The Hip Pocket #40: THE BAD NEWS BEARS

One of the best sports films ever made and one of the funniest films of the '70s

There is no single canon.

We all have movies we love.

Some of them are great movies. Some of them are terrible movies. Love does not care. Love is unreasonable. Love is blind. We love what we love, and the louder you love it, the better.

One of my favorite things is sharing a film I love with someone. Even if they don't love it the same way I do, that experience imparts something about you to that person. When you share something you love, you are sharing a part of yourself, and there is nothing more vulnerable or personal than that.

I don't think of these movies as the canon or the official library or anything that formal. These are all just movies I keep in my hip pocket, movies I've filed away as part of my own personal ongoing film festival as worthwhile and notable.

This is an ongoing list, one without an ending. This is The Hip Pocket.

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The Bad News Bears
Walter Matthau, Tatum O’Neal, Vic Morrow, Joyce Van Patten, Ben Piazza, Jackie Earle Haley, Alfred Lutter III, Chris Barnes, Erin Blunt, Gary Lee Cavagnaro, Jaime Escobedo, Scott Firestone, George Gonzales, Brett Marx, David Pollack, Quinn Smith, David Stambaugh, Brandon Cruz, Timothy Blake, Bill Sorrells, Shari Summers, Joe Brooks, George Wyner, David Lazarus, Charles Matthau, Maurice Marks
cinematography by John A. Alonzo
music by Jerry Fielding
screenplay by Bill Lancaster
produced by Stanley R. Jaffe
directed by Michael Ritchie
Rated PG
1 hr 42 mins

A broken-down former ball player is roped into coaching a Little League team of misfits, and he brings in a couple of ringers to turn the team around.

I am being completely serious when I say that any list of the very best films of the 1970s, one of the very best decades in movie history, has to include The Bad News Bears, or I simply cannot respect it.

When I saw this film the first time, I was the age of the kids on the team. Maybe a little younger, since it came out when I was six, but I was already involved in little kid sports, and the ‘70s in central Florida looked a hell of a lot like the ‘70s in the San Fernando Valley. It felt like a documentary to me, like a snapshot of the world I recognized. When my older son was in Little League and playing other childhood sports (including some times spent playing basketball at the actual Mason Park where the film was shot), I showed him this and it hit me in a totally different way. In the time between those two screenings, I probably returned to the film every three or four years, and every single time, I was struck anew by just how smart and funny and genuine everything about the movie is. It’s a small miracle, a movie that could never be made the same way today, and it does not surprise me that parents in the ‘70s lost their minds a bit when the film was released.