NIGHT MOVES- 1975 Dir. Arthur Penn

What I remember:

I saw this in the theater when it came out, and was a little befuddled. This was not your standard whodunit for certain. Arthur Penn, who had helped foment the New Hollywood revolution with his unforgettable “Bonnie and Clyde”, and, in my mind at least, cemented his role as a great auteur with one of my favorite films then and now, “Little Big Man”, would not be interested in making a standard private dick flick. Here was one of Hollywood’s guiding lights, directing one of filmdom’s hottest stars in Gene Hackman. It would seem to be a very easy sell to the moguls. Penn had been hot during the intervening period (spanning 1968-1974); “Alice’s Restaurant” was a charmer based on the Arlo Guthrie counter-culture anthem, and “Little Big Man” was a big hit with the hippies and a breakthrough in its depiction of the Native American.

Hackman was coming off a great run including his brilliant turn as Jimmy Doyle in both “French Connection” movies, his signature role as Harry Caul in the Coppola’s masterpiece “The Conversation”, and his great actor pair with Al Pacino in “Scarecrow”.

So what could possibly go wrong here? Penn was famous for being an autocrat both on the shoot and behind the scenes. I recall that I needed to see “Night Moves” a second time before I could really follow the story and understand the characters. Blame it on my youth, blame it on whatever 1975 had me indulging in. Possibly blame it on the film and it’s convoluted narrative line. I remember that the supporting cast was a tad weak, and there was a laugh-out-loud absurdist line when out of nowhere, Paula, Hackman’s love interest in the movie, blurts out, “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” Hackman replies, “Which Kennedy?”

Now you’re asking, why did you choose this movie for your blog? I guess it comes under the heading, “It’s so weird that it’s cool, maybe even great”. There was a lot of detective genre deconstruction in the ‘70’s. Heading the list was “Chinatown”, but there were also “The Long Goodbye”, “Klute”, “The Late Show”, and you could even include “Shaft” on this list. With “Night Moves”, I think the genre was imploded. Plus, the most deconstructed detective film of all time, “The Big Lebowski” references “Night Moves” in many ways. Let’s give it a chance, shall we?

After re-watching:

“Who’s winning?”
“Noone. One team’s losing slower than the other”. Ellen and Harry Moseby
PLOT SUMMARY

Ex NFL defensive back Harry Moseby is a private investigator who is called in to trace the runaway daughter of an aging ex Hollywood starlet. The runaway is well known for her promiscuity, as is the mother. The starlet needs her child back so that she can collect a trust owed her from her first husband. Otherwise, the two want nothing to do with each other. At the same time Moseby discovers his wife is having an affair. He runs from the emotional conflict headlong into his investigation, which takes him into the world of stuntmen, charter boating and eventually pre-Columbian artifact smuggling.

STORY/THEME

There’s a joke that goes;

A couple are lying in bed after sex. The girl turns to the guy and asks, “Does having sex with me make you a pedophile?” The guy responds, “Pedophile. Isn’t that a big word for an 8-year-old?”

Yeah, that’s pretty creepy, but damn funny too. Watching a supposedly 17-year-old Melanie Griffith get in and out of clothes for the better part of two hours makes you feel a little bit creepy, a little bit tingly (Hey, wasn’t that an Osmonds’ song title?). “Night Moves” overcomes this most prurient of situations 10-fold, with a densely plotted mystery and a very well developed character study of it’s protagonist. It’s not so much a “noir deconstruction”, as a rethinking of the classic Private Dick character, giving him a rounder, more corruptible and more faceted personality. At one point, the man Harry’s wife is having an affair with says, “C'mon take a swing at me Harry, the way Sam Spade would!” It’s a great moment, when you realize that this is the 70’s, not the 40’s, and things are not going to progress the way the standard detective fare would go. There is another fight later in the film, where Harry and the girl’s Step-father are in a tussle, all the while, Paula (Jennifer Warren), the woman both have slept with, is yelling at them about how stupid they are acting, how childish. In a Marlowe or Spade story, the girl would just be screaming her head off.

