[Each of the last
six years, I’ve used the Super
Bowl week to AmericanStudy
some sports
histories and stories. This year I’ve decided to focus on sports movies and
what they can tell us about American culture and identity. Be a good sport and share
your responses and nominees in comments for a crowd-sourced weekend post that’s
sure to take home the championship!]
On what the
changes between an original film and its remake can tell us about American
narratives.
I’m not going to
try to make the case for the original The Longest Yard (1974)
as some sort of American classic, but it does offer a pretty gritty and
realistic depiction of prison life and community amidst its more comic moments
and its lovable underdogs sports story. The film’s sadistic Warden Rudolph
Hazen, played to sleazy perfection by Eddie Albert, could be transplanted
without much revision to a more overtly realistic contemporary film such as Cool Hand Luke (1967). And as the disgraced football star
turned convict, Burt Reynolds feels precisely as flawed and frustrating yet
ultimately heroic as Paul
Newman in that film or Jack Nicholson in the following year’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). So you know what, maybe
I am making the case for Longest Yard
as a minor American classic, perhaps not quite on par with those contemporary films
or another like Dog Day Afternoon (1975), but in the
conversation at least.
It will likely
come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Adam Sandler’s film oeuvre that the 2005 Longest Yard remake, starring
Sandler in the Reynolds role and James Cromwell as the Warden (among many other
celebrity roles), is not a classic, minor or otherwise. While I try not to sum
up entire works with one moment or detail, I’d say this one qualifies: in the
original film, the climactic game between the prisoners and guards was a
brutally realistic grudge-fest, with lives and futures on the line; in the
remake, that’s ostensibly still the case, but at one point Sandler’s
quarterback gives one of the guards a wet willy. I can’t say it any more
clearly than does the Wikipedia
entry on the remake and its critical reception: “the greatest complaint
from critics was that it replaced the original’s dark comedy and grit with
juvenile humor and visual gags.” Since “juvenile humor and visual gags” is what
you’ll find if you look up “Adam Sandler” in the dictionary, it’s fair to say
that his presence had a lot to do with that change; but I would also argue that
the two films reflect a significant difference in our national narratives about
prison.
In this post
on Dog Day Afternoon, I wrote
about the 1971 Attica Prison rebellion, and the way those prominent and
controversial events foregrounded issues of prisoner treatment and life in this
easily overlooked American community. Popular and influential films like Luke and Yard likewise reflect the presence of those issues in the era’s
collective conversations. In the 21st century, on the other hand, we
tend not to think about our prisons and their communities at all; when we
do, as John Oliver
highlights in this brilliant piece, it’s mostly as fodder for jokes about
prison rape (perhaps the least appropriate subject for jokes imaginable) or as
the subject of melodramatic entertainments like Oz and Orange is the New
Black. So if the remake is set in the same community that was the subject
of those gritty, socially realistic earlier films but is instead full of dumb
jokes and silly entertainments untethered from reality (which are the variant
definitions of “Adam Sandler”), that would seem to be a pretty accurate depiction
of the way we now engage with prison, when we engage with it at all.
Next
MovieStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other sports movies you’d highlight?