Happening

Suddenly, the film Happening (L'énévement), released last year but set in 1963, is more than just a reminiscence of a difficult time in a woman’s past; it is powerfully relevant to this very moment. In 2000 an autobiographical novel written by Annie Ernaux was published in France telling the story of Anne, a lycée (senior high school) student in Angoulème (central France near the Atlantic coast) enjoying her independence and looking forward to all of the things she wants to do with her life. She is about to graduate with honors, but something has happened that could complicate her dreams. Her menstruation is late. 

She doesn’t tell anyone, initially not even her friends who tell one another everything – especially if it has to do with boys. And something else is different in Anne’s world. It isn’t the France we might think it is. For some reason, in all of the marvelous French films of the ‘60s, the subject of abortion never came up. The reason why is simple and surprising: abortion was absolutely forbidden. 

Anne looks pale to her parents and her mother thinks she is feverish. They own a bar and they dote on Anne and are exceedingly proud of her progress in school. Anne goes to a doctor. The examination quickly lays out all of the relevant facts. 

After palpitating Anne’s abdomen, the doctor asks her to remove her panties. With his hand inside her he asks, “Are you late with your period?” She doesn’t answer. “You’ve had sexual relations?” “No.” “Never?” “Never.” “No boyfriend?” He finishes and says, “You’re pregnant, miss. I’m sorry.” (That “sorry” alone is classic. It’s like he’s passed a sentence.) She sits up on the table. “It’s not possible.” “I know what it means to you.” She looks at him appealingly. “Do something,” she says. To which he trots out the usual lines: “You can’t ask me that. Not me, not anyone. The law is unsparing. Anyone who helps can end up in jail. You too. And only if you’re spared the worst. Every month, a girl tests her luck and ends up dying in extreme pain. You don’t want to be that girl.” “It isn’t fair,” she tells him. “Maybe I won’t carry it until term!” “Maybe.” 

Completely on her own, Anne consults library texts about pregnancy while she experiences symptoms like increasing appetite and cravings. She consults another doctor and demands that he help her. He reluctantly prescribes something that he says will make her menstruate. (Estradiol, a hormonal steroid, which Anne learns sometime later actually strengthens the embryo.) 

In her dorm a friend claiming to be a virgin, straddling a pillow, demonstrates what she learned about sex from dirty magazines. Anne looks on distraught because for her it wasn’t pleasurable and it resulted in catastrophe. It was furtive, with a boy she met in a bookstore. Next we see her vomiting in the dorm lavatory. A title tells us it’s now 5 weeks. (The titles – from 3 weeks all the way to 12 – are acceptable editorializing in the film, letting us know the progress of the pregnancy and heightening the inevitable sense of urgency that Anne is undergoing – that we are undergoing.) 

The oddity of this strictly anti-abortion society is that there isn’t a trace of religion anywhere – not even a crucifix, even though France is Catholic – even more Catholic in 1963. The aloneness of Anne builds. She becomes ostracized in her dorm when she seeks help from a young fireman named Jean, who only wants sex from her because she’s “safe.” After all, she can’t get pregnant twice. So she is further isolated when word gets around that she was out with a boy. The scene where she is confronted by some other girls is quite disarmingly staged in the dorm’s common shower room. She and her accusers are all naked. 

What Annie Ernaux, and the film’s director Audrey Diwan, make terribly clear is how terrorised Anne and everyone is by the laws against abortion, how Anne is stripped of a choice once she is pregnant. If word of her pregnancy gets out she’d be kicked out of school and it be the end of her future. If she gets an abortion she risks much worse, the loss of her freedom, arrest and imprisonment. When she attempts using a knitting needle, her doctor tells her she failed, adding, “accept it, you have no choice.” 

Finally, Jean finds help for her (the father of the child, named Maxime, knows she is pregnant, but does nothing to help). Another girl, Letitia, had an abortion performed by a woman named Madame Riviêre. Anne does have a choice, but a hazardous one, and she takes it. 

The film comes straight at you from the opening scene. It isn’t nostalgic in the least: it looks at 1963 almost as if the German Occupation were still going on – because, of course, it partly was. The anti-abortion laws in France were an odd hangover from the Nazi era. Claude Chabrol’s 1988 film, Une affaire de femmes, was set during the German Occupation and is about a woman named Marie-Louise Giraud, played by Isabelle Huppert, who performed twenty-seven abortions and was guillotined in 1943 by the Vichy authorities. The Vichy government made abortion a capital crime because of population decline. Abortion wasn’t legalised in France until 1975, two years after Roe v Wade in the US. France, along with other European countries, has since come to regard access to abortion as a woman’s – as a human – right. Now, thanks to the extreme chill caused by the Gang of Six on the Supreme Court, the French government is planning to enshrine abortion in the constitution. Some people, it seems, are more committed to liberal democracy than others. 

