Film

The Bad News Bears (1976)

I once watched one of my brother’s teammates on his Babe Ruth League baseball team, having been asked to do something he thought was wrong, strip off his jersey, set it and his cap on the dugout bench, and leave the field. I don’t remember the proposed transgression, whether it was throwing a beanball or something more technical, like agreeing to accept a violation of the rule that every kid had to play at least one inning and take one at-bat. But I remember admiring him for it. The coach, a known asshole, stood gape-mouthed as the kid walked away.

Youth sports are one of the places where we first begin to really question adults, to see the gap between what they profess and what they do, what they claim to value and what their actions reveal, how they handle events that are beyond their control, how they respond to failure. Sure, coach, you say the most important thing is to play the game the right way, but that does frequently seem to include letting your son pitch and looking the other way when he picks on the benchwarmers between innings. 

That youth-adult interaction is the core of The Bad News Bears. But because sports movies also tend to reflect what America thinks of itself at the moment of their making, it ends up being bigger than that. This is a movie that, in the thick of the 1970s, grasped that something had gone wrong.

I don’t want to make too big a claim. This is a sports movie aimed at kids. It leans a lot on what an old friend once labeled, “Kids say the motherfuckingest shit.” It does that better, and with more content, than later iterations like Stranger Things, but it’s not above the cheap joke that is a kid swearing. Nonetheless, it falls into a category of artwork I love: The thing that is significantly better than it would need to be to fulfill the requirements of its product class. The Bad News Bears is genuinely funny. The screenplay (by Burt Lancaster’s son Bill) is well structured, the dialogue clever and believable. The performances, even from the kids, are almost uniformly strong. (The quiet glee on the face of a weak-hitting short kid who, late in the film, draws his first walk, is perfect.) It’s a good movie, one that holds up to adult viewing.

Walter Matthau plays Buttermaker, a pool cleaner who had a brief minor-league pitching career and now pours Jim Beam into his Budweiser in the morning, into his Mickey’s Big Mouth in the afternoon. He’s been hired to coach a team of kids who were rejected by other teams and now have their own solely because of a lawsuit brought by an ambitious local politician, who cares about them exactly as much as you're imagining. True to the genre, Matthau, with the help of his ex-girlfriend’s pitching phenom daughter Amanda Whurlitzer (played by Tatum O’Neal) and cool, smoking, motorcycle-riding delinquent Kelly Leak (played by Jackie Earle Haley), turns the initially hapless Bears into a winning team. 

What that summary misses is the very 1970s-ness of it all. Parents, particularly SoCal parents, in the 1970s were absconders. Distracted by the freedoms promulgated in the 1960s, which by then had been stripped of their political content, shed dull responsibility in favor of a journey of the self. In the wake of that, these kids are spending the summer all but on their own, bereft of role models and things to believe in, left to imitate the pathologies of adult life. They’re neither kids nor adults, and the era they are in refuses to acknowledge the risks of that confusion. (Of which the lifelong struggles of Tatum O’Neal herself are but an extreme example.)

Buttermaker is a bad fit in that milieu. The parents and league officials are mostly embarrassed by him. He has long ago accepted his status as an alcoholic failure. The other adults are striving for self-actualization; he’s seen the self and decided against it. What he finds he can’t tolerate is seeing these kids written off the same way. Watching him, in fits and starts and with plenty of mistakes, commit to doing what he can to stop that is the heart of the movie. 

That’s all Matthau, who tended to hide a lot of his skill as an actor behind his type. Watch his face—those features that look like late Auden if you sculpted him in Play-Doh—as the camera lingers on him during the team’s opening day 26–0 loss. In a few wordless seconds, he shows us pity and frustration and anger and painful memories of his own failures. Even his shambling walk to the mound after making an urgent “time out” gesture feels like the result of choice and practice. It’s a marvelous performance, one that, like the screenplay it’s built on, treats Buttermaker as a real person in a genre that prefers types. 

The kids lose in the championship game. It was the 1970s. The protagonists almost always lost in 1970s sports movies. We don’t get a big epiphany. It’s far from clear that any lives will be significantly changed by this. But there is some dignity, and coming from an era when that was in short supply, it shines.

