The Bad News Bears (1976)

Now get back to the stands before I shave off half your moustache and shove it up your left nostril.

With his previous film inexplicably tanking at the box office, Michael Ritchie needed another job to keep the lights on and his career on track. Thanks to those rotten little horndogs in Smile, Ritchie had proven himself a master of handling potty-mouthed pre-teens, which would be vital: “The next job in Paramount’s point of view, and [producer] Stanley Jaffe’s point of view, was to be The Bad News Bears.” It was something of a gamble for Paramount. The House of Mouse ruled the roost when it came to children’s films – few if any non-Disney movies about kids had made any money, and even they had largely pivoted away from children by the end of 1975, instead relying on the box office draws of Peter Ustinov, David Niven, and other animals.¹ For Ritchie, it was a challenge: make a children’s movie where the kids acted like real kids, don’t dumb it down with stupid gags, and wrap it up in a tribute to “the great American sport.”

Luckily, he struck gold with Bill Lancaster’s script. Lancaster was the son of Hollywood royalty² and, after a short career as an actor, he turned to writing. Per Ritchie, “He’d been around enough scripts to know those which sold and those which didn’t, and those that had hype quality, that slightly larger-than-truth quality were the ones that sold.”³ That said, Ritchie still had some notes. The first thing he did was change the ending, which originally had the Bears winning the championship in the ninth. A bold enough decision for a children’s film, but his second change was even bolder: Ritchie went out of his way to excise anything about the kids’ parents and their home situations. Everything had to happen on the field or as part of the team. Ritchie’s reasoning was simple: for him, The Bad News Bears was a film about baseball, and therefore had to focus on the game itself. Why? Because baseball was a “a game of character, it’s a game of challenge.”

Talking of challenges, there was the issue of casting. Believe it or not, The Bad News Bears wasn’t conceived as a star vehicle; it was a kids’ movie, and kids’ movies didn’t have stars. A couple were considered for the main role of Morris Buttermaker, the alcoholic curmudgeonly coach, former minor-league pitcher and part-time pool cleaner, but they were two actors with a long history of not doing projects: Steve McQueen and Warren Beatty. With McQueen “hanging out with bikers somewhere in the desert” and Beatty stringing them along for months (classic Beatty), Ritchie was confident that it would a no-star picture. What he didn’t reckon on was Tatum O’Neal.

O’Neal was riding high after an Oscar win for Paper Moon (1973)⁴ and had somehow scored the infamous Sue Mengers as her agent. Mengers was a tough cookie: she first demanded a part for Tatum’s brother Griffin, then tried to wangle a rewrite job for her husband Jean-Claude Tramont. Ritchie and Jaffe held firm. They didn’t really want Tatum O’Neal: they weren’t sure she had the acting ability to pull off the role, they already had Kristy McNichol in mind (who “had not had her big blaze to semi-fame and burnout”), and O’Neal would have made it a Tatum O’Neal picture, despite the part not being anywhere close to a leading role. “And then came along, thank God, Walter Matthau …”

Matthau wasn’t totally on board at first, dismissing The Bad News Bears as a “dirty picture” (or a “doity picture” as Ritchie described it), but Ritchie persuaded the grumbling puritan to read with the kids, and Matthau, charmed by the young ensemble, agreed to do the movie a week before principal photography. Once Mengers got wind of Matthau’s commitment, however, O’Neal’s price soared to the point where Ritchie and Jaffe had to sacrifice net points to make the deal. What had started as a no-star children’s movie was now a two-star children’s movie, and that once reasonable gamble was looking considerably less so on the eve of shooting.

Then again, The Bad News Bears isn’t exactly an experimental picture, at least on the face of it. Morris Buttermaker (Matthau) is handsomely paid by a local councilman and father to coach a new expansion team, allowed access to the league thanks to the councilman’s successful lawsuit. The kids are a rag-tag bunch of no-hopers, but with the help of an ex-girlfriend’s daughter (O’Neal) and a local juvenile delinquent (Jackie Earle Haley), the team find themselves in the unlikely position of getting to the championship, where they show the Yankees what a real team looks like. It’s your standard tale of plucky underdogs triumphing against the odds. But where other sports pictures would be content to stick to that formula, The Bad News Bears subtly subverts it and chucks in a baseball-as-American-values metaphor for good measure, all accompanied by Jerry Fielding’s irreverent arrangements of Bizet, which give proceedings a vaguely Looney Tunes feel. Buttermaker isn’t just a beer-swilling never-was, he’s the kind of beer-swilling never-was who adds Jim Beam to his morning brew and isn’t above berating a bunch of eleven-year-olds into cowed silence or bribing his ex-girlfriend’s daughter with ballet lessons (but not “French jeans”) to join the team.

