Morris Buttermaker was a fair to middling minor league pitcher in his day, whose claim to fame was once striking out Ted Williams in a Spring Training game. Now, he’s a whiskey and beer swilling, filtered cigar chomping pool cleaner who’s at once soft-spoken and gruff. You love him already, don’t you?
“The Bad News Bears” is subversive from the start, its characters realistic and flawed. Of course, the engine driving this train is the late Walter Matthau, whose Buttermaker was hired to coach a team of misfits who are so bad at baseball they’re only in the elite league because one the parents sued the league. Most of the Bears’ parents are conspicuously absent at practices and are rarely heard or seen at games. Leaving them out of the movie is a stroke of genius – we’re constantly wondering why one of them didn’t step up to coach the team.
The subversive nature of the movie is exemplified in a performance from the late Vic Morrow. As Roy Turner, the coach of the Yankees, he is openly hostile toward Buttermaker and the Bears in general. While his hostility is certainly not commendable, it comes from an honest source: the Bears have no business in this top-notch league, and there are plenty of leagues where the Bears could have played. “Why did Whitewood [the lawyer who sued to get the Bears (read: his son) into the league] choose my league?” Turner seems to be asking throughout the movie. Cementing the Bears’ outcast status is the fact that every other team in the league is named for a Major League one. I love the moment in the first game when one of the Yankee players hits a home run off of the perpetually wild Rudy Stein. Coach Turner applauds, takes off his cap, wipes his brow, and most tellingly, breathes a sigh of relief. Without a single word, we realize how important the league is to him. Over the course of the movie, we learn of course that it’s too important.
After a humiliating season-opening 26 to zip loss at the hands of the Yankees, most of the team wants to quit. And so does Whitewood. But Buttermaker, for some reason, sees this gig as a potentially redemptive moment for him, and unlike a million times in the past, he decides to stick it out.
As for the other characters, the movie is a demonstration in how to craft three-dimensional personalities regardless of screen time. Director Michael Ritchie, working from a dynamite script by Bill Lancaster (Burt’s son), crafts an economical, fast-moving story where each character has a big moment. There’s the Muslim Ahmad, desperate to equal his brothers’ athletic feats; there’s the fat kid Engelberg (this movie INVENTED that cliché), who turns out to be a pretty good hitter; there’s the little hot-head, Tanner, unafraid of anything; there’s Jackie Earle Haley’s Kelly Leak, the smoking, cussing, motorcycle riding bad boy ringer who really just needs a hug – which is not cheesy at all because not once does another warm and fuzzy character say he only needs a hug.
A clever subplot is that Amanda Whurlitzer (dude, the characters’ names are even awesome) is actually the daughter of Buttermaker’s ex-girlfriend and the all-around symbol of his failures as a human being. Besides the Ted Williams strikeout, Buttermaker’s other claim to fame is teaching Amanda how to throw a wicked curveball, of which he says, “It’s like a scoop of ice cream, it comes up to the plate and just disappears.”
Of course, the movie comes down to the big game, and Buttermaker’s been bitten by the win-at-any-cost bug. He finds out that he’s no better than Roy Turner, who commits a shocking and inexcusable act in the finale (though, as it turns out, Turner really ain’t that bad of a guy). This moment aside, Roy Turner is right, at least at the beginning of the movie – why should the league lower their standards to satisfy a do-gooder City Councilman? He never meddles or cheats, he just coaches his boys. And in Coach Buttermaker, the Bears learn that their standards should be raised, that they shouldn’t accept losing, and that winning only comes when you do your best.
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