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Movie and TV Discussion => Movie reviews => Topic started by: Barry on June 07, 2025, 05:10:48 PM
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Bang the Drum Slowly: A 4K Review
The very opening of the movie:
“Actually, you get over it fairly quick. You might not think so, but it's true. You're driving along with a man who's been told he's dying and yet everything keeps going on. I mean, it'd been hard enough rooming with him when he was well. He chewed this disgusting tobacco he pissed in the sink, and as a catcher he was a million dollars worth of promise worth two cents on delivery.
Most people didn't even know he was with the club and, um, he was almost too dumb to play a joke on... and now he'd been played the biggest joke of all.”
“Bang the Drum Slowly” is a 1973 movie that starred Robert De Niro (Bruce Pearson) in one of his earliest roles as a catcher on a N.Y. major league baseball team (The Mammoths); Michael Moriarty (Henry Wiggen) as its star pitcher and Vincent Gardenia and it’s Manger (Dutch). There performances are all outstanding. This is a very good drama, sadly the type they don’t make anymore.
The movie shows how the Pitcher, Henry Wiggen and later the owner and the team, has to deal with a player, person, who just discovered he is dying of Hodskins’s Disease.
Many people felt that the represented the player/ownership relationship accurately. And that Wiggen was based on Tom Seaver. None of this can be true today, so this is a very “period” piece.
First, Seaver was 12 years old when Mark Harrius wrote the book the story is based on. And Harris also wrote the screen play.
Today, Salary arbitration, the Union and a player’s Agents would rule out all of the interaction and wheeling and dealing shown in the beginning.
Sadly, Bruce Pearson was a catcher for a N.Y. Major League Team who dies. In real life, we had Thurmond Munson, a catcher for the Yankees die in 1979 at the age of 32.
I won’t give away how that is treated in the movie. But in Real Life, George Steinbrenner, owner of the Yankees, hired an airplane and the entire Yankees Team and their staff, flew to the Monday services for Munson in Canton.
The Yankees were scheduled for a evening game at the stadium that night, against Baltimore. It was to be televised as “ABC’s Game of the Week.” The newspapers went nuts over that Yankees may have to forfeit because they would arrive too late for the scheduled start of game. The Orioles showed nothing but class and never, not once mentioned a forfeit. And they wore black armbands too. In an unforgettable scene, for what was to be an unforgettable game, at the beginning, the Yankee starters stood at their defensive positions, save for the catcher's box, which remained empty.
At his time, it seemed that the entire city of New York, for over eight minutes, banged the drum slowly.
The movie looks gfreat, but a little grainy in some parts, typical of movies from this era. The mono sound is fine and easy to understand. It's hard to beleive but it is a movie older than 50 years.
Bonus Features:
1. 2-Disc Set: 4K Ultra HD + Region A Blu-ray
2. 4K UHD presented in Dolby Vision High-Dynamic-Range
3. New audio commentary with director John Hancock moderated by Cinématographe's Justin LaLiberty
4. New audio commentary with film historian Jim Hemphill
5. "Death at the Box Office" - a new video interview with director John Hancock
6. New video essay by film historian Chris O'Neill
7. English SDH subtitles