When we lionize the cinema of the 1970s \u2013 and this writer is fully complicit in that perhaps outsized lionization \u2013 it\u2019s important to understand exactly what that period did, for perhaps the last time. It\u2019s not just a matter of great studio movies; there have always been those, and in spite of the current tilts towards I.P. worship and algorithmic thinking, there always will be. It\u2019s more a question of the philosophies, stated or implicit, for doing business in the film industry, for the kind of leeway that was given to filmmakers and, consequently, the kind of risks that studios were willing to take. Because, as has been researched and reported at far greater length elsewhere, it was a rare era where (at least early on) studio executives genuinely had no idea which way was up, and were thus willing to throw a lot of things at the wall to see what stuck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All of which is a mighty roundabout way of talking about \u201cThe Longest Yard,\u201d Robert Aldrich\u2019s 1974 football comedy \u2013 and how tricky it is to classify it as such, because there\u2019s also quite a bit about it that is purposefully, pointedly not funny<\/em>. That\u2019s the case from the jump; it opens (opens!<\/em>) with our boozed-up would-be football star protagonist Paul \u201cWrecking\u201d Crewe getting into an ugly fight with his bitter wife that goes from viciously verbal (\u201cYou split when I tell you to split, you All-American sonofabitch,\u201d she hisses) to uncomfortably physical before he steals her car, leads police on a drunken car chase, and drives the vehicle into a river. The cops find him at a bar, where their attempt to arrest him escalates into a fistfight. This guy is the hero of the movie!<\/p>\n\n\n\n