One of my father’s favorite movies is Smokey and the Bandit. Given any opportunity, he will recommend watching it as a very funny movie. I did see it once, but honestly, I couldn’t say I found it all that funny. Maybe now that I am a bit older, but as a kid/young teen, not so much. However, Reynolds was one of the biggest stars in the 70s, and outside of Smokey and Deliverance, I don’t know that I have ever seen any of his movies from that era.
All this is a long way to get around to saying I decided to watch The Longest Yard.
Paul Crewe (Reynolds) is a former pro football player, a quarterback ejected from the game for point shaving. After an ugly break-up argument with a wealthy girlfriend, he takes her car, gets involved in a police chase, and gets sentenced to 18 months in prison. He ends up in Citrus State Prison under the care of football-obsessed warden Rudolph Hazen (Eddie Albert). Hazen wants Crewe to coach his semi-pro team of guards, led by the sadistic coach/quarterback Captain Knauer (Ed Lauter), a man who has already hit Crewe with his baton before Crewe can even see the warden. All Crewe wants to is to quietly serve his sentence and then get out. But Hazen really wants a good football team, and he’ll do what he needs to in order to get a better team. His efforts may not work out as planned as Crewe has a proposal of his own: since the guard team would need another team to play first as practice, a team that would theoretically be easy to beat, Crewe suggests a team of inmates to play the guards. Hazen accepts, and from there, Crewe has a task to put together a group that can perhaps not only play the guards, but beat them.
There’s a lot to like in a movie like this. Sure, it looks familiar in many ways. For example, there is the obligatory recruitment montage as Crewe and his closest allies–his manager Caretaker (James Hampton), former pro player Nate (Michael Conrad), and a few others–go around the prison looking for specific prisoners to play their game. It’s a standard scene, and some of the perspective players are little better than cartoon characters, but it does reflect the sort of breezy comedy that this movie often appears to be. “Appears” is the key word since there’s a lot of subtext to this movie on how prisoners are treated. The prison itself is segregated, and the Black inmates are routinely referred to by racists names by the guards. Likewise, as the prison’s work detail involves a lot of physical labor, someone thinks it would be some sort of problem for Crewe on his first day out to be paired with one of those self-same Black inmates. Crewe doesn’t seem to have an issue there, but the implication from the guards was, well, shouldn’t he?
Likewise, while this is in many ways a standard underdog sports comedy, not many feature a prominent supporting character getting murdered partway through the movie, and not in an accidental sort of way. It’s deliberate and even a bit brutal.
As it is, though, the movie seems to work largely based on Reynolds’s effortless charm. He tosses off one-liners with an easygoing smile, and it isn’t too hard to see how he managed to somewhat seduce the warden’s helmet-haired secretary (Bernadette Peters). Sure, this may be something of a “bro” comedy–it isn’t too hard to see why Adam Sandler would remake this movie–but it’s a also fun. It’s easy to root for the prisoners, particularly since few of them come across as hardened criminal masterminds, while the guards are the sadistic monsters. Still, at the end, the real villain is Warden Hazen, a man who wants to have power without getting his hands dirty. As the movie ends, the prisoners may still be sitting in his facility with little hope of getting out soon, but even the guards are no longer inclined to listen him anymore, and that may be the bigger victory than simple points on the board.
Grade: B
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