"The Longest Yard" is a comedy-drama set in a prison in the swamp area of Florida. Burt Reynolds plays a once top pro-football player who was banned for gambling and throwing a game. He then lives a sort of celebrity life as a show piece and male prostitute for rich women. One night he has had enough. With the latest "sugar momma" spurting angry and vehement words at him, he takes off in her fancy foreign car. She calls the police to report it stolen, and after a lengthy police chase with a number of crashed vehicles, he lets the car roll off the docks and into the bay.
After his sentence to prison for 18 months, Paul Crewe isn't welcomed by other convicts. His joking and kidding persona doesn't gain him friends in prison. As one prisoner says, he could murder, rob, steal or blow up a building, but to sell out his team in a football game - that's too much for these hardened criminals. In time, of course, he does win them over, or at least gets accepted as a fellow con. And that comes about when the debonaire but dastardly Warden Hazen gives Crewe a special assignment. He is to organize a team of prison inmates to give his guards a warm-up game before they go after a semi-pro title Winning a semi-pro title has been a craze for Hazen, who is played very well by Eddie Albert.
Well, there is some good football action on the field when game time comes. But some of the humor - that is, prison humor, comes before that as Crewe tries to recruit a team. With the help of the prison's black market master, Caretaker (played very well by James Hampton), Crewe talks various convicts into being on the team. Most initially don't want anything to do with him, but when he says they will be up against the guards, that does the trick.
One can guess how this will comes out. The fun is in seeing the game and the ending. This film was one of several in the 1970s and 1980s that Hollywood made with comedy set around prisons and crimes. They were not of the category of mystery comedies set around capers - usually jewel thefts or robberies. Most often, the law enforcement characters were portrayed as buffoons or simpletons, and the prison guards and wardens as sadistic purveyors of punishment.
This film was among the earliest in which inhumane treatment and injustice of some notorious prisons was portrayed along with comedy. By the time of this film, prison reform had pretty much cleaned up administration of the justice system in the USA, and prisoners were no longer mistreated. Still, the treatment portrayed when Crewe first goes to prison is a reflection of how inhumane and brutally hard some men could be toward their fellow human beings. That is the best part of the drama of this film. It's not difficult to imagine how audiences might root for criminals to defeat such law enforcement people. Of course, one doesn't think about that when going to see this movie.
"The Longest Yard" was entertaining when I first saw it when it came out. Perhaps not quite as enjoyable watching it these many years later, when I obtained a DVD that had this and the 2005 remake with Adam Sandler in the lead role. I suspect that modern audiences who watch this film for the first time might have conflicting views. A much larger disrespect for law enforcement exists alongside shocking examples of abuses by some officers and especially by government officials. Then there's the effects that many years of computer games that celebrate human violence may have on people who spend, or waste, so much time on this form of "entertainment."
After his sentence to prison for 18 months, Paul Crewe isn't welcomed by other convicts. His joking and kidding persona doesn't gain him friends in prison. As one prisoner says, he could murder, rob, steal or blow up a building, but to sell out his team in a football game - that's too much for these hardened criminals. In time, of course, he does win them over, or at least gets accepted as a fellow con. And that comes about when the debonaire but dastardly Warden Hazen gives Crewe a special assignment. He is to organize a team of prison inmates to give his guards a warm-up game before they go after a semi-pro title Winning a semi-pro title has been a craze for Hazen, who is played very well by Eddie Albert.
Well, there is some good football action on the field when game time comes. But some of the humor - that is, prison humor, comes before that as Crewe tries to recruit a team. With the help of the prison's black market master, Caretaker (played very well by James Hampton), Crewe talks various convicts into being on the team. Most initially don't want anything to do with him, but when he says they will be up against the guards, that does the trick.
One can guess how this will comes out. The fun is in seeing the game and the ending. This film was one of several in the 1970s and 1980s that Hollywood made with comedy set around prisons and crimes. They were not of the category of mystery comedies set around capers - usually jewel thefts or robberies. Most often, the law enforcement characters were portrayed as buffoons or simpletons, and the prison guards and wardens as sadistic purveyors of punishment.
This film was among the earliest in which inhumane treatment and injustice of some notorious prisons was portrayed along with comedy. By the time of this film, prison reform had pretty much cleaned up administration of the justice system in the USA, and prisoners were no longer mistreated. Still, the treatment portrayed when Crewe first goes to prison is a reflection of how inhumane and brutally hard some men could be toward their fellow human beings. That is the best part of the drama of this film. It's not difficult to imagine how audiences might root for criminals to defeat such law enforcement people. Of course, one doesn't think about that when going to see this movie.
"The Longest Yard" was entertaining when I first saw it when it came out. Perhaps not quite as enjoyable watching it these many years later, when I obtained a DVD that had this and the 2005 remake with Adam Sandler in the lead role. I suspect that modern audiences who watch this film for the first time might have conflicting views. A much larger disrespect for law enforcement exists alongside shocking examples of abuses by some officers and especially by government officials. Then there's the effects that many years of computer games that celebrate human violence may have on people who spend, or waste, so much time on this form of "entertainment."