The film follows Anne so closely that we see nothing that she doesn’t see. Even when she swims in the sea, we’re in the water with her, up to our chins (I thought I tasted salt water). It is an extremely disciplined film that, when the time comes, is as explicit about an aborted fetus as it needs to be. The cinematography is unadorned – astonishingly. Audrey Diwan avoids the usual horror of teenage films. When there is dancing in a club, we aren't subjected to blasts of ‘60s music. The only other times we hear music it's to draw us into Anne’s feelings of impending disaster. 

A newcomer, Annamaria Vartolomei, plays Anne with total conviction. Sandrine Bonnaire, now 55 and wearing her age proudly, is still exquisite as Anne’s mother. There is Fabrizio Ringione, handsomely contemptible as Anne’s unhelpful doctor. And Anna Mouglalis, as the abortionist Madame Rivière, has an uncannily deep voice and strong presence. Happening may become the film of the era, as long as Americans do something to stop their country's leaden drift toward authoritarianism. There is always November to prove if they still believe in democracy.

Il Grido (The Cry)

... every object in a film is an experience of the viewer’s. After all, what does the director do? He conveys what he thinks he has seen. But, good Lord, the meaning of reality, living as we do enclosed in ourselves, isn’t always clear to us. We could discuss for hours an episode or even an object found on the street. And the same thing is true of a filmed episode or object. Except that I never ask explanations from what I see in real life, but with a film I ask the director. But the director is only a man. Very often I cannot give an explanation because I see only images, and images are what I transfer to the screen. Very often these images have no explanation, no raison d’etre beyond themselves. (Antonioni interviewed by Charles Thomas Samuels in 1969) 

With his fourth film, Le Amiche [The Girlfriends], Michelangelo Antonioni had attained a new urgency in his work. It was an adaptation of a novel by Cesare Pavese in which a successful woman from the working class finds herself in the company of a group of diffident middle class dilettantes who are so bored by being alive that one of them tries – but fails – to commit suicide at the start of the film and tries again near the end – and succeeds. They were the same people found in his previous films – The Story of a Love and The Lady Without Camellias, except that the protagonist this time was from a poor family who had succeeded in escaping into professional success. 

Antonioni wrote the script for Il Grido [The Cry-1957], the film he made after Le Amiche, with Elio Bartolini and Ennio De Concini, based on his own original story. Once again his protagonist is working class, except that the world that Il Grido explores is several levels below that of Le Amiche. The river Po flows from the mountains west of Turin all the way across northern Italy to the Po delta south of Venice. The film is set, and photographed entirely in the dreary, fogbound, industrial region along the river north of Ferrara – with its factory towns whose men work long hours for little money and whose families scrape by. Aldo, Antonioni’s central character (played by the American actor Steve Cochran), works in a sugar mill and has lived with Irma (Alida Valli) for seven years, despite Irma having a husband working in Australia. They have a small daughter named Rosina. When the film begins Irma is informed of her husband’s death. She is upset, but not for the reason we think. For four months Irma has been involved with another man, so when she tells Aldo that her husband is dead, he expects her to marry him right away. When she explains that things have changed, but not in the way he thought they would, his shock is so intense that Antonioni follows the incredibly slow process of his disintegration through the rest of the film. 

Aldo seeks advice from his mother, who tells him she is a “bad woman,” but that “there must be a way to bring back her feelings.” So Aldo confronts Irma in the street and, with the whole town watching, he slaps her savagely several times and when he’s finished shouts, “Now, come home!” Irma rearranges her hair and walks past him, turns and says “Now it’s really finished.” Aldo takes his daughter Rosina with him and he leaves the town – called Goriano – and takes to the road, stopping first at Pontelagoscuro (“hidden lake bridge”), north of the city of Ferrara. There he finds an old flame, Elvia (Betsy Blair). After discovering that he still loves Irma, Elvia asks Aldo why he came. “Because I have nowhere else to go,” he says. Somehow, that nowhere takes him farther and farther away from Goriano. 

Over the course of several months Aldo takes up with two other women, Virginia (Dorian Gray), who owns a filling station, and Adreina (Lynn Shaw). Both of them attempt to make Aldo stay with them, but fail. When Rosina catches Aldo and Virginia “making out” (as depicted, you could hardly call it anything else), Aldo puts her on a bus bound for Goriano. The seasons pass, the cold turns to wet, