sddavis63 This is very much a baseball movie, in the sense that it plays out like baseball. It seems a lot longer than it really is, there's little emotion and there's not really a whole lot interesting that happens until near the end, just as the baseball season doesn't really get too interesting until August or maybe even September. The lack of emotion was what really surprised me in this. I mean, this should be a tug at your heartstrings type of story, but it's quite lacking for the most part in anything that would draw an emotional response from the viewer. Robert de Niro was pretty good as Bruce Pearson, a big league catcher who struggles through one last season after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. His good performance aside, though, we don't really see a lot of struggle. Yeah, there's a bit of a fight to keep him on the team, and star pitcher and Bruce's friend Henry Wiggen (Michael Moriarty) - who at first is the only one who knows Pearson's condition - has to fight to keep him on the team, finally ending a contract dispute only when the team agrees to keep Pearson. Once he's on though, for the most part the fight goes away. Pearson has a solid season - for him, great, because apparently he's never been that solid before. Until close to the end of the movie he never really seems sick, so even though you know what's going on, there's a certain lack of empathy for the character. This final season just seems to play out too nonchalantly. Moriarty was OK as Wiggen, and this certainly gave us a look at a different era in baseball - before free agency and big buck contracts, even a star like Wiggen has to sell insurance on the side to make a living. Vincent Gardenia I thought was a strange decision to play the manager, and he didn't really feel right in the part. The ending was well done. Pearson finally does get sick and leaves the team before the World Series, which they apparently won, but none of that is portrayed - which was appropriate, since the movie wasn't about the team and whether or not it won, but about Pearson.I thought that as a drama, the movie could have gone for more emotion, and I've seen far better baseball movies (right off the top of my head I'd cite "Pride of the Yankees," "Eight Men Out" and "For Love Of The Game.") This one has its moments and it does a decent job of portraying the struggles of the baseball season as this apparently very talented team sort of meanders through the season without really generating any chemistry or putting it all together until the end. Still, I didn't find myself getting too excited about it.

sol ***SPOILERS*** Very probably the best of the slew of a loved one dying of an unnamed and incurable disease movie of the early 1970's Bang the Drum Slowly predated the grand daddy of all those five handkerchief tearjerker-"Love Story"-by some 15 years. The 1973 movie was originally shown on TV's United States Steel Hour in September 1956 staring Paul Newman and Albert Saimi in the leading roles of Henry Wiggen & Bruce Pearson.It's when New York Mammoth star pitching ace Henry Wiggins, Michael Moriarty, held out sighing his yearly club contract during spring training that it was suspected that he wanted something far more then the money, 70,000 smackers, that his team offered him. Soon it became obvious that his relationship with his roommate and catcher Bruce Pearson, Robert De Niro, was behind Wiggens holding out! That, Wigens relationship with Pearson, was far more important then what he can get in cash from the Mammoth's owners. Wiggens insisted that if Pearson, who was having a rotten spring training, is ever traded to another team he's to be traded along with him!You could just imagine all the rumors and snickering Wiggens' demands conjured up among his fellow Mammoth teammates and the teams manager, the I've seen it all but in this case I'll have to pass, Dutch Schnell, Vincent Gardenia. What exactly is going on between these two guys anyway! Was it that mysterious hunting and fishing trip last winter to the wilds of Minnesota that somehow caused them, in being alone in the states dark and forbidden forests, to somehow change their outlook on life. Did that romp in the woods cause then to get off the straight and narrow road and become unnaturally friendly with each other?It's later in the baseball season with poor Bruce Pearson, playing the best baseball of his entire career, being on the verge of collapsing from sheer exhaustion that Wiggens finally reveals to Mommoth teammate Goose Williams, Tom Signorelli, the shocking truth behind his odd friendship with his ailing battery mate. It was that winter when a concerned Wiggens had his friend Pearson secretly checked into the Mayo Clinic, in Minnesota, that he found out that he was in fact dying from an incurable disease: Hodgkins lymphoma! All Pearson now wanted was to not only finish out the season as the club's first string catcher but be a part in helping the team win the league's pennant as well as the World Series.With the cat now out of the bag in what Pearson is going through, in him having a few months left to live, the Mommoth players stop their bickering with each other as well as picking on and needling the good natured and friendly Bruce Pearson and instead get down to business. It's then that he Mommoth players join together as a team and, with Pearson providing the glue, stick together and go all the way to the top of the baseball world as its World Champions.***SPOILERS*** In the end Pearson didn't live out the year dying just before Christmas but at least being part of the Championship New York Mammoth team. This had Pearson go out of this world as a winner not only in baseball but even over the dreaded and fatal disease that eventually took his life Hodgkins lymphoma. It was fitting that only Pearson's good friend and teammate Henry Wiggins was the only members of the Mammoth team to attend his funeral. Since it was Wiggens who was by Pearson's side right from the start until the end as he was dying from his incurable disease. And it was Wiggens more then anyone one else, with the exception of Persons family members, who should have been with him when he was laid to his final resting place.P.S it was nice to see that some of "Bang the Drum Slowly" scenes were filmed at the old old, before it was closed down and completely refurbished in 1974, New York's Yaknee Stadium known as "The House that Ruth Built". Unlike in the new and now even newer, opened last years, Yankee Stadium it was in that historic and majestic ballpark that the great Babe Ruth himself played most of his major league games and gave the fans who watched him play their greatest baseball memories.

