| The Bad News Bears | |
|---|---|
 Theatrical release poster byJack Davis | |
| Directed by | Michael Ritchie |
| Written by | Bill Lancaster |
| Produced by | Stanley R. Jaffe |
| Starring | |
| Cinematography | John A. Alonzo |
| Edited by | Richard A. Harris |
| Music by | Jerry Fielding |
| Distributed by | Paramount Pictures |
Release date |
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Running time | 102 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Languages |
|
| Budget | $9 million[1] |
| Box office | $42.3 million[2] |
The Bad News Bears is a 1976 Americansportscomedy film directed byMichael Ritchie and written byBill Lancaster. It starsWalter Matthau as alcoholic ex-baseball pitcher Morris Buttermaker who becomes a coach for a youthbaseball team known as the Bears. The film's cast includesTatum O'Neal,Vic Morrow,Joyce Van Patten,Ben Piazza,Jackie Earle Haley, andAlfred W. Lutter. Its score, composed byJerry Fielding, adapts the principal themes ofGeorges Bizet's operaCarmen.
Released byParamount Pictures on April 7, 1976,The Bad News Bears received generally positive reviews. It was followed by two sequels,The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training in 1977 andThe Bad News Bears Go to Japan in 1978, a short-lived 1979–80CBStelevision series, and a 2005remake.
In 1976, Morris Buttermaker, an alcoholic pool cleaner and former minor-league baseball pitcher, accepts a secretive cash payment from lawyer Bob Whitewood to coach his son Toby's youth baseball leagueexpansion team, the Bears. The team is made up of unskilled players, formed as a settlement to a lawsuit brought against the league for excluding such players from other teams. Shunned by the more competitive teams (and their competitive parents and coaches), the Bears are considered outsiders and the least talented team in theSouthern California league.
Buttermaker makes little effort to help the boys improve, accomplishing nothing before their first game except for finding a sponsor to provide uniforms. He forfeits the opening game after the Bears allow 26 runs without recording an out.
With the entire team wanting to quit due to the humiliation of their first loss, Buttermaker begins to take his coaching more seriously, teaching basics like hitting, fielding and sliding. In addition, he recruits two unlikely prospects: sharp-tongued Amanda Whurlitzer, the 11-year-old daughter of Buttermaker's former girlfriend and a skilled pitcher (trained by Buttermaker when she was younger); and the local cigarette-smoking, loan-sharking,Harley-Davidson-riding troublemaker Kelly Leak, who is also the best athlete in the area but has been excluded from playing in the past due to his juvenile delinquency. With Amanda and Kelly on board, the team gains confidence and they begin to win. The strained past relationship between Buttermaker and Amanda is revealed as the team improves.
Eventually, the Bears make it to the championship game opposite the top-notch Yankees, who are coached by aggressive, competitive Roy Turner. As the game progresses, tensions rise between the teams and the coaches, as Buttermaker and Turner engage in ruthless behavior toward each other and the players in their fervor to win the game. But when Turner strikes his son Joey, the pitcher, for ignoring his orders and intentionally throwing at the batter Mike Engelberg's head, Joey retaliates by holding on to acomebacker until the Bears runner scores, then walks off the field.
Buttermaker realizes that he, too, has placed too much emphasis on winning, and puts in hisbench-warmers to allow everyone to play. The Bears lose in the end, but despite Buttermaker's move, they nearly win the game. After the trophy award ceremony, Buttermaker gives the team beer, which they spray on each other in a celebration as if they had won, telling the Yankees "where [they] can put their championship trophy".
Top-billed, shown in the opening credits, are Matthau, O'Neal and Morrow.
The Bad News Bears was filmed in and aroundLos Angeles, primarily in theSan Fernando Valley. The field where they played is in Mason Park on Mason Avenue inChatsworth.[citation needed] In the film, the Bears weresponsored by an actual local company, "Chico's Bail Bonds".[citation needed] One scene was filmed in the council chamber atLos Angeles City Hall.[citation needed]
Walter Matthau was paid $750,000 plus over 10% of thetheatrical rentals.[3]Tatum O'Neal was paid $350,000 plus a percentage of the profits.[4] These were later estimated to be $1.9 million.[5]
Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 97%, based on reviews from 35 critics, and an average rating of 7.8/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "The Bad News Bears is rude, profane, and cynical, but shot through with honest, unforced humor, and held together by a deft, understated performance from Walter Matthau."[6]
In his 1976 review, criticRoger Ebert of theChicago Sun-Times gave the film three stars out of four, and called it "an unblinking, scathing look at competition in American society".[7]
Gene Siskel of theChicago Tribune awarded two-and-a-half stars out of four, calling the film's characters "more types than people" and the kids' foul-mouth dialogue "overdone", although he found O'Neal's performance "genuinely affecting".[8]
Variety called it "the funniest adult-child comedy film sincePaper Moon", and lauded the "excellent" script.[9]
Kevin Thomas of theLos Angeles Times declared it "the best American screen comedy of the year to date", adding, "Bright, pugnacious and utterly realistic as most children seem to be today, these kids are drawn with much accuracy and are played beautifully."[10]
Vincent Canby ofThe New York Times found the film only "occasionally funny", but praised screenwriterBill Lancaster for "the talent and discipline to tell the story ofThe Bad News Bears almost completely in terms of what happens on the baseball diamond or in the dugout".[11]
Gary Arnold ofThe Washington Post praised it as "a lively, spontaneously funny entertainment" that "could rally a large parallel audience seeking less innocuous and stereotyped pictures with and about children".[12]
Tom Milne ofThe Monthly Film Bulletin called it "miraculously funny and entirely delightful".[13]
It’s so funny. It’s so sweet. It’s sweet and, yet, it’s completely wrong. It’s just so wrong on so many levels. — Tatum O'Neal[14]
Walter Matthau was nominated jointly for this film and his work inThe Sunshine Boys for theBAFTA Award for Best Actor at the 30th British Academy Film Awards. The screenplay by Bill Lancaster, son of actorBurt Lancaster, was awardedBest Comedy Written Directly for the Screen at the29th Writers Guild of America Awards.