Harry is a new kind of person for the movies, the intellectual jock. He’s way too smart to be a head-banging NFL pro. He plays chess (hence the title; Night Moves= Knight Moves). He has a tortured childhood, which from of all people, you learn by dialogue given the wife’s lover. In fact, all the exposition in “Night Moves” comes from strange sources; the back-story of Delly the runaway and her mother is revealed on tape while Harry is driving around LA. Who supplied the info, we never know. Every time Harry tries to get back-story from the characters it is obscured; when supplied it’s surrounded by action (a bar fight or a stunt shot), and when it is withheld, it is done in the most arcane manor, especially in Paula’s non-sequitors (refer to the “Kennedy shot” question).

In fact, the red herrings in our mystery all equal the plot itself. What does that mean? Shit, I don’t know really. Where were YOU when Kennedy was shot? Did you know sharks have to keep swimming because they have no flotation sacs? I guess what I am getting at is, the story of why Delly eventually dies, and what the main stunt guy, Joey Ziegler (character actor Edward Binns) has to do with it, what her death has to do with this artifact smuggling, and how the step-father, stunt man, and even possibly the guy who first connected Harry in on the case are all tied together is never suitably explained.

When I first saw this movie, I was totally flummoxed, expecting a denouement wherein all this would be wrapped up in a nice little package, with Melanie Griffith’s oft-shedded halter-top as the bow.
NOW, I get it. I mean I really get it! Near the climax, Paula tells Harry that he’s asking the wrong questions. He isn’t of course, if he wants to figure out the mystery. But he is, if he wants to understand why he is forced to get to the WHY of everything. Paula says that Harry should be content, that he has solved the case. But surely he is not content. He needs to know “why”. He needs to know why his wife had an affair. Dammit, it’s not enough for a person to know where they are and what they are doing. We need to know why.

Not really a spoiler, but the film ends with Harry having made one more discovery in the case- not one that wraps it all up by a long shot, but another reveal. He is shot in the leg, and unable to control the boat he is on, which begins going in circles- and we cut to an overhead shot of this. Cue credits. That ending was probably enough to kill any chance this movie had of becoming a classic. I absolutely love it, and now think it is the best possible ending for this unique genre piece.

FILMMAKING

For a very theatrical director, Arthur Penn has always had an eye for the memorable image. There is a striking visual in “Left Handed Gun”, when the gang decides that Deputy Moon is their next target, and they shoot their guns at a reflection of the moon in a pond, scrambling the reflection with the pond’s ripples. The climactic massacre in “Bonnie and Clyde” is a sequence that could have no theatrical peer, as is the Chief’s death scene in “Little Big Man”. For some reason, “Night Moves” doesn’t have a visual lynchpin. Possibly the final shot of the boat circling, or the discovery of the corpse in the submerged plane, but as a rule, it is not a source of the great filmic moment.

However, there is one very unique stylistic element to the movie. There is no use of visual transition language separating scenes. No use of dissolves, no fade to black, no clue that we are now in another place or time. I am sure that this is by design. The resultant effect is one of temporary confusion and disorientation. It’s not unpleasant by any means, but it is unsettling as each new scene takes a few seconds to register. Since Harry is in virtually every sequence of the film, you can’t use his presence or lack thereof as an anchor. What is Penn trying to accomplish with this stylistic trope? Beats the hell out of me.
At about the same time, one of my personal loves in cinema history, “The Last Detail” came out. A much simpler film, to be sure, but Ashby’s beautiful little masterpiece has it’s own revolutionary play on film language; Ashby uses dissolves in a scene on a train, when two Navy non-coms are arguing about how to deal with their current predicament- how to handle a kleptomaniacal shlemiel they are escorting to the brig. The dissolves are used even though there is no time passing, no scene changing. It is very effective in showing the disconnect between the two sailors during that particular sequence. I think Penn was trying for something similar with his lack of transitional devices, but instead it just makes the film a bit more angular than necessary.

PERFORMANCES

Gene Hackman is a national treasure as far as I’m concerned. If you can show me a bad performance by him, I’ll buy you a steak dinner. It’s a good thing for “Night Moves” that he is in every scene. The supporting cast is not anywhere nearly as good, although the underused Jennifer Warren does a nice and memorable job with the part of Paula. She makes a pretty hard to believe character somewhat credible. She’s not terribly sexy, but you can see why Moseby likes her. Susan Clark as Harry’s wife Ellen, has her moments, especially during the couple’s confrontational scenes. You can tell her problem with Harry is a lack of emotional connection predicated by Harry’s obsession with “why”. Oh…and James Woods is in the movie! This is one of his earliest feature roles, pre-dating his breakthroughs in the TV mini-series “Holocaust” and the films “Choirboys” and “The Onion Field”. He plays one of the many tools who have had relations with Delly. He also spends a lot of time getting beat up in the movie. One performance that is shockingly bad is by Anthony Costello as stuntman Marv Ellman, who slept with both Delly and her mom Arlene. It’s laughably bad, and it’s not something you’d expect to see in an Arthur Penn film. Arlene, as played by Janet Ward, is a poorly drawn, single faceted character not worthy of the rest of the ensemble. The boozy, slutty, aging starlet has been done far better turns by the likes of Shelly Winters and Harvey Fierstein.

