Director: Michael Ritchie
Starring: Walter Matthau, Tatum O’Neal, Jackie Earle Haley
Year: 1976
One of my favorite sports movies from my childhood, The Bad News Bears is wrong in all the best ways, and a crass classic of the genre. It’s filled with a ton you need to explain to your kids, especially why they haven’t heard those terms and why they can’t repeat them, but hey, the 70s was a weird time. This is a great example of that raw weirdness, of what was wrong about how we acted then and of what was right about the way we made films. A bit of a moral roller coaster, Bad News Bears is at its best when it’s unhinged, and that describes it most of the time.
An elite youth baseball program in California is sued to include one more team, a bunch of ragtags who don’t fit in anywhere else. They call themselves the Bears, and they’re terrible, mostly because their manager is a drunk and a coward. Buttermaker is old, sad, doesn’t want a coaching job, and hates kids, but he might have just enough heart left to pick them up and turn them into a real team. The kids themselves are hopeless, haphazard hooligans, but if they pull together they just might make themselves proud, if they don’t kill each other first.
Again, this is a film that needs context, because the 70s were wild, and they used rude phrases and racial insults with some frequency. It isn’t shown to be cool, it’s pretty ignorant and lessons are learned, but still, it’s there, and you’ll have a few things to explain to your kids if you watch it with them. Still, with that understood, this is a film that’s about as classic as they come. The kids, the coach, the league, the games; it’s about as much fun as you can have watching a movie that’s about nothing more than youth baseball. But, honestly, there’s more to it, there are morals here, and the way they’re delivered so subtly is a compliment to the genre. Matthau and O’Neal are excellent, the kids are so memorable, and this is a film you’ll always remember, because it’s originality is something that can’t be taken away.
My rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