Film Appreciation - The Greatest Game Ever Played (In Prison)

Cody Hamman tosses around some Film Appreciation for The Longest Yard (1974).

Burt Reynolds was one of the biggest box office draws of the 1970s and early '80s, and he was just starting to establish himself as a cinema superstar when he took on the role of down-and-out former football player Paul "Wrecking" Crewe in director Robert Aldrich's 1974 sports comedy The Longest Yard.

Crewe left football in disgrace when he was suspected of shaving points off a game. When the film catches up with him eight years later, he has just spent his day getting drunk and watching two televised football games back-to-back. His girlfriend Melissa (Anitra Ford) tries to come on to him, but Crewe isn't in the mood - and she doesn't take his rejection lightly. You might think that Crewe's football career was responsible for a fair amount of things in the mansion he and Melissa share, but she claims she's responsible for everything, including the Maserati Citroën Crewe decides to take for a drive. 

Crewe and Melissa get into the physical altercation over the car, during which Crewe grabs Melissa by the face, shoves her against a wall, then tosses her to the floor. Crewe is shockingly rough with Melissa in this moment, and Reynolds was understandably nervous about shooting such a scene. Aldrich assured him that he could get away with it and the audience would still be on his side later in the film. Somehow we are, but I can't see something like this being in a movie these days. It really feels like a relic of the '70s.

Crewe gets in the Citroën, puts some Lynyrd Skynyrd on the radio, and goes for a cruise that is quickly interrupted by the police. A car chase directed by stunt coordinator Hal Needham ensues, ending with Crewe dumping the car in a bay. Needham would go on to work with Reynolds several more times, including when he made his full feature directorial debut with the second biggest hit of 1977, Smokey and the Bandit, one of my favorite movies. This car chase is like a preview of what's to come for these two.

Two police officers find Crewe in a bar, where he's having more drinks. He's in good spirits at first, making one of the cops crack up with his flippant attitude, but when they go to arrest him he fights back... It doesn't work out for him.

Convictions on the charges of stealing a car, drunken driving, drunk in public, and resisting arrest earn Crewe a prison sentence of two to five years, with a possibility of parole in eighteen months. He'll serve his time at the Citrus State Prison... and will come to find out that the warden pulled a lot of strings to get him there.

Crewe has a rough first day at Citrus State, and not just because the guards shave off his trademark mustache, which he once shaved off on TV for $10,000. Guard Captain Knauer (Ed Lauter) pulls him aside to tell him that the warden is going to ask him to help coach the prison's semipro football team, which consists of guards and is run by Knauer. Knauer doesn't want Crewe's help, and to make sure Crewe will refuse the offer he gives him a couple whacks with his nightstick.

Warden Hazen (Eddie Albert) does indeed have Knauer bring Crewe to his office so he can ask him to help coach the team, and while Knauer shows support for this idea while in the presence of his boss, Crewe does what he was told to do and refuses the offer. Hazen thinks quite highly of football, and wants his team to excel at it. He wants them to win the national title after five years of being runner up. Hazen is going to make Crewe's stay at the prison very uncomfortable until he agrees to help the team reach this goal. But Knauer beats on him some more to make sure he won't.

The Longest Yard is perfectly cast, even when the casting seems unlikely. You know Eddie Albert as a nice guy from Green Acres and Witch Mountain, but here he's a total bastard, and effectively makes you despise his character.

Crewe is assigned to "swamp reclamation" duty, which is really just a bunch of chained prisoners shoveling mud in the nearby swamp for no reason other than to put them to work. While out in the swamp, Crewe meets several important characters - there's the antagonistic Unger (Charles Tyner), who mocks him and is a lackey for the guards; Pop (The Hills Have Eyes' John Steadman), a 70-year-old man who has been at Citrus State for 34 years and 30 years earlier made the mistake of punching a guard who went on to become warden, Hazen himself; Granville (Harry Caesar), the African American man he befriends while chained to him; and Caretaker (James Hampton), who can get his fellow prisoners anything they want, including laid with a woman. Caretaker lets Crewe know that the other guys aren't happy with him because he had it all and threw it away. And messed with football in the process. The swamp reclamation stuff almost seems like as much of a relic of the '70s as that domestic violence up front. A modern studio film wouldn't dedicate 12 minutes to watching characters meet each other while trudging through the swamp. The story would have to move along quicker than that.

After a scuffle with inmate Rotka (Tony Cacciotti), who shows his disapproval of Crewe by doing push-ups in front of him, and after standing up to Knauer when he's reprimanded, Crewe is locked in a hot box for 24 hours. When he's let out, Hazen pitches him an idea on how he can help the football team: the team will build up toward facing the pros by facing the cons. Crewe is given four weeks to assemble a team of prisoners to play against the guards in a "tune up game". The idea being that the prisoners won't stand a chance against the guards, even with Crewe being forced to play quarterback. It will just get the guards ready for the real game to follow. Crewe has been broken down by swamp reclamation, but what finally gets him to agree to Hazen's plan is blackmail. If he doesn't, Hazen will make sure he serves his full sentence.

There are split reactions from inmates who hear about the football team. Some don't trust Crewe enough to get involved, while others jump at the chance to get a free shot at the guards, maybe even kill one of them during the game. And if they get injured, that will just mean some easy time in the infirmary. While Crewe is trying to assemble the team, an inmate on custodian duty offers to help: this is Michael Conrad as Nate Scarboro, another former pro. He used to play for the Giants, until a knee injury forced him to quit.