And that team is an extremely motley crew: a snot-nosed, chocolate-stained, short-sighted, butterfingered knot of misfits who can barely take two steps without starting a fight or falling over. If you thought the kids in Smile needed their mouths washed out, then short-arse slur-factory Tanner (Chris Barnes) knocks them into a cocked hat. The fat kid Engleberg (Gary Lee Cavagnaro) doesn’t even bother to take the wrapper off his chocolate bar before he starts eating it.⁵ The two Mexican kids don’t speak English and refuse to wear cups because they’re “Catholic and it’s a sin.” One of the star players, Leak (Jackie Earle Haley) is a Harley-riding loan shark. Even the “booger-eating spaz” Timmy Lupus (Quinn Smith) can mix a mean martini. These aren’t your apple-cheeked Disney kids; these little fuckers mean business, and would give “Badass” Buddusky a run for his money in the cussin’ stakes.

Labelling The Bad News Bears as a children’s picture is to celebrate it as one of the best of its kind, but also to diminish it. Ritchie never missed an opportunity to satirise American values and the same is true here. It’s no coincidence that the Bears are the only team not to have a name inspired by a major league team - over the course of the movie, they play the Yankees, the Mets, and the White Sox among others. Even as an expansion team, they can’t afford a real name. And while the Yankees enjoy sponsorship from Denny’s, the best the Bears can hope for is (real-life company) Chico’s Bail Bonds. These kids are marginalised, both through a lack of much-prized athleticism (the only Black kid, Ahmad, is the only kid in his family who isn’t good at sports) and a lack of social skills that reflects a lifetime of neglect at both home and school. In this respect, Ritchie was right to cut the non-baseball stuff. We don’t need to see Amanda’s home life to know that it’s unhappy: she’s out selling Maps of the Stars’ Homes to make money, going on dates at eleven years old, and wants Buttermaker of all people back in her life. The other kids all look like they’ve been dumped at baseball practice not because they particularly like the game (though young Ogilvie is a stats nerd) but because their parents don’t know what else to do with them. And that’s if they have parents: Kelly Leak appears to exist on his own feral terms, buzzing around on his Harley and hustling air hockey when he’s not loan sharking the other kids.

In contrast, the other teams seem cohesive and drilled, even if that has been established through aggressive means. Enter Vic Morrow as the Yankees’ coach Turner, the villain of the piece who’s not above ordering one of his team to spike Amanda in the chest to win the game, or – in a particularly shocking moment – slapping his own son in the middle of the diamond.⁶ For him, winning is the be-all and end-all; it’s as much a core part of the game as fiddling with your cup and spitting tobacco juice out the side of your mouth.⁷ It’s also a big part of Buttermaker’s philosophy when he begins to believe the team aren’t quite as bad as they seem. But where most sports pictures would have the kids gelling as a team and pulling victory from the jaws of defeat, The Bad News Bears flipped the trope on its head months before Rocky Balboa went the distance.

Those of you sensitive to spoilers for an almost fifty-year-old movie can look away now.⁸ Thanks to a forfeit because “three of my White Sox have the ‘flu, I’ve got a goddamned little Jesus freak in Bakersfield at a revival meeting,” the Bears make it through the final, but they do not win that championship game, largely because Buttermaker makes the decision to allow every kid on his team a little game time, despite knowing that it’ll end in a loss. The Bad News Bears has been, up until this point, a funny, good-hearted romp with the occasional dramatic moment, but now it becomes something more meaningful. Buttermaker has put his team in harm’s way to secure a win, risking Amanda’s pitching arm, telling the skittish Rudi to take a ball to the back, and he’s in the middle of berating the failing little bastards in the dugout when he realizes that it’s just Little League, for crying out loud:

