Now we’re talking! This was one of the few R-rated movies my parents let me see long before I turned 17. Of course, soon I was sneaking into many R-rated movies before I reached that age. I’d buy a ticket to “Ghost,” and I ended up seeing Steven Seagal in “Marked For Death.” I guess my mom and dad thought that since I was watching all these movie review shows like “Siskel & Ebert” and “Sneak Previews” among others, and that I had seen the trailer for this particular film numerous times on the Movietime Channel (long before it turned into E! Entertainment Television), the damage to my fragile little mind had already been done. Then again, it’s not like they were exposing my brother and I to “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” That would have scarred us for life!
So why would I choose “Bull Durham” as my all time favorite sports movie? When I first saw it on VHS, I was already getting pretty used to the Hollywood formula of the typical sports movie where the hero suffers a crushing defeat and has to build themselves back up to an audience-pleasing finish. Don’t get me wrong, I loved a lot of those crowd pleasing movies like “The Karate Kid” and “Rocky III” (hadn’t seen the first one yet). Back at that young age, I was more comfortable knowing how a movie would end, and I wanted them all to end the same way. It’s still that way with today’s generation of audiences who thrive on repetition in stories and of the good guys (or gals) beating the villains with the expected rush of excitement as we are led to believe that good will always triumph over evil. When you’re young, you have yet to learn that in reality the bad guys get away with a lot before anyone notices (especially if they have corporate and/or political connections).
With “Bull Durham” though, it forever changed the way I looked at sports movies in general. It didn’t always have to be about the training montages and the build up to that big game. Instead, it could be more about the reality of the game itself, and of the various personalities who inhabit it. Whether or not the characters get their big moment at the end, their victories and accomplishments were never about coming out on top or being the best. The real victory came from struggling through one important stage in your life and surviving it to get to the next sone; closing one chapter in your life and moving to the other.
Most baseball movies focus on the major leagues, but what makes “Bull Durham” especially unique is that it is really all about the minors. Writer/Director Ron Shelton based this film on his own experiences in the minor leagues which he played in for several years, and he shows it to be a much looser environment that appears to be far more fun and carefree. The baseball stadium may be smaller, but the connection between the players and the fans is more intimate and not engulfed in corporate greed or network contracts. Still, all those players see getting to the majors as their holy grail, the one thing they feel destined to get to at some point (they refer to it as “the show”). Sad thing is many of them will not make it.
“Bull Durham” focuses on three characters throughout: Crash “the player to be named later” Davis played by Kevin Costner, Ebby Calvin "Nuke" LaLoosh played by Tim Robbins, and Annie Savoy played by Susan Sarandon. LaLoosh is the star pitcher of the Durham Bulls and is about to make his professional debut. However, he ends up pitching the same way he makes love as Millie (the incredibly cute Jenny Robertson) points out:
“…all over the place.”
Hence, veteran catcher Crash Davis is brought onto the team to teach LaLoosh to control his pitching and get him prepped for “the show” which everyone believes he is destined for. During this time, the two of them will meet up with the high priestess of baseball, Annie Savoy. Her church is the one of baseball, and she hooks with one guy a season to help them with their playing and to expand their mind. This player also gets to share her bed with her, and considering just how amazingly hot Sarandon is in this role, it does look foolish to even consider turning her down.
Like I said, “Bull Durham” is not about the big game, and that’s one of the many reasons this movie has stayed with me ever since I saw it on our old Zenith television all those years ago before the tube inside broke for good. At the age of 14, I may not have understood it all, but it was not a movie that just went in and out of my system like a McDonald’s Big Mac. It offers us a closer look into the world of baseball than we could have ever expected to see at that point in time. The intimate details of the minor leagues made it very unique among other films of its genre. You also get to learn the importance of the relationship between the pitcher and the catcher, and of how one had better not cross the other if he is looking for a good game.