Books

Rudyard Kipling, “The House Surgeon” (1909), and M. R. James, “A Vignette” (1936)

Staying with the theme of childhood for a bit: Most of the heightened emotions of childhood are unavailable to us as adults. The anticipation of Christmas morning, the thrill of seeing Disneyland, the joy of our team winning the World Series—the adult versions of all these are muted where not wholly absent. Anthony Powell called this “the eternal failure of human life to respond one hundred per cent.”

One thing that can still connect us to childhood is fear. We may not get as excited as we used to, but we definitely can still get as scared. Which I suspect is why I continue to read ghost stories and weird tales. The best of them can still unsettle me enough that I can ever so briefly lose the adult illusion that I understand and can manage the world.

Years ago I published a list of ten favorites, and if you’re interested in exploring the genre that’s a great start. Today I want to highlight two that seem to be rooted in the authors’ actual experiences.

Kipling
Kipling’s ghost stories tend to be about what you’d expect. There’s a lot of exoticism and some condescension, typical of a man who seems to have simultaneously been genuinely impressed by Indian culture and thought the English had a right to dominate and if need be destroy it. Confused ex-pats confront ancient understandings and come off the worse for it. Depending on your tolerance for that stuff, many of the stories can be satisfying, because Kipling always wrote good sentences and sketched characters quickly and effectively. 

The one I’m featuring here, “The House Surgeon” (1909), is in itself no great shakes. It’s a perfectly fine tale of a man who visits an acquaintance at an English country house and discovers that the house is regularly plagued by a hideous pall, an invisible black fear and horror that suffuses everything and everyone for periods. Its first appearance is nicely described:

It was just then that I was aware of a little grey shadow, as it might have been a snowflake seen against the light, floating at an immense distance in the background of my brain. It annoyed me, and I shook my head to get rid of it. Then my brain telegraphed that it was the forerunner of a swift-striding gloom which there was yet time to escape if I would force my thoughts away from it, as a man leaping for life forces his body forward and away from the fall of a wall. But the gloom overtook me before I could take in the meaning of the message. I moved toward the bed, every nerve already aching with the foreknowledge of the pain that was to be dealt it, and sat down, while my amazed and angry soul dropped, gulf by gulf, into that horror of great darkness which is spoken of in the Bible, and which, as auctioneers say, must be experienced to be appreciated.

Despair upon despair, misery upon misery, fear after fear, each causing their distinct and separate woe, packed in upon me for an unrecorded length of time, until at last they blurred together, and I heard a click in my brain like the click in the ear when one descends in a diving bell, and I knew that the pressures were equalised within and without, and that, for the moment, the worst was at an end. But I knew also that at any moment the darkness might come down anew; and while I dwelt on this speculation precisely as a man torments a raging tooth with his tongue, it ebbed away into the little grey shadow on the brain of its first coming, and once more I heard my brain, which knew what would recur, telegraph to every quarter for help, release, or diversion.

What makes this interesting to me is how it maps to Kipling’s account of a house his family rented in 1896 in Torquay. Here’s the way Stephen Jones, editor of a volume of Kipling’s ghost stories, describes it:

Kipling admitted that the family’s new home, “seemed almost too good to be true” and despite the building’s bright rooms and the fresh sea air, he revealed that he and his wife experienced “the shape of a growing depression which enveloped us both—a gathering blackness of mind and sorrow of the heart, that each put down to the new, soft climate and, without telling the other, fought against for long weeks. It was the Feng-shui—the Spirit of the house itself—that darkened the sunshine and fell upon us every time we entered, checking the very words on our lips.”

Kipling’s memoir, alas, doesn’t make much of their time at the house. He does, however, describe visiting it again thirty years later. In a Robert Aickman-esque touch, the gardener and his wife are “quite unchanged.” More important, Kipling found “the same brooding Spirit of deep, deep Despondency in the open, lit rooms.” Because this is life, not a story, there is no denouement, no explanation. Some places are simply haunted, and the solution is to flee them.

James
M. R. James’s best-known stories are carefully constructed accounts of frightful, often ancient things brought to light by too-diligent antiquarian inquiry undertaken by too-sheltered men. They’re clever, even funny, but also creepily effective in their imagery. They can actually scare.

