Pauline Kael, who died this week at age 82, "stood alone, as the most influential American film critic," says Roger Ebert. In her long career, most notably with "The New Yorker" magazine, Kael reviewed dozens of sports movies. As her colorful reviews make clear, she enjoyed the spirit of flicks like "Rocky" and "Slap Shot" and "Bull Durham." And unlike most other critics, she found "Raging Bull" pretentious. In short, she liked sports movies with spunk.
Here are some selections from Kael's reviews over the years.
"Bull Durham"
Baseball, 1988; Kevin Costner, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon
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| Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon star in "Bull Durham." |
Props: "Kevin Costner comes through with his first wide-awake, star performance…. This is a baseball movie without the clichés of baseball movies…. Sarandon's Annie is a wonder."
Sports shot: Costner's best scene, says Kael, is when he "picks a fight with an umpire in the middle of a game and whips himself up into a goofy frenzy; he goads the guy until he gets thrown off the field."
Diss: "Crash's big speech about what he believes in comes out as rehearsed, off-key posturing."
Kael's verdict: A wonderful, heartwarming movie.
"The Color of Money"
Pool, 1986; Paul Newman, Tom Cruise; directed by Martin Scorcese
Players: Newman did all of his own pool shots; Cruise did all of his but one.
Props: Paul Newman, as veteran pool hustler Eddie, tries to inspire the young pool shark, Vincent (played by Cruise). "In once scene, Eddie deliberately gets Vincent riled up during a match by petting and stroking Carmen [Vincent's girl] in clear view of the pool table. It's perhaps the most assured piece of smiling deviltry that Newman has ever brought off.… His hand moves over her backside so smoothly that you could almost weep for poor Tom Cruise." Also, props for a Forest Whitaker as Amos, a pool shark.
Sports shot: "The matches are zap-zap mechanistic; they're impersonal ... and they all look the same."
Kael's verdict: First half of film is good, second half not so.
"Raging Bull"
Boxing, 1980; Robert De Niro; directed by Martin Scorcese
Player: De Niro puffed up from 145 to 215 pounds to play La Motta as an old man.
Props: For Joe Pesci, who plays Joey, La Motta's brother, manager, and sparring partner. "It's Pesci's picture, if it's anybody's, because we can understand why Joey does what he does."
Diss: "Listening to Jake and Joey go at each other, like the macho clowns in Cassavetes movies, I know I'm supposed to be responding to a powerful, ironic realism, but I just feel trapped. Jake says, 'You dumb f--k,' and Joey said, 'You dumb f--k,' and they repeat it and repeat it. And I think, What am I doing here watching these two dumb f--ks?"
Sports shot: "The fights are fast and gory and are shot very close in…. We're put in the ring, with our heads right up against the heads of the two fighters who are hammering away at each other, with slow-motion eruptions of blood and sweat splashing us." But "Scorsese doesn't care about the rhythm and balance of fighters' bodies. There's no dancing for these fighters, and very little boxing."
Kael's verdict: Mixed. Raging Bull is "overripe, ready for canonization."
"Semi-Tough"
Football, 1977; Burt Reynolds
Props: "This isn't just another of Burt Reynolds' rakehell-bum roles: Billy Clyde is a good-ol'-boy Cary Grant.… Every gag line is super-casual, every inflection on the button."
Sports shot: "The games are deliberate muddy chaos.… [Director Michael Ritchie] edits so fast that it's clear he doesn't want us to be involved in who wins, or even who's playing."
Kael's verdict: Mediocre, but painless.
"Slap Shot"
Hockey, 1977; Paul Newman
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| Paul Newman stars as Reggie Dunlop in "Slap Shot." |
Player: "As Reggie, the player-coach of the Chiefs, he [Newman] gives the performance of his life.… What Newman does here is casual American star-acting at its peak; he's as perfectly assured a comedian as Bogart in 'The African Queen.'"
Props: "A comic hymn to violence." She says "Slap Shot" will be a huge hit, one of the biggest moneymakers of all time. (It fell far short of that mark, but became a very lucrative video.)
Diss: No mention of the Hanson brothers, the brutal, doofish trio who continue to be cult heroes.
Sports shot: "We're told that the fans only want blood and gore. Yet toward the end, when Reggie inspires his men to go out and play 'old-time hockey,' they don't get the chance to play, and we never find out whether the fans would actually reject a good fast game."