That’s a joke.

ON SECOND LOOK

Well, in this case it’s third, and I think I like “Night Moves” even more this time than the time I re-watched it back in the ‘80’s. Sure it’s complex, muddled and unresolved. To quote Cheech Marin after an incredibly cacophonous guitar solo, “What, you didn’t like that?” I think it tackles very interesting subject matter. What compels a man to find out the reason for everything? Does the world need to be explained? Should we destroy ourselves and all that surrounds us just to figure out the meaning of life, the universe and everything? Just as Harry shouldn’t destroy himself to find out whodunit and why, we shouldn’t kill ourselves trying to unravel the puzzle of life. Zen, baby. Chill, baby. It’s the ‘70’s

Oh yeah....to answer the question, on a short bus going home from school, somewhere on 2nd Avenue in Spanish Harlem.

1st Look-★★★ 2nd Look-★★★1/2

“THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING”- 1975 Dir- John Huston

What I Remember:

From the ad campaign, the posters, the star power, this movie looked like everything I used to hate. A couple of Brits have a wild adventure in the sub-continent, carousing and fighting and living it up, little brown ignorant men get slain by the hundreds, etc., etc. Yet, you had to notice the director. Here was a man responsible for 3 of my favorite films; “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”, “Freud, The Secret Passion” (and WHY is this film not available ANYWHERE?), and “The Asphalt Jungle”. He also had just come off an unforgettable acting turn in “Chinatown”. Regardless, I was in film school at the time, and pretty much saw everything that came through.

How much did I underestimate this film? Memory holds this to be a masterpiece, an utter gem. Superficially it is an action picture, and also a progenitor of the then budding genre, the “buddy film”. Nowadays the term used is “bromance”, but it will always be “buddy” for me. At any rate, when you scratch the surface of “TMWWBK” (another long title I refuse to enter time and again), you end up with a story that is so much deeper. It’s a tale of arrogance, a tale of self-deception. It’s a fable about the corrupting force of absolute power. It’s an allegory of colonial conceit.

I also remember that my impressions of both stars, Michael Caine and Sean Connery, were changed forever in a positive manner. Don’t get me wrong, I had seen and liked both actors in previous films, yet I had never seen them so believable and so far out of their respective wheelhouses. This was no James Bond or Harry Palmer. Daniel and Peachy are two very unforgettable characters, and they owe that to Mr. Huston.

After re-watching:

“If we're going to make it stick that I'm a god, you ought to bow when you pass in front of me like everybody else.” – Daniel Dravot

PLOT SUMMARY

Peachy and Daniel, a pair of scoundrel ex-members of the British Army, are living in India and running a) various scams, b) guns and c) from the authorities. Peachy Carnahan (Michael Caine) runs into the Northern Star’s chief Indian correspondant, Rudyard Kipling (Christopher Plummer) in a train station. Peachy lifts Kiplings’ gold watch, and to his chagrin sees a Freemason medallion attached to the chain. Since Peachy is also a Freemason, he attempts to follow Kipling onto the train to return the watch. He then uses his Masonic connection to convince Kipling to pass a message to his comrade, Daniel Dravot. They plan a blackmail scheme that is thwarted by Kipling when they tell him that they will pose as correspondants for HIS paper! They then decide on their next scheme; go to remote Kafiristan and become Kings by using their British street smarts. After a grueling journey, they make it to Kafiristan, wherein Dravot is mistaken for the long lost son of Alexander the Great, and they discover riches beyond their wildest dreams.