The specific details are among the things that make the movie work for me immensely. Aside from the main players, the other team members are individualized to where you can tell one from the other. There’s the one player who swears by the bible and wants all his fellow teammates to follow in his righteous path. Then you have another player who uses a necklace with a cross to bless his baseball bat, and who later needs a live rooster to take the curse off his glove. Crash
A lot of friends of mine from my high school days kept telling me about how much they hated Kevin Costner because it always seemed like he was playing himself in every role. That may be true, but he was a perfect fit for playing a veteran baseball player. You believed in Crash Davis because of how Costner portrayed him, and he also had the athletic ability to hit a ball right out of the park during filming (twice according to
As for Tim Robbins, I think this was the first movie he did that made me aware of who he was. I never did see “Howard The Duck” which he co-starred in, but that’s probably just as well. Looking back at his performance, it is clearer to me now that he had the toughest of all the roles in “Bull Durham.” Throughout the film, Tim has to take the “Nuke” LaLoosh from being a wild and crazy guy on and off the baseball to someone more mature to where you believe he is ready to enter the majors. Robbins makes the transition look seamless, and that ain’t ever easy. It was the first real indicator of the brilliant actor we have now come to see him as today. Since then, he has gone on to do very memorable work in films like “The Player,” “The Shawshank Redemption,” and “
But seriously, the most memorable performance in “Bull Durham” comes from the incredibly sexy Susan Sarandon as Annie Savoy. To say that she is sizzling hot remains an understatement a good two decades later as she captivates the audience in the same way she reels in Tim and Kevin. With this character, Ron Shelton gave us one of the most original female characters we have ever seen on the silver screen. She is a strong female, and Sarandon succeeds in making Annie anything but a slut. It may almost sound ridiculous to have a character believing in the “church of baseball” when you look at it on the page, but once Susan utters those words that start off this movie, you never doubt that she fully believes in it for a second.
The only thing more astonishing to me than Susan Sarandon in “Bull Durham” is the fact that she didn’t get an Oscar nomination for Best Actress! Even after twenty years (yes, it has been that long), it still feels like such an unforgivable sin. Granted, she went on to be nominated for an Academy Award several times (even for “The Client” of all movies), and she did finally win the Oscar for her work in “Dead Man Walking.” Still, I can’t believe that this same body of members failed to recognize her brilliant work here. This remains my favorite performance of hers for all times, and she has given a lot of great ones throughout a long career. She still looks pretty hot today, and she offered us one of the few good moments in the live action (and surprisingly boring) film version of “Speed Racer.”
But the real star of “Bull Durham” is truly Ron Shelton, and he must see a lot of Crash Davis in himself. As I said earlier, he spent several years in the minors but later retired when he realized that he was not gonna get to “the show.” Ever since this film, he has been the guy to go to for writing sports movies. You never get a “Rocky” like movie from Ron, and the characters he creates are so rich and complex and always have such fantastic dialogue streaming out of their mouths that make it hard to compare him to other writers. This great talent of his led him on to make “White Man Can’t Jump” where Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes were as brilliant at hustling on the basketball courts as they were at verbal sparring with each other and their opponents, to “Tin Cup” which gave us his take on the final victorious moment and had me thinking that Costner and him should make as many movies together as possible, and to “Cobb” with Tommy Lee Jones which may still be the definitive anti-sports biopic of all time.
Incidentally, the commentary track he does for the DVD remains one of my all time favorites. Throughout the movie, he strips away the mythology of many other baseball movies to give us an idea of what the game is really like. I also loved how he talked about the fight to get Tim Robbins cast in the movie even though the studio didn’t view him as a big enough star. The way they saw it, the audience would never believe that Susan Sarandon would fall for a guy like him. This leads him to immediately bring up that he is godfather to one of their sons. Ron also pays great respect to the other actors like the late Trey Wilson who is so good here as the coach of the team, and to Robert Wuhl whom he cast despite him giving the worst audition of any actor he had seen at that point in his life. Ron also lays bare how he loves making movies but how much he hates the business of it, and this is something I don’t think he has ever gotten over.
Very special thanks should be given also to Orion Pictures for being the only studio willing to make this movie. They are long since gone, the victim of a bankruptcy brought on by one flop too many. Still, they were a great home at the time for filmmakers like Woody Allen, Jonathan Demme, and Ron Shelton among others. Without them, would we ever have seen “Bull Durham” get made? How about “Robocop,” “Dances With Wolves,” “The Silence Of The Lambs,” or lord knows how many Woody Allen movies?
Ron Shelton may have never made it to the big leagues, but his experiences allowed him to give us “Bull Durham,” one of the funniest and most irresistibly sexy films of all time. I still see it as my all time favorite sports movie, and I don’t care how much you love “Rocky” or “Raging Bull.” Besides, where else will you find a movie about minor league baseball? Oh yeah, there’s “Major League: Back To The Minors,” but who’s in a hurry to see that???
**** out of ****
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