Kael's verdict: A winner.
"Rocky"
Boxing, 1976; Sylvester Stallone
Players: "Carl Weathers [as Apollo Creed], a former Oakland Raiders linebacker, is a real find." And Burt Young, who plays Paulie, was a professional boxer.
Props: "The innocence that makes this picture so winning emanates from Sylvester Stallone.… Stallone looks like a big, battered Paul McCartney."
Sports shot: "At the climactic prizefight … the camera is so close to the fighters that you can't feel the rhythm of the encounter."
Kael's verdict: A winner.
"The Longest Yard"
Football, 1974; Burt Reynolds
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| Burt Reynolds hit paydirt in "The Longest Yard." |
Player: Reynolds wearing form-fitting chain-gang white togs.
Props: Reynolds is "perfect in this brutal comic fantasy about a football game between crazily ruthless convicts and crazily ruthless guards; for all its bone-crunching collisions, the picture is almost irresistibly good-natured and funny."
Sports shot: Reynolds' inspirational speech to his convict teammates, which "echoes Ronald Reagan's Gipper speech from 'Knute Rockne-All American.'"
Kael's verdict: A winner.
"The All-American Boy"
Boxing, 1973; Jon Voight
Diss: The film is a "disgracefully condescending view of America as a wasteland populated by grotesques, stupes, and sons-of-bitches."
Sports shot: "A sequence of boxers working out in a California gym to a Gregorian chant," which "hits a new high-low in showy intellectuality."
Kael's verdict: A must-miss.
"The Great White Hope"
Boxing, 1970; James Earl Jones
Diss: "Imagine a reputable director [Martin Ritt] in 1970 thinking he could turn a play into a movie by filling it up with extras."
Sports shot: "When Ritt splurges and shows us thousands of people at the final match, counting time with the referee (so it obviously isn't stock footage), we are moved not by any meaning in the shot but by its pathetic extravagant exhibitionism. It's there to prove they could afford it."
Kael's verdict: A clunky, overproduced melodrama.
"Downhill Racer"
Skiing, 1969; Robert Redford
Props: "The ski footage … is the true excitement of the film…. [Director Michael] Ritchie has brought off one thing that takes skill, even though it isn't worth doing: he's kept the audience from howling at the coach's speeches. The coach, Gene Hackman, is such a sane, unassuming actor that he somehow makes it a pleasure to watch him as he delivers his ritual (though now quickie) sermons on moral fiber and sportsmanship."
Diss: "The single worst sequence involves a woman journalist who understands nothing of sports; it is condescendingly written and so excruciatingly directed that it stops the show cold."
Kael's verdict: "Not too bad."
Short Takes from Kael
"Field of Dreams"
Baseball, 1989; Kevin Costner
Diss: A sincere but manipulative film.
"Matador"
Bullfighting, 1986; Antonio Banderas
Player: "Angel [played by Banderas] is training to be a bullfighter, but he faints at the sight of blood."
Diss: "This comedy is all lush, clownish excess …"
"The Natural"
Baseball, 1984; Robert Redford
Sports shot: "Every time Roy is about to pitch or hit … he's glorified in slow motion … And we're supposed to sit there oohing and ahing over Robert Redford lifting his leg."
Diss: "The movie turns its source material -- Bernard Malamud's lively, magical first novel -- into primordial hokum."
"Heart Like a Wheel"
Drag racing, 1983
Props: Beau Bridges "brings his marvelous radiance to the role of the impulsive, rowdy Connie Kalitta, who becomes Shirley's [drag racer Shirley Muldowney's] partner."
Sports shot: Shirley's car crashes into flames, and her son "runs out to her and looks into her charred helmet."
"Personal Best"
Track, 1982
Sports shot: Director Robert Towne "breaks down athletic events into specific details; you watch the athletes' calves or some other part of them, and you get an exact sense of how their bodies work - it's sensual and sexual, and it's informative, too."
Props: "This is a very smart and super-subtle movie, in which the authenticity of the details draws us in."
"Rocky III"
Boxing, 1982; Sylvester Stallone, Mr. T
Sports shot: "You're pummeled by the noise and the rock music and the images of bodies being whammed."
Diss: "Empty and inept."
