The Longest Yard (1974)

The Longest Yard (1974) Director: Robert Aldrich Watched: June 2, 2018 Rating: 6/10 A Has-been Football star Earns redemption Serving time leading prison inmates' team; Tested when the warden blackmails him To throw the game. The cons are misfits, But With Guidance Play like pros. Fun characters, But endless game with split screens was no fun. Clichéd "guy film" achieves wide appeal by Crossing genres- Satire, Drama, Sports, With Real-life Football stars, Real-life prison. Unlike the story, the pros beat the cons. Tetractys poems stem from the mathematician Euclid, who considered the number series 1, 2, 3, 4 to have a mystical significance because its sum of 10. He named it a Tetractys. Thus, these poems follow a 1, 2, 3, 4, 10 syllable format, with additional verses written in an inverted syllable count. #Tetractys #QuintupleTetractys #PoemReview #GoldenGlobesBestPicture

I saw this film years ago, and remember thinking it was OK. It's a little hard to imagine now, what a big deal Burt Reynolds was in the Seventies. No other movie star came close. On a recent viewing I found this this movie to be a bit better than I remembered. Still not a classic or anything, but pretty good. The depiction of prison life is harsh, as it surely is, but it seems a different world from today's prisons, with their racial gangs and constant strife. The football game is quite reminiscent of the one in M*A*S*H, from only a few years before.

The warden of this spectacularly clean correctional facility is Eddie Albert. His corrections officers are a semi-pro football team. Now, before I continue, I want to mention that I am so little a follower of football that I don't know what a semi-pro team is. Baseball -- that's the game for me. And the team? The St. Louis Browns.Anyhow, Eddie Albert is a mean mother, although peanuts compared to Strother Martin in "Cool Hand Luke." He wants one of his inmates, Burt Reynolds, to put together a football team out of that motley cohort with the intention of having the guards' team clobber them on the field in front of thousands of people.Eddie Albert's team of correctional officers loses. With the help of some very savvy (and extraordinarily big) experienced inmates, Burt puts together a team that knows everything, from how to play cleverly to how to play dirty.We've seen it all before. The sports story about the despised subordinates who develop enough spirit to apply themselves and win. I can think of "The Bad News Bears" and "Victory" offhand. But nobody cares, not even Robert Aldrich, the director. It's designed to be fun.I've always admired Burt Reynolds as a person. He's strikingly handsome, athletic and fit, doesn't take himself or his profession seriously, and is without guile or pretense.That's part of the problem with his movies. He seems to glide through them being himself, with the notable exception of "Deliverance", into which he put a good deal of effort. He worked hard on his own movie, "Sharkey's Machine" too, but the level of subtlety there was about what it is here, which is to say, not very much. Reynolds is his usual affable part-Italian, part-Cherokee self. His lines are thrown away. The humor -- hell, all the testosterone-driven values in the movie, dramatic as well as comic, don't rise above the level of drive-in movie fare. It just looks more expensive.Well, I'll give an example. Before the game, the inmates are dispirited because their beloved manager was murdered. The head honcho of the corrections officer's team enters their room, snarls, "See you on the field," and then butts his shaved head through the wall. In case you didn't find that meanly amusing enough, he punches his fist through it too and leaves without another word.And yet it must have found a sizable enough audience. A remake appeared some years ago. In any case, others might find this more enjoyable than I did. I didn't find it so bad as to be insulting. It just didn't strike me as very interesting or particularly well done.

Disgraced former pro football quarterback Paul Crewe is sent to prison after a drunken night to remember. The prison is run by Warden Hazen, a football nut who spies an opportunity to utilise Crewe's ability at the sport to enhance the prison guards team skills. After initially declining to help, Crewe is swayed into putting together a team of convicts to take on the guards in a one off match, thieves, murderers and psychopaths collectively come together to literally, beat the guards, but Crewe also has his own personal demons to exorcise.This violent, but wonderfully funny film has many things going for it. Directed with style by the gifted hands of Robert Aldrich, The Longest Yard cheekily examines the harshness of gridiron and fuses it with the brutality of the penal system. The script from Tracy Keenan Wynn is a sharp as a tack and Aldrich's use of split screens and slow motion sequences bring it all together very nicely indeed. I would also like to comment on the editing from Michael Luciano, nominated for the Oscar in that department, it didn't win, but in my honest opinion it's one of the best edited pictures from the 70s.Taking the lead role of Crewe is Burt Reynolds, here he is at the peak of his powers (perhaps never better) and has star appeal positively bristling from every hair on his rugged chest. It's a great performance, believable in the action sequences (he was once a halfback for Florida), and crucially having the comic ability to make Wynn's script deliver the necessary mirth quota. What is of most interest to me is that Crewe is a less than honourable guy, the first 15 minutes of the film gives us all we need to know about his make up, but much like One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest the following year, The Longest Yard has us rooting for the main protagonist entering the home straight, and that is something of a testament to Reynolds' charm and charisma.The film's crowning glory is the football game itself, taking up three parts of an hour, the highest compliment I can give it is to say that one doesn't need to be a fan of the sport to enjoy this final third. It's highly engaging as a comedy piece whilst also being octane inventive as an action junkie's series of events. A number of former gridiron stars fill out both sides of the teams to instill a high believability factor into the match itself, and the ending is a pure rewarding punch the air piece of cinema. 9/10