Cinema
Play ball
Clancy Sigal
Michael Ritchie's subject is American competitiveness, its fierceness and costs. In The Candidate he tore apart power-lusting politicians; in Smile the ethos of the beauty contest. His masterpiece, Downhill Racer, with Robert Redford as the win-at-anyprice skier, was a powerfully subdued comment on the cutthroat spirit of the winter Olympics. The Bad News Bears (Plaza 1, A certificate) is an awesomely engaging, acutely observed satire on Little League baseball where toddlers learn the basic lesson of American suburbia: compete or die.
There's nothing quite like the Little League in Britain. It's symbolic of everything that is over-organised and patriotic in America, a training ground for conformists --and some say, even for My Lai killers. Most kids love Little League competition: more alarmingly. I've seen otherwise placid parents go berserk cheering and even cursing their little ones on the baseball field. The emotional identification of adults with what is, after all, only a game for kids is one of the terrors of American life.
Walter Matthau, effectively impersonating Wallace Beery as a broken-down exminor league pro, is bribed by a Los Angeles councilman to coach a 'Dirty Dozen' team of losing misfits, including the politician's inept son. 'What do you expect--all we got is Jews, spies. niggers and a boogie-eating moron,' complains a battlesome little cowlicked monster. The Bears realise just how bad they are when Matthau shows up, unshaven, half-drunk, uncaring. But after losing their first game 26-0, they shame Matthau into whipping them into shape. It's a question of pride, theirs and his. Inspired by vague paternalism and a desire to disprove the taunts of a rival manager, Matthau sobers up. Instead of persuading the kids that their defiant instincts are right, that Little League is a con perpetrated by adults for adults, he goes all out to train his kids to win—at any price. He even pushes Tatum O'Neal. tomboy daughter of his ex-girl friend, into damaging her elbow while pitching for his club. But when Matthau sees that he has betrayed the Bears by goading them to win rather than letting them lose in their own inimitable way, he eases up. And by a whisker his team loses the North Valley League championship, but they celebrate it as a moral victory.
This is a skilled and charming movie. Though it's shot entirely on a California baseball diamond, you don't have to know the game to enjoy the picture. The kids (often too small for their baggy uniforms) are enchantingly obscene, Matthau is irresistible, the target is choice. And the message is universal: in the game of life, don't drop out or try to change the rules, just adapt with a satiric life style that keeps your conscience clean.
Michael Ritchie and his scriptwriter (Burt Lancaster's son Bill) undermine their material with such cute lovableness as to blunt its sharpest points. Ultimately, The Bad News Bears applauds the ethic it seems to be criticising.
The week's other two commercial releases are potboilers. The Incredible Sarah (Empire Leicester Square, A certificate) is a disgrace. A lesser actress than Glenda Jackson might have put more oomph into this 'free portrayal' of Sarah Bernhardt's early career. But Jackson, terribly miscast, destroys any possible resemblance between herself and the extravagant and florid Sarah by reading her lines in an unradiant, uninterested monotone. Her justified contempt for the script becomes contempt for us.
Survive (ABC Shaftesbury, X certificate) is, despite the cannibalism, more respectable and straightforward. Based on a book by Clay Blair Jr. it tells of the Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashes into the snowy Andes where the survivors eat some of the dead to stay alive. Originally made in Mexico and re-dubbed by Americans. Survive is obviously a quickie but blessedly without too much gore. 'The most shocking episode in the history of human survival'-cutting up the bodies into frozen strips of human loin-is handled with surprising tact.
At the London Film Festival, Truffaut's Small Change ('L'Argent de Poche'), concerning school-agers in a French provincial town, is feyer and more sentimental than his other, darker films about children (400 Blows and L'Enlant Sauvage). But as a lyrical tribute to young possibilities, it is refreshingly unpatronising. The theme, that kids are born in a state of grace which they retain longer than we think, is unforced and almost persuasive. In Joe Losey's Mr Klein, Alain Delon is a cruel scavenger who buys escaping Jews' objets d'art at cut prices only to become obsessed with finding his Doppel ganger, a runaway Jew with the same name as his. Polished and empty, it is notable mainly for its low-key sequences of the Paris police methodically rounding up deportees in 1942.
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