STORY/THEME

I feel like this was a film that I really had right. There were few surprises, and many scenes were stuck in my brain with crystal clarity. It is a tribute to just how visually stunning “TMWWBK” is. Much of the location shooting was in Morocco, but some of the winter Himalayan scenes were shot in the French Alps. The stunning landscapes are a result of the “David Lean” effect- a large scale adventure or historical film made after 1965 needed to have the sweeping landscapes that equal “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Dr. Zhivago” in scope. Could the film have been as effective without this imagery? Maybe, but I think you get the idea that these men, while absolutely reprehensible in character, also possess a super-human amount of courage and bravado. Traversing the Himalayas seems impossible, and one of the best sequences comes when they are stuck at a crevasse, with no way to cross. Knowing that they are done for, they begin to recount their memories, and begin laughing loud and heartily. The laughter starts an avalanche, and soon the crevasse is filled.

As an adventure fable, it is amongst the best. Where it also succeeds is as allegory to the hubris of the British empire. Daniel and Peachy, though obviously of the lower rungs of British society, feel that they are so much smarter and civilized than the Kafiris, that they underestimate the people and their society. They cringe at the thought of the Kafiris playing polo with a dead man’s head in a sack as the ball, yet have no sense of guilt after throwing a perfectly nice Indian man from a moving train. The history of British Colonial rule has always been one of hypocrisies like these.

Interestingly enough, the film I believe “TMWWBK” resembles the most is Huston’s own “Treasure of the Sierra Madre”. Greed, of course is the motivational factor, but there is also the juxtaposition of cultures, and the Caucasian feeling of superiority and entitlement that is their undoing. I believe that Herzog’s “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” and “Fitzcarraldo” also play into this theme. Adding the buddy film into this brew causes an interesting dichotomy; on one hand you are rooting for these bastards because they are so endearing, and obviously care for each other. On the other, you have to hate how completely awful they are to the Kafiris, Afghans and Indians.
Daniel’s and Peachy’s success in Kafiristan is sheer luck; an arrow hits Daniel in the heart, but actually gets stuck in his bandolier. This is how Daniel becomes God-like to the Kafiris. Then, when the high priest is about to shoot an arrow point blank at him to prove his immortality, Daniel’s exposed chest reveals the Masonic medallion Kipling gave him for good luck. It turns out that Alexander the Great used the same emblem, and for the holy men, that is enough to prove Daniel’s connection to the Gods. As always, luck runs out, as it must for our “heroes”. When it does, you realize that it’s not their superior intellect or cleverness that has been keeping them alive, but the acts of a bemused deity, simply waiting for the proper moment to knock them off their perch.

FILMMAKING

The story is beautifully told, both in imagery and in pacing. Visuals from the Khyber Pass and the Himalayas scenes are indelible, as are the initial shots of Zigandergul, or whatever it is they call the holy city. The matte paintings are amongst the most gorgeous I have ever seen, and they are utilized perfectly. There are lots of street market scenes early on in the movie, giving a sense of place and time. Huston always took great care with that part of his works. Placing a fable such as this in the most real of atmospheres can cause a disconnect, but not here. It gives you the feeling of veracity, and it helps you become invested in these characters and their less than believable exploits. The two British soldiers going into battle in their Beefeater red, leading a ragtag group of Kafiris also provides an image that is almost shocking. It reminded me of that great scene in “Interiors” when Maureen Stapleton enters a dining room in a bright red dress, where everyone else is in muted tans and grays.

Visuals aside, Huston works the pace of this film artfully. The story unfolds just right, and you are sucked in early. It’s an exciting world that these people populate, yet your seat in the theater is about as close as you’d ever want to get.

PERFORMANCES

As I stated above, both leads step out of their carefully developed images for this movie. Huston originally conceived this as a vehicle for Gable and Bogart in the ‘50’s, and how different a film this would have been with Americans in those parts? He later envisioned Paul Newman and Robert Redford in the lead roles, the two actors who invented the buddy film with “Butch Cassady and the Sundance Kid”, and perfected it with “The Sting”. Again, I feel using American actors in these roles would have ruined the film. Caine was known for playing the humanistic spy Harry Palmer, and the cad Alfie, had never really played up his Cockney as much as he got to in this film. His take on Peachy is a bullseye. Connery also gets his Scotsman just right, and you get the sense that these performances were based on childhood memories of folks or relatives that they knew well. No American actor could possibly pull this off, just as a Brit could never really do a Woody Allen neurotic Jew (See Kenneth Branagh in “Celebrity”) or a Police chief in the deep south like Rod Steiger’s award winning turn as Gillespie in “In The Heat of the Night”.