"Chariots of Fire"
Track, 1981
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| Ian Charleson (451) portrays Scottish missionary and Olympic gold medalist Eric Liddell in "Chariots of Fire." |
Diss: "The picture is a piece of technological lyricism held together by the glue of simpleminded heroic sentiment; basically, its appeal is in watching a couple of guys win their races."
"Pumping Iron"
Bodybuilding, 1977; Arnold Schwarzenegger, Louis Ferrigno
Props: "Competently made documentary about the grotesque, comic subculture of bodybuilding."
"Lifeguard"
Tanning, 1976; Sam Elliott, Anne Archer)
Player: Former high school star athlete can't grow up - he's still working as a lifeguard 15 years after graduation. Has middle-aged fling with high-school sweetheart. Young girl has crush on him.
Props: "The sort of small-scale picture that's a drag in a theatre but shines on Home Box Office."
"Bang the Drum Slowly"
Baseball, 1973; Robert De Niro
Diss: "De Niro gives what may be his only bad screen performance."
"The Last American Hero"
Auto racing, 1973; Jeff Bridges
The New Journalism: Based on the Tom Wolfe article about legendary car racer Junior Johnson.
Props: "The casting, the acting, and the milieu seem effortlessly, inexplicably right. This movie transcends its genre."
"The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings"
Baseball, 1970; Richard Pryor, Billy Dee Williams, James Earl Jones
Props: "Rowdy, good-natured comedy-melodrama about a barnstorming black baseball team."
"This Sporting Life"
Rugby, 1963; Richard Harris
Sports shot: "The rugby games [according to the original reviews of the film] were said to be a 'microcosm of a corrupt society.'"
Diss: "It's a mixture of the powerful, the inexplicable, and the dislikable."
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| Paul Newman stars as "Fast" Eddie Felson in "The Hustler." |
"The Hustler"
Pool, 1961; Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason
Props: "Newman gives a fine, emotional performance. You can see all the picture's faults and still love it."
"Bullfight"
Bullfighting; 1956
Props: The documentary "succeeds where fictional treatments have failed -- in communicating the elation and desperation of bullfighters testing themselves."
"Take Me Out to the Ball Game"
Baseball, 1949; Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Esther Williams
Players: "Kelly and Frank Sinatra are vaudevillians who are baseball players; Esther Williams, the manager of the baseball team, is in love with Kelly, but Sinatra is in love with her. And there are gangsters trying to get the boys to double-cross her and lose a game."
Diss: "This asinine story just about smothers the good-natured hoofing."
"Here Comes Mr. Jordan"
Boxing, 1941
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| Warren Beatty (16) stars as QB Joe Pendleton in "Heaven Can Wait." |
Player: Robert Montgomery plays a heavyweight title contender who dies 50 years sooner than scheduled, and has to find a body in order to rejoin the living and contend.
Reincarnation: Remade into "Heaven Can Wait," a 1978 film starring Warren Beatty. The boxer in the original plot is a star quarterback in the remake.
Diss: "Audiences loved this chunk of whimsy."
"National Velvet"
Horse racing, 1944; Elizabeth Taylor, Mickey Rooney
Props: Taylor "gives what is possibly her most dedicated performance as Velvet Brown, a little English girl who wins a horse in a village lottery and is obsessively determined to enter him in the Grand National."
"Golden Boy" Boxing, 1939
Player: William Holden plays a violinist turned prizefighter.
Diss: "Only semi-reprehensible."
"Olympiad"
Olympics, 1938
Players: Leni Riefenstahl was commissioned by Adolf Hitler to produce documentaries on his political conventions and the Olympics.
Sports shot: "Despite Hitler's Aryan myth, she [Riefenstahl] knew beauty when she saw it: in the throbbing veins of Jesse Owens' forehead … in the lean Japanese swimmers; in the divers soaring in flight so continuous that they have no nationality."
Props: "The results were the two greatest films ever directed by a woman."
"The Champ"
(Boxing, 1931)
Diss: "A tedious story…. Something about Tia Juana [sic] and horse racing and boxing."
The full-length reviews can be found in the collected works of Pauline Kael, including the books "When The Lights Go Down," "Reeling," "Hooked," "Deeper Into Movies," "I Lost It At the Movies," and "For Keeps." More of Kael's short takes can be found in "5,001 Nights at the Movies."
