Bang the Drum Slowly movie review (1973)

On the surface, then, the movie seems a little like “Brian’s Song”. But it’s not: It’s mostly about baseball and the daily life of a major league club on the road. The fact of Bruce’s approaching death adds a poignancy to the season, but “Bang the Drum Slowly” doesn’t brood about death and it isn’t morbid. In its mixture of fatalism, roughness, tenderness, and bleak humor, indeed, it seems to know more about the ways we handle death than a movie like “Love Story” ever guessed.

The movie begins at the Mayo Clinic, follows the team through spring training, and then carries it through a season that feels remarkably like a Chicago Cubs year: a strong start, problems during the hot weather, dissension on the team, and then a pennant drive that (in the movie, anyway) is successful. There isn’t a lot of play-by-play action, only enough to establish the games and make the character points. So when the team manager and the pitcher conspire to let Bruce finish his last game, despite his illness, the action footage is relevant and moving.

“Bang the Drum Slowly” was adapted for the screen by Mark Harris, from his observant 1955 novel. He seems to understand baseball players, or at least he can create convincing ones; if real baseball players aren’t like the ones in this movie, somehow they should be. The director, John Hancock, is good with his actors and very good at establishing a lot of supporting characters without making a point of it (in this area he reminds me of Robert Altman’s shorthand typecasting in “M*A*S*H” and “McCabe and Mrs. Miller”). Some of the best scenes are in the clubhouse, an arena of hope, despair, anger, practical jokes, and impassioned speeches by the manager.

He’s played by Vincent Gardenia as a crafty, tough tactician with a heart of gold he tries to conceal. (“When I die,” he says during one pre-game pep talk, “in the newspapers they’ll write that the sons of bitches of this world have lost their leader.”) He knows Bruce and Henry are concealing something, but he doesn’t know what, and his efforts to find out are hilariously frustrated. At various times, the midwinter visit to the Mayo Clinic is explained as a fishing trip, a hunting trip, a wenching trip, and a secret mission to rid Bruce of the clap.