DEATH STORY
WEIL, HENRY
On Screen DEATH STORY By Henry Weil Some of us, it is evident, enjoy watching other people make love. A lot of us, it would also appear, find considerable pleasure in watching others die. Love...
...Our task as audience is simply to sit back and observe how beautiful death can be...
...Yet, at bottom, the character of Schnell is a dishonest Hollywood fabrication...
...An easy purgative for tears, Bang the Drum Slowly produces none of the pity and terror that true tragedy is supposed to evoke...
...Ali Mc-Graw's screen expiration, therefore, was a victory of sorts, as well as a thrilling tickle at our private death wishes...
...This he gently places on his friend's forehead like a wreath, a symbol of Pearson's regality and merit...
...Then there was Brian's Song...
...There are quiet shots of Pearson burning old high school photographs and newspaper clippings...
...There are blatant ironies, too: A young catcher cut from the team gripes, "Life is unfair, I'll tell you that...
...Love Story's phenomenal drawing power, for example, came from its beautiful heroine's demise...
...It merely suggests erroneously that the fatal malady may have something to do with internal bleeding...
...A movie character's fatal vulnerability seems somehow to suggest our own ^vulnerability...
...In the end, we are offered sentimentality where we ought to have been offered answers, or at least the barefaced admission that no answers are possible...
...The mechanics of the film flagrantly encouraged members of the audience to fantasize about the beauty, the tragedy of their own final hours, while never missing a mouthful of popcorn or honestly facing the meaning, not to mention meaning-lessness, of death...
...acquaintances (who don't know) lecture him on his clothes, advising him that how he dresses will affect his future...
...Particularly outstanding is Vincent Gardenia as manager Dutch Schnell, who acts precisely the way a cinematic coach should: cagey, blustering, aggressive, kind, indulgent when we want him to be, firm when he is forced to be...
...Unfortunately, death's streamlined bleakness is compromised by a pair of stewardesses waiting at the plane's door-houris, no doubt, ready to fan the hero's weary brow on his way to paradise...
...No ball club would gallantly jeopardize its chances of success by ignoring a player's debilitating illness...
...Adapted for the screen by Mark Harris from his own novel, Bang the Drum Slowly tells the untrue story of a baseball player's death, and of the loving comradeship of a fellow teammate who stands by him, stalwartly, to the end...
...Significantly, we see this only from Wig-gen's vantage point, through a harsh wire-mesh barrier that neatly expresses his and Pearson's final separation...
...Because Schnell's suspicions and angers are without malice, all of his traits are endearing...
...Clearly contrived, Bang the Drum Slowly touches all the necessary bases on its way home: Friends of Pearson's (who know) find themselves thoughtlessly using catch phrases that awkwardly incorporate the idea of death...
...The dying player, catcher Bruce Pearson (Robert de Niro), is disintegrating from Hodgkin's disease, though the film quite specifically never explains what that is...
...It is a graceful, touching moment...
...The film barely touches on a victim's agonies in accepting his fate (Pearson broods briefly that he survived learning to swim, fighting in Vietnam, crossing in front of oncoming trucks, only to be felled by a disease, and why...
...Televised a season or so ago, it told the true story of a football player's death, and of the loving comradeship of a fellow teammate who stood by him, stalwartly, to the end...
...The critics, of course, hated Love Story, finding it slick, shallow and dishonest...
...Pearson encounters only one really selfish character in the course of the film-the prostitute...
...The futures of too many people are at stake to worry about one man's lack of a future...
...It attracted the largest audience of any "made-for-TV" movie in history, thereby reportedly facilitating the financing of Bang the Drum Slowly...
...Similarly, death is simply not beautiful...
...They preferred the "meatiness" of Cries and Whispers, where the grisly agonies of a lingering end are examined in relentless detail...
...Supporting Pearson throughout his final season is his roommate, pitcher Henry Wiggen (Michael Moriarty...
...His baseball team, the New York Mammoths, a rather hostile herd at the season's beginning, comes victoriously together when the catcher's illness is made known...
...The best of this derives from the solidly professional performances of such unknown New York character actors as Ann Wedgeworth, Selma Diamond and Marshall Efron...
...Wiggen's efforts are noble in the extreme: He lies to the team's coach, interferes when a prostitute tries to become Pearson's insurance beneficiary, even insists on a clause in his contract prohibiting the management from trading, demoting or firing Pearson unless it does the same to him...
...Everyone is kind to him as his fife trickles away...
...We loved Dark Victory for the same reason...
...Lest anyone miss the point, Wiggin quickly announces that his friend is dying...
...Following Pearson's final game, during the exultant victory stampede to the dugout, Wiggen pulls away in balletic slow-motion to retrieve Pearson's fallen cap...
...Since Moriarty is tall, blond and innocent-looking, somewhat on the order of Jon Voight, and de Niro is short, dark and fumbling, an Italian Dustin Hoffman, so to speak, a faint aroma of Midnight Cowboy hovers over all of this...
...Apparently on the assumption that most of us would probably prefer to die laughing, the film is laced with humor too...
...And Random Harvest...
...Director John Hancock and Harris have seen to it that Pearson's dying is beautiful, all right...
...the first ball thrown out for the new season comes from a doddering ancient who set a record back in 1901...
...Moreover, the only knowledge about death it seems to impart is that if you are dying, you should run and tell all of your friends, because they are sure to make the end pleasant as hell for you...
...Pearson himself, despite his worsening disease, has his best year...
...Shortly afterward, the film finds a brilliant visual metaphor of death: Pearson walks, starkly alone, across a concrete runway to a sterile and ominous-looking airplane...
...Still, the film does manage to capture several lingering images that are singularly effective...
...To describe the plot gives nothing away, for the opening shots show Pearson emerging, shaken, from the Mayo Clinic-a sign of certain fatality...
...A real big-league manager must always temper his indulgence, and he must usually be ruthless and uncompromising...
Vol. 56 • October 1973 • No. 19
