RNMorton Gets my Game Ball for the best football movie of all time along with The Best of Times. Always out there lurking just outside my list of ten favorite movies of all time. Burt, run out of pro ball for fixing games, goes loco on his bitchy girl friend and her exoticar and gets sent up the river for some hard time. His state prison guards boast the best football team in the state, and the warden (exquisitely played by Eddie Albert) would like Burt to give his championship team a nice warm up game. Burt puts together a better team of inmates than anyone expects and the fun begins. One of Burt's best performances, helped along by Albert, Michael Conrad and some former NFL stars, including Ray Nitschke, Joe Kapp and Sonny Sixkiller. His-tor-eee

ccthemovieman-1 Overall, a brainless-but-lots of fun flick and very fast-moving one, typically sleazy (er, "gritty," as critics preferred to call them) movie of its decade.In the 1970s, who better than make a thug into a lovable, good guy we all want to root for than Burt Reynolds? Box-office-wise, Burt was the hottest thing going in the '70s and playing a lawbreaker seemed to be tailor-made for him, from "Smokey And The Bandit" on down the line.The shock in this movie was seeing nice-guy Eddie Albert play the mean warden, but he pulled it off convincingly. Most of the characters in this movie are over-the-top, but that was the idea.This movie manipulates all of us to root for the prisoners in the big football games against the prison guards. In essence, that's the story in this film: a big football game played between prison inmates and the guards. Along the way, Burt gives us his normal glib-but-entertaining wisecracks and personality and we get some wild characters to go with him, such as the very likable "Caretaker" (James Hampton).Burt is macho enough, as the quarterback here, for the guys to respect him, and still be a ladies' favorite. I can't say the same for Richard Kiel, but "Jaws" (as became later in a James Bond movie), was always fun to watch. Some real-life pro goons, like Green Bay's Ray Nitchke, join the cast for some gridiron realism.In the end, its a clichéd, but fun two hours of escapism.

Robert J. Maxwell The warden of this spectacularly clean correctional facility is Eddie Albert. His corrections officers are a semi-pro football team. Now, before I continue, I want to mention that I am so little a follower of football that I don't know what a semi-pro team is. Baseball -- that's the game for me. And the team? The St. Louis Browns.Anyhow, Eddie Albert is a mean mother, although peanuts compared to Strother Martin in "Cool Hand Luke." He wants one of his inmates, Burt Reynolds, to put together a football team out of that motley cohort with the intention of having the guards' team clobber them on the field in front of thousands of people.Eddie Albert's team of correctional officers loses. With the help of some very savvy (and extraordinarily big) experienced inmates, Burt puts together a team that knows everything, from how to play cleverly to how to play dirty.We've seen it all before. The sports story about the despised subordinates who develop enough spirit to apply themselves and win. I can think of "The Bad News Bears" and "Victory" offhand. But nobody cares, not even Robert Aldrich, the director. It's designed to be fun.I've always admired Burt Reynolds as a person. He's strikingly handsome, athletic and fit, doesn't take himself or his profession seriously, and is without guile or pretense.That's part of the problem with his movies. He seems to glide through them being himself, with the notable exception of "Deliverance", into which he put a good deal of effort. He worked hard on his own movie, "Sharkey's Machine" too, but the level of subtlety there was about what it is here, which is to say, not very much. Reynolds is his usual affable part-Italian, part-Cherokee self. His lines are thrown away. The humor -- hell, all the testosterone-driven values in the movie, dramatic as well as comic, don't rise above the level of drive-in movie fare. It just looks more expensive.Well, I'll give an example. Before the game, the inmates are dispirited because their beloved manager was murdered. The head honcho of the corrections officer's team enters their room, snarls, "See you on the field," and then butts his shaved head through the wall. In case you didn't find that meanly amusing enough, he punches his fist through it too and leaves without another word.And yet it must have found a sizable enough audience. A remake appeared some years ago. In any case, others might find this more enjoyable than I did. I didn't find it so bad as to be insulting. It just didn't strike me as very interesting or particularly well done.

Spikeopath Disgraced former pro football quarterback Paul Crewe is sent to prison after a drunken night to remember. The prison is run by Warden Hazen, a football nut who spies an opportunity to utilise Crewe's ability at the sport to enhance the prison guards team skills. After initially declining to help, Crewe is swayed into putting together a team of convicts to take on the guards in a one off match, thieves, murderers and psychopaths collectively come together to literally, beat the guards, but Crewe also has his own personal demons to exorcise.This violent, but wonderfully funny film has many things going for it. Directed with style by the gifted hands of Robert Aldrich, The Longest Yard cheekily examines the harshness of gridiron and fuses it with the brutality of the penal system. The script from Tracy Keenan Wynn is a sharp as a tack and Aldrich's use of split screens and slow motion sequences bring it all together very nicely indeed. I would also like to comment on the editing from Michael Luciano, nominated for the Oscar in that department, it didn't win, but in my honest opinion it's one of the best edited pictures from the 70s.Taking the lead role of Crewe is Burt Reynolds, here he is at the peak of his powers (perhaps never better) and has star appeal positively bristling from every hair on his rugged chest. It's a great performance, believable in the action sequences (he was once a halfback for Florida), and crucially having the comic ability to make Wynn's script deliver the necessary mirth quota. What is of most interest to me is that Crewe is a less than honourable guy, the first 15 minutes of the film gives us all we need to know about his make up, but much like One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest the following year, The Longest Yard has us rooting for the main protagonist entering the home straight, and that is something of a testament to Reynolds' charm and charisma.The film's crowning glory is the football game itself, taking up three parts of an hour, the highest compliment I can give it is to say that one doesn't need to be a fan of the sport to enjoy this final third. It's highly engaging as a comedy piece whilst also being octane inventive as an action junkie's series of events. A number of former gridiron stars fill out both sides of the teams to instill a high believability factor into the match itself, and the ending is a pure rewarding punch the air piece of cinema. 9/10