Caine’s wife, Shakira, plays the part of Roxanne, whom Daniel attempts to marry in the film. She has no lines, but her beauty is incomparable. Christopher Plummer as Kipling does a very standard job, but this is what the film calls for. If he emoted in this role the way he does in some later performances, it would have been entirely out of place. Almost every other part except that of Billy Fish, the Indian translator, is played by locals and extras, again adding to the sense of realty in which Huston envelops the movie. The faces are striking, especially those of the high priest and the warlord they encounter early on in Kafiristan.

ON SECOND LOOK

If I had to sell this film with a Hollywood agent, it’d go like this: “Gunga Din” meets “Fitzcarraldo”, or…. Howard Hawks directs “A Passage to India”.
OK, now I’m just free-associating.

This film is every bit as good as I thought it was. It’s huge and sprawling, it’s visually without peer, it’s quite well acted, it’s comic and tragic, it’s enthralling and disturbing. I love it.

1st Look- ★★★★ 2nd Look-★★★★

"LONG GONE" 1987 Dir. Martin Davidson

What I remember:

This was a made for HBO movie, back when that didn’t carry as much weight as it does now. In those days, “made for pay TV” was much like our “straight to DVD” is now. In other words, it’s not good enough or it doesn’t have enough star power to be in theatrical release. Was it really originally made for HBO, or was it picked up by them as a movie too good to be shelved? IMDB says it was an HBO production, so one must assume it truly was made for TV. IMDB also says that the film’s lead, William Peterson, turned down the Tom Berenger role in “Platoon” to be in “Long Gone”. Hmmm. Would he have done that for a film that he knew was only going to play on Pay TV?

Whatever the case, it would have been a success in theaters, I believe. It predates “Bull Durham”, and memory tells me that it was just about as good. I remember some great touches, like the casting of Teller (from Penn and Teller) as Henry Gibson’s son. It’s supposed to be the ‘50’s in the south, and they get a lot of the atmosphere right. It was very funny, with lots of well played baseball scenes, a blisteringly hot Virginia Madsen (as one of the best named characters in film history, Dixie Lee Boxx), Dermit Mulroney’s first major role, and Larry Riley playing the power hitting black player they try to pawn off as Latino. To this date, when listing our favorite baseball movies, both my wife and I have “Long Gone” in our top 3. We are both quite keen to watch it again.

After re-watching:

“Tell him this ain’t New York, Daddy. Tell him we got the Klan here, in case he ain’t noticed” – Hale Buchman Jr.

“Only words djoo got know een Beisbol: ‘Hamborger’, ‘I got it’, ‘Poossy’, ‘No Comprendo’ ”. – Paco Izquierdo
PLOT SUMMARY

It’s 1957, and the Tampico Stogies are a terrible low A level team, that may or may not be affiliated with a Major League franchise. Their player/manager is Stud Cantrell (William Peterson), who is a typical hard drinking, hard playing, hard loving man’s man. He meets an extremely hot to trot young woman, whom he intends to love and leave, but she becomes a bit more than he bargained for. He signs up two prospects, one an innocent rookie with a vacuum cleaner glove, and the other a black power hitter from the Josh Gibson mold. Together the three spearhead a revival of the perennial losing franchise, and guide them toward a league championship.


Q- Was my memory accurate?

STORY/THEME

Is it a baseball movie, or is it a movie about racism in the south? Is it a romantic comedy, or is it a period piece? Maybe it’s a coming of age movie. Or is it a Faustian fable? All of the above or none?

Well hell’s bells, boys, is all I gotta say. It’s a got-damn movie so just sit back and enjoy, you naval-staring Yankees!

What it really is, is the first movie about the Minor Leagues. The Minors have been a major part of my family’s life for the past 20 plus years, so I know a dadgum thing or two about them. When I first saw “Long Gone”, I had little to no knowledge of the Minor Leagues. Those 20 years have certainly put a spin on my perception of the film. “Long Gone” is definitely a fantasy. It was not trying for authenticity the way “Bull Durham” did. In fact, the film has more similarities to “Slap Shot” than it does to the great Ron Shelton work. For example, there is one plot device that is outright stolen from “Slap Shot”. Dusty Hoolihan is the Ogie Ogilthorpe of this movie, so if you’re an acolyte of that great hockey satire, that should give you enough to go on.

