VERSE:
IHM, Eleanor Fitzgibbons
plays, Paul Crewe, arrested, and it's the only scene in movie who has no character. But while the prisoners and the film that doesn't take place in a prison or on a the guards both enter...
...In one scene, for instance, Crewe reveals to his closest friend in prison how he shaved those She cannot bear points to get money he needed for his father, the only this symbol of remembered grief person in the world he ever cared for...
...one is embarrassed by its own emotions and tries to disclaim them...
...When Crewe walks off across the field after him the lowest thing in the prison in the eyes of all the game, the warden orders the head guard, who has the mass-murderers, wife-beaters and psychopaths he been Crewe's nemesis, to shoot Crewe for trying to finds there...
...What gets Crewe on the field, though, game ball anyway, thus proving that even he learned to is that the warden (Eddie Albert) doesn't share his respect something-football...
...Toward the beginning the warden gives Crewe a little pep talk about how Someone has touched her football builds character...
...But while the prisoners and the film that doesn't take place in a prison or on a the guards both enter their game as a no-holds-barred football field...
...having an incomprehensible forty-five minutes right in the middle of it...
...But unlike the earlier film, this at indeliberate fault...
...that we are supposed to realize it is...
...This is all bull too, and it's lightly obvious from the way Eddie Albert delivers the speech on the arm...
...But the guard defies the order, and then it guys...
...It doesn't really make any difference that you don't realize this until the movie is about half Persephone dreams over...
...But it turns out that the team is composed of guards, and the warden wants Crewe to get together an inmate team to scrimmage DREAM WITHIN A DREAM against his team...
...I guess they're just an average bunch of escape...
...The to darkness warden of course turns out to be the one person in the night...
...This is really The road is now a churning lake...
...See, football does build character for having shaved points, which is an offense that makes after all...
...I foolishly must have assumed this just because it seemed that Crewe was ELEANOR FITZGIBBONS, IHM being recruited for the team...
...But apparently Robert Aldrich didn't get the message because his ending Persephone wakes up suggests he believes every word the warden says...
...Maybe my attention was already beginning to flag by this point, for somewhere I got the impression that this was a team made up of prisoners...
...From the expression on Crewe's face, he knows it as well...
...27 September 1974: 524...
...advantage of Crewe's talents and experience...
...At this point the ref should inmates' compunctions about Crewe...
...grudge match, they emerge from it having learned to Crewe is an ex-football hero banned from the game respect each other...
...The same disingenuousness affects the film's whole but never reaches them...
...It's not the sort of movie that can be hurt by she has lost her mantle...
...Longest Yards director, Robert Aldrich, scored his Did someone else greatest success seven years ago with a film called The mistake the blue Dirty Dozen, which is about men recruited from an and leave the black Army brig to perform a dangerous mission behind she has on now enemy lines...
...He has organized have blown the whistle on this movie and penalized it a semi-pro team at the prison, and he wants to take fifteen yards for sportsman-like conduct...
...trying to have it both ways: to imply that this rat who from wave to wave seems to care about nothing-not even football!-actually has deep feelings, and yet not to imply it so she struggles, founders, tries to run unequivocally that we can't still believe him an incor- toward open doors of morning light rigible rat...
...The similarities to this new film aren't lost on Aldrich, who portrays the prisoners' team here as a or is she herself sort of Dirty Eleven...
...Reynolds plays and has one thought: she must return the scene straight, as if he is supposed to get everyone she must return...
...choked up with it, but then at the end he tells his buddy with a sneer that what he said was bull...
...They reflect the values and moral priorities of becomes apparent Crewe is only going to pick up the most Americans...
...attitude towards football itself...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
Vol. 100 • September 1974 • No. 22