“A Vignette” is far less developed, offering no more than what the title claims. James said he was “ill satisfied” with it, calling it “short and ill written.” But that very brevity is part of what makes it seem drawn from life. Michael Cox, in M. R. James: An Informal Portrait, describes it as “the memory of something that seemed real to him at the time and that shaped his subsequent attitude towards the supernatural,” and that’s definitely the impression it leaves.

James tells of a country house with a forested park around it where he perhaps once saw . . . something.

To be sure, it is difficult, in anything like a grove, to be quite certain that nobody is making a screen out of a tree and keeping it between you and him as he moves round it and you walk on. All I can say is if such a one was there he was no neighbour or acquaintance of mine, and there was some indication about him of being cloaked or hooded.

Quite a sting in the tail, no?

The story is only five pages long. If that paragraph has piqued your October fancies, it’s worth seeking The Collected Ghost Stories of James, which it closes.

Music

Blue Rose, by Rosemary Clooney and Duke Ellington (1956)

Rosemary Clooney, like Tony Bennett and Henry Mancini, was born about ten years too late for the era that would have best suited her talent. Her 1928 birthdate meant that she only caught the tail end of the big band era as a precocious teenager*, and by the time she was in her mid-thirties her kind of music was almost wholly passé. Like Bennett and Mancini, she found a way through it and had a fine career, but for me her life and work carry a sense of being slightly misplaced in time.

All, that is, except this record. A footnote in Ellington’s career—it barely gets mentioned in any biographies—it’s the high point of Clooney’s. And, crucially, of Billy Strayhorn’s, as Ellington’s composer, arranger, and collaborator. 

It started with Strayhorn. Ellington introduced him to Columbia producer Irving Townsend at a party. Within minutes, Strayhorn had pitched an album with Clooney, who he thought was underrated. Strayhorn biographer David Hajdu says that by the end of the night, “Strayhorn, Townsend, and Ellington had agreed on a basic approach to the album: whatever Clooney and Strayhorn wanted to do.” When Strayhorn came to Beverly Hills, Clooney was instantly taken by him. He moved into her house for a week and played nursemaid while they planned the record.

A nursemaid was needed because Clooney was deep into a pregnancy. Which introduced a complication: She had been forbidden to fly, but Ellington’s New York–based orchestra couldn’t get to California. The then-novel solution? The band would record in New York, then Clooney would lay down her vocals over their tracks. 

The fact that you’d never guess that from listening to the album is a double tribute to Strayhorn—not just to his arrangements, which left the perfect space for her vocals, but also to his coaching of Clooney. Used to singing in the presence of a band as the music was being created around her, she struggled to connect with what she heard in her headphones until Strayhorn talked her through it, telling her,

You’re a beautiful woman, looking into the mirror and combing your hair, and there’s no Duke Ellington and there’s no band. The radio is playing the record, and you just sing along with the orchestra, and we overhear it.

The result is one of the best vocal albums of the 1950s. There’s a confidence to Clooney’s singing that feels like rising to the occasion of playing with this crack band. The first track, “Hey Baby,” runs ninety seconds before she opens her mouth, building drama that she pays off perfectly with her cool, languid delivery of the words of the title. From that moment, we know we’re in the presence of something special. Her wordless vocals on “Blue Rose” swing gently, seductively. Clooney’s “Mood Indigo” is my favorite version of that song. Strayhorn’s own songs shine, as do his arrangements, particularly “Sophisticated Lady,” which opens with a lovely Ellington piano filigree and develops into a delicate arrangement that brings out the song’s melancholy core.

The album didn’t chart. Ellington was at a relative low point, and Clooney wasn’t someone to whom jazz fans attended. The day after Ellington finished his part of the recording, Clooney notes in her memoir, Elvis appeared on Tommy Dorsey’s TV show. An era was ending. Nearly seventy years later, however, Blue Rose glows, a collaboration among three artists (to say nothing of a band) at the height of their powers.

*Clooney got her first paid gig in 1945, when she was sixteen, singing with her sister on an afternoon talk and music program, “Crossroads Cafe,” on Cincinnati’s WLW, a continent-spanning 500,000-watt AM powerhouse. In Girl Singer, she notes, “One of the first programs to be heard regularly was a series of swimming lessons, every Wednesday evening at eight o’clock, taught by an instructor from the YMCA. (‘Don't take the radio into the pool with you!’)”