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The Bad News Bears
A terrific performance by Walter Matthau is the main selling point of 1976's The Bad News Bears, a by-the-numbers sports comedy given some originality by having child actors talking like sailors.
Matthau plays Morris Buttermaker, a beer-drinking, pool-cleaning, former minor league baseball player who is paid to coach a ragtag group of foul-mouthed ballplayers into a real baseball team. When the team displays virtually no talent on the field and Buttermaker is asked to give it up, he instead decides to help the team by hiring a female pitcher with a bullet for an arm and a juvenile delinquent who help the team score runs but bring just as much conflict to the team.
Burt Lancaster's son, Bill, has provided a screenplay where the main attraction seems to be ten year olds using a lot of adult language, but there are some additional layers to the story that bubble to the surface. Eventually, Buttermaker's obsession with winning and making himself look good become more important than the team as a whole, which is supposed to be the primary message here I guess.
The big draw here was actually supposed to be the first film appearance by Tatum O'Neal, after becoming the youngest actor in history to win an Oscar for her film debut in Paper Moon. Someone was determined to prove that O'Neal's Oscar win was no fluke and that she wasn't riding on her father's coat tails. If the truth be told, the performance is nothing special and O'Neal is still a working actress today, but, honestly, she has never topped her work as Addie Prey. This film did feature an impressive film debut with Jackie Earle Haley's first film role as Kelly the juvenile delinquent.
The offbeat idea of utilizing music from Bizet's Carmen for a lot of the story actually works. Matthau is a pro, as always, but he really is relegated to playing second fiddle to these kids, including Alfred Lutter, who had just finished playing Ellen Burstyn's son in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and Chris Barnes as Tanner. Vic Morrow and Joyce Van Patten score in supporting roles and you might recognize the young man playing Morrow's son as Brandon Cruz, who played Eddie on the ABC sitcom The Courtship of Eddie's Father. The film was followed by two sequels The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training and The Bad News Bears Go to Japan, but neither featured Matthau or O'Neal. There was also a short-lived television series that featured Jack Warden as Buttermaker and Tricia Cast as Amanda.
A terrific performance by Walter Matthau is the main selling point of 1976's The Bad News Bears, a by-the-numbers sports comedy given some originality by having child actors talking like sailors.
Matthau plays Morris Buttermaker, a beer-drinking, pool-cleaning, former minor league baseball player who is paid to coach a ragtag group of foul-mouthed ballplayers into a real baseball team. When the team displays virtually no talent on the field and Buttermaker is asked to give it up, he instead decides to help the team by hiring a female pitcher with a bullet for an arm and a juvenile delinquent who help the team score runs but bring just as much conflict to the team.
Burt Lancaster's son, Bill, has provided a screenplay where the main attraction seems to be ten year olds using a lot of adult language, but there are some additional layers to the story that bubble to the surface. Eventually, Buttermaker's obsession with winning and making himself look good become more important than the team as a whole, which is supposed to be the primary message here I guess.
The big draw here was actually supposed to be the first film appearance by Tatum O'Neal, after becoming the youngest actor in history to win an Oscar for her film debut in Paper Moon. Someone was determined to prove that O'Neal's Oscar win was no fluke and that she wasn't riding on her father's coat tails. If the truth be told, the performance is nothing special and O'Neal is still a working actress today, but, honestly, she has never topped her work as Addie Prey. This film did feature an impressive film debut with Jackie Earle Haley's first film role as Kelly the juvenile delinquent.
The offbeat idea of utilizing music from Bizet's Carmen for a lot of the story actually works. Matthau is a pro, as always, but he really is relegated to playing second fiddle to these kids, including Alfred Lutter, who had just finished playing Ellen Burstyn's son in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and Chris Barnes as Tanner. Vic Morrow and Joyce Van Patten score in supporting roles and you might recognize the young man playing Morrow's son as Brandon Cruz, who played Eddie on the ABC sitcom The Courtship of Eddie's Father. The film was followed by two sequels The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training and The Bad News Bears Go to Japan, but neither featured Matthau or O'Neal. There was also a short-lived television series that featured Jack Warden as Buttermaker and Tricia Cast as Amanda.