cmvoger This movie,"Bang The Drum Slowly", is about much more than a baseball season. Similar stories have been set in other locations, among other groups of men. The field hands in a bunkhouse in "Of Mice And Men", or the military barracks in "The Hasty Heart". These are all stories about friendships among men, at a time when those men need those friendships.When Michael Moriarty learns his friend Robert De Niro is incurably sick and will soon die, he makes a decision to give his friend a final season of friendship and support. These men talk half-bright teenager among themselves, and then try to sound like sports-interview aces in formal situations. Note Moriarty's awkwardness in refusing to have an unwritten clause about not trading De Niro away from the team: "No verbal words. Must be wrote." He is equally awkward, and must move cautiously, in persuading the other players to help, and to keep mum when symptoms of the illness appear. Eventually, everybody is in on the effort to help. De Niro is welcomed into the TEGWAR games, and into the glee club. The team doctor is in the dugout at every game. The patient is able to hold up his end as catcher when the rotation brings him up to catch a game. At bat, it seems his best play all year is to hit a good solid triple and come into third standing up. In what turns out to be his last game, his team-mates see the trouble coming. The first baseman dashes in and snags a pop fly that De Niro can no longer handle himself.In his final monologue, walking away from De Niro's graveside, Moriarty gives what could be considered a strong contender for the best curtain line ever: "From here on in, I rag nobody."

bc-in-va DeNiro (as Bruce Pearson) and Moriarity (as Henry "Author" Wiggen) really shine in their roles and have great chemistry in this story about a journeyman catches stricken with Hodgkin's disease, and his friendship with his star pitcher teammate. I don't understand why this doesn't get more mention when people talk about great baseball movies. Maybe it's because while baseball dominates the scenes, it's not really a baseball movie.A few scenes really stand out to me in this movie as moving and really well done.1) Near the opening, Bruce burns all of his old press clippings at home after getting the diagnosis. It's as if since his future looks limited, his past no longer has meaning to him.2) Bruce's father, a simple man like his son, visits and has a talk with Wiggen. Mr. Pearson's struggle to accept his son's fate and then coming out with the words to express himself, coupled with Wiggen's emotions during and after the talk is a marvelous scene.3) The pennant clinching game. IThe ump sees Bruce struggling and uses the excuse of brushing off the plate to talk to him. "Don't slow down the game. You all right? You don't look all right." Wiggen is at his best, pouring in strike after strike as the pace picks up, and then it abruptly goes to slow motion with a pop up in front of the plate. The whole game sequence is very well done.The music really set the tone for the movie too, but if you don't like "Streets of Laredo" you won't appreciate it.