This moment is not only a heartbreaker - look at these kids staring at Buttermaker like he’s yet another adult who shouts at them - but it also represents a key evolution for Ritchie as a filmmaker: Buttermaker is the first character in a Ritchie movie to actually change, or at least show us a different, previously hidden side. Chappellet, Devlin, and McKay don’t change in their respective movies; at best, they learn something about the world that they didn’t previously know. Even Big Bob in Smile – for all his wavering – settles back into his old RV sales pitch with ease. But this feels like the first time Buttermaker has ever considered the idea of losing as a victory, and that sacrificing the team’s win at the altar of fair play makes him not only the better coach, but the better man. It’s more important that his team enjoy their smaller wins – like Engleberg’s first home run or Lupus’s first catch – and shower them with cheap beer than have the honour of carting around the biggest Little League trophy in the country.

It's testament to Matthau’s skills as a dramatic actor (which he was before the Broadway staging of The Odd Couple opened him up to comedy) that he can pull this off with little more than a line of dialogue. It’s also worth noting that the young cast are all charming in their own disgusting ways – I could watch a series of movies based on Tanner and Lupus – and even O’Neal’s obvious struggles with the prickly script can’t dull the spark that made her such a standout in Paper Moon. As for Jackie Earle Haley, his performance as Kelly Leak might now be ringing with future echoes of Ronnie McGorvey, Rorschach or even Freddy Krueger, but it’s no wonder that he continued to have a successful (if utterly typecast) career – he’s both the kid you never wanted to meet at school, and also clearly the most damaged of the bunch.

For the most part, the gamble that was The Bad News Bears paid off. Box office was strong, making a hefty profit against its $9m budget (with those net points feathering the nests of both Matthau and O’Neal), and enjoying excellent reviews, even from those – like Gene Siskel – who thought Smile was the better movie. There would be two sequels, The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training (1977)⁹ and The Bad News Bears Go to Japan (1978),¹⁰ as well as short-lived sitcom (1979-80) starring Jack Warden in the Buttermaker role and a forgettable 2005 remake with Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa mode. We may well visit those sequels at some point, but I get the feeling it’s a case of rapidly diminishing returns, and a studio eager to make further box office off a movie they didn’t fully understand. Because while the premise of The Bad News Bears is easily replicable, Michael Ritchie’s tone is not, and that’s what makes the film such a rewatchable joy.

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Next up: “It's The World's Greatest Game (And It Sure Ain't Football!)”

1. In One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing, the crime comedy No Deposit, No Return, and The Best of Walt Disney’s True-Life Adventures respectively.

2. Do I really need to tell you? All right, it’s Burt. Burt Lancaster was his dad. And if you don’t know who Burt Lancaster is, don’t let the door hit ya where the good lord split ya.

3. I could write thousands of words about Bill Lancaster’s script, which is an unpolished gem of a debut. Suffice to say, he came into the screenwriting game with a knack for large casts of sharply delineated characters, something that would prove useful when he wrote one of the greatest horror movies of all time.

4. Still the youngest winner of an Academy Award, O’Neal was ten years old when she won for Paper Moon. And honestly, it’s a solid performance, but it’s not even the best Best Supporting Actress-nominated performance in that movie (all hail Madeleine Kahn!).

5. Michael Ritchie on the difficulties in casting fat kids: “One of the problems with fat kids is that they tend to be very self-conscious about their weight. And therefore they tend to be not funny about their weight and about their size. I said, ‘Go to Texas.’ Because in Texas, there’s a chutzpah about everything, and an arrogance that I think will allow a kid to be both overweight and cocky about it, which is what’s written here.”

6. In typical Ritchie fashion, the moment is accompanied by nothing more than the ambient hiss of passing traffic and lasts just long enough to make even the most jaded viewer uncomfortable.

7. Why yes, all I know about baseball I learned from cartoons. What gave it away?

8. And while they’re looking away, let’s trash talk ‘em for being fucking infants and flick snot at their backs. Honest to God …

9. Featuring William Devane as Kelly Leak’s father – released the same year he played the hook-handed Vietnam vet avenger in Rolling Thunder. The perverse part of me wants to conflate the two roles.

10. Again written by Bill Lancaster, produced by Ritchie, and featuring a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance by Sho Kosugi, star of the Cannon Films Ninja movies.