Primarily, “Long Gone” is an enjoyable romp that tries to be all things to all people. Maybe if it had focused a bit more on one of the factors dealt with, the film would be considered far better. Unfortunately, it is quite scatter-shot. The most compelling part of the film is the story of Joe Louis Brown, ex-Negro Leaguer without a job, who tries to get his career back by taking on with the Stogies. The fact that teams in the ‘50’s South were still segregated, is circumvented by having the announcer call him Jose Brown from Venezuela. One of the best moments in the film comes when Brown hits a pinch-hit walk-off homerun in his first at bat for Tampico. The team is still celebrating in the locker room when Brown approaches the showers, and quickly the room grows silent. As soon as he realizes what’s happening, he shouts, “I don’t want to shower with no white boys anyway!”

The two main relationships, Cantrell and Dixie, and the young, slick-fielding Jamie Weeks and his ultra-Christian girlfriend, Esther, are not the deepest of character studies. As a romantic comedy it falls a bit short. While no actual playing of baseball is quite as embarrassingly bad as Tim Robbins’ attempt at a fastball delivery in “Bull Durham”, the game itself is very trivial to the movie. As a baseball action (oxymoron?) movie it also falls quite short.

As for plot and character development, all three lead male roles are put to the test, Cantrell and Brown to the “temptation of greed test”, Weeks to the “maturity/responsibility” test. However these tests come almost at the end of the movie, so your motivational obstacles are quite diminished by the amount of time they are given.

FILMMAKING

Martin Davidson, I knew Sergei Eisenstein, and you sir…..

Let’s not be harsh, here. In other hands, this could have been a much better watch, no question. However, the comedy is quite well done here. The entire movie has a kind of soft-focus glow, like an ‘80’s SkinaMax soft-core, or a Breck ad from the ‘70’s. The feeling of being hot and sweaty runs through the entire proceedings, and most of the guys walk around in unbuttoned shirts and rolled up sleeves. The camera is certainly not the star, but when it focuses on a young Virginia Madsen, well, it becomes everybody’s friend. She is positively luminous throughout, and embodies the idea of a movie star.

There are no real standout visuals, nothing too interesting done sound or set-wise. It’s pretty much run–of-the-mill filmmaking on a limited budget. The soundtrack is nice with a lot of classic R&B and some old time Rock and Roll. There is also a great scene on the team bus, with Joe Louis Brown singing and playing on the harmonica an improvised song for the Stogies that endears him to the team.

PERFORMANCES

William Peterson does a fine job with his charming, folksy and charismatic part; his smile lights up the screen, and his befuddlement when cornered by Dixie is believable.
Larry Riley as Brown has a convincing power swing, and he captures the fun-loving but world-weariness of the persecuted black man pre-Civil Rights Movement. Riley was also the big power hitter in “A Soldier’s Story”, the excellent baseball/military/whodunit of the ‘90’s. Sadly, Riley’s career was cut short by AIDS.

Ms. Madsen was so undeniably gorgeous at this time, that she could have stuttered like King Bertie through the whole film and nobody would have cared. It happens that she is quite good with her less than meaty role. She has a couple of scenes where she gets to emote, and handles them well. Dermit Mulroney looks the part of a young phenom, and he is pretty solid. His opposite number, Katy Boyer is entirely forgettable as the Christian girl succumbing to her lust. One imagines a young Meg Ryan in the same role doing a much more humorous turn. Much of the funniest bits are Henry Gibson and Teller as the clone-ish father and son, Hale Buchman Sr. and Jr. Junior is always either telling his father to say things directly, or whispering the ideas to him. Senior subsequently repeats these things as if they were his own idea. Teller is sufficiently evil as Junior, and therefore very funny.

ON SECOND LOOK

You must remember that “Long Gone” was made in 1987, two years before “Bull Durham”. Is it better than Shelton’s masterpiece? Of course not. Does it deserve to be a top 3 baseball film? Maybe not. It’s damn funny, and I think if it had had a bit more focus, could have been really great. I will say this- the combination of comedy, irreverence, atmosphere and Ms. Madsen’s smokin’ hot face and body were enough to keep it in my mind for 24 years. There’s something to be said for that!

1st Look- ★★★★ 2nd Look-★★★