Unlike Scarboro, Crewe was never injured during his 11 years in football and doesn't intend to get hurt in this game. With the help of Scarboro as head coach and Caretaker as manager, Crewe begins recruiting the biggest inmates in the prison to surround himself with. They go through files to choose prisoners with athletic abilities, the more violent the better. They also peruse the guards' medical files to find out which ones have had broken bones, so they'll know their weak points. It's around the time that Crewe requests those medical files when you start to realize that this is going to be a special kind of football game, and one that's more fun (for me, anyway) to watch than the usual thing.

Recruits include a dimwitted, extremely strong man referred to as Sonny (but there is no character named Sonny in the credits); a Native American called The Indian (Sonny Sixkiller), who played some football at Oklahoma State prison; Richard Kiel as the giant Samson, Mr. Florida 1964; Granville, the only African American who agrees to be on the team at first; and Connie Shokner (Robert Tessier), the "baddest cat in the joint," who killed five people to end up in prison and has killed two more while locked up. Shokner knows karate, so you know he's dangerous. Crewe even says it directly, "That karate's bad."

Before first practice, Crewe and Scarboro express different outlooks on the upcoming game - Crewe just wants to survive it, while Scarboro wants the team to do their best to beat the guards. During a meeting with Hazen, Crewe assures the warden that the team doesn't have a chance of winning the game, he just wants to give the men some of their pride back. Giving a speech to his new team, Crewe hypes them up by describing the game as their chance to humiliate the guards.

The team doesn't display the greatest agility overall, but they are tough. Some of them too much so. Shokner is so violent that he plays defense with a punch, breaking Samson's nose. Richard Kiel is best known for being a mute henchman in a couple James Bond films, but roles like this show that he could be very funny and endearing when given the opportunity. He has a charm, when he's allowed to speak, that makes you like him as soon as he shows up.

Meanwhile, Unger has been spying on the practice sessions and reporting back to the guards. He gives Crewe a chance to stop these reports, he asks to replace Caretaker as manager, but Crewe remains loyal to Caretaker. So Unger remains loyal to the guards, and tells them that Granville is the best player on the team aside from Crewe. Afraid of losing, the guards make the mistake of messing with Granville while he's doing custodial work in the library, where several other African American prisoners witness as Granville keeps his cool despite being mistreated and insulted. The guards have made a mistake: they just convinced several of the African American prisoners to take part in the game.

As the game draws near, Caretaker pulls off three big rip-offs. He steals three boxes of equipment from the guards, steals uniforms for the team, and manages to get them a look at the warden's personal home movies of previous games. That last one comes with a catch: to get the film reel, Crewe has to have sex with the warden's beehived secretary (Bernadette Peters). Caretaker really can get a prisoner laid with a woman in this place, and it seems like the secretary does this with some frequency.

The team also starts taking measures to inflict more pain on the guards. Shokner teaches his teammates some hits, Pops tells them how to make plaster casts to put on their arms, they examine x-rays of the guards' formerly broken bones, Scarboro advises them to go for "balls, guts, ribs"... and Pops also provides brass knuckles. Any guard who gets tackled will get an extra elbow, knee, or kick. The anticipation starts to build even more. I love watching these guys prepare to inflict pain.

Practice sessions become more open after Crewe convinces Hazen to have Unger leave the team in peace. Unger doesn't take this well, and retaliates by reverting to the arsonist ways that put him in jail in the first place. He sets it up so that when the light is turned on in Crewe's cell, the bulb will explode and cover the man with burning fuel.

Before that light is turned on, Caretaker shares some alcohol with Crewe and they have a drunken heart-to-heart about Crewe's reason for shaving the points off that game. Crewe gives an emotional explanation that he wanted the money so he could help out his father, who then died... but he made that up. The real reason is that he wanted the money himself and never cared about football. It's interesting that Crewe isn't given much depth, does terrible things, and yet we still like him. If the father story had been true, it would have given the character more layers, but it also would have been a cliché for him to have such a sob story. The filmmakers clearly weren't interested in that.

When the light is turned on, it's not Crewe who gets burned. It's Caretaker. Unger doesn't mind who it was, he slams the cell door shut while Caretaker burns so it will be harder for him to be helped. Caretaker dies.

The film cuts from Caretaker's directly to game day. If you weren't ready to see these prisoners kick some ass before, the film has made sure you'll be ready to see some vengeful violence by killing off Caretaker right before the game. The only problem here is that Unger himself doesn't get any direct comeuppance from Crewe or the team. We have to settle for the guards getting punished for instigating the trouble. But, that's fun nonetheless.

I've never in my life managed to get interested in or care about football, but that's not a hindrance to my enjoyment of The Longest Yard. I remember loving it from the first time I saw it, rented on DVD from Netflix sometime around the start of the 2000s. It's kind of surprising that it took me until the DVD age to see it, but somehow it had never crossed my path before then.

Reynolds is great in the lead role of Paul Crewe, and Aldrich surrounded him with a great supporting cast. You really come to like some of Crewe's fellow prisoners and really dislike Hazen and his lackeys as the movie goes on. Made on a budget of $2.9 million, The Longest Yard made $43 million during its box office run - a great return on investment, and awesome box office numbers for the '70s. It's easy to see why it was such a success: it's a terrific example of set-up and pay-off.

The scenario is interesting. The story is emotionally engaging. The cast, the director, and the writer (Tracy Keenan Wynn, working from a story by producer Albert S. Ruddy) make sure you're rooting for some characters and against others. Then you get to watch those characters smash into each other throughout the climactic sequence, which also takes some twists and turns.

This is a great, hard-hitting, really cool movie.