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The online film magazine Combustible Celluloid offers new movie reviews, DVD reviews, film reviews, actor interviews, actress interviews, director interviews, film books and all things cinema related for the thoughtful and passionate. Online for ten years! Over 3000 reviews!

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The Bad News Bears (1976)

Rating: 3 1/2 Stars (out of 4)

Punch Drunk Glove

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Buy The Bad News Bears on DVD.

It suddenly occurred to me halfway through the original The Bad News Bears that I was watching a W.C. Fields movie. Walter Matthau was the perfect Fields for the modern age. He's a beer-swilling, grumbling curmudgeon thrown in with a batch of misfit kids (fat kids, Mexican kids, Jewish kids, foul-mouthed kids, etc.) and he develops a look on his face as if a dog just piddled on his best polyester suit. It's not long before the "David vs. Goliath" formula kicks in, but Matthau's perfectly restrained, brilliantly comic performance holds it together.

I wish I could say the same for the two sequels -- The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training (1977) and The Bad News Bears Go to Japan (1978) -- which Matthau declined to appear in. The second film has William Devane and the third Tony Curtis filling in for the Matthau role, but neither shows the same comic cynicism or restraint. The sequels both have their share of good baseball scenes (especially the big-league park in Breaking Training) but they both foresaw the coming of the 1980s with their blatant cookie-cutter formula. On a side note, Go to Japan was directed by the late John Berry, who had been blacklisted in the 1950s.

Starring: Walter Matthau, Chris Barnes, Tatum O'Neal, Ben Piazza, Vic Morrow, Erin Blunt, Jackie Earle Haley, Gary Lee Cavagnaro, Joyce Van Patten, Jaime Escobedo, Scott Firestone, George Gonzales, Alfred W. Lutter, Brett Marx, David Pollock
Written by: Bill Lancaster
Directed by: Michael Ritchie
MPAA Rating: PG
Running Time: 102 minutes
Date: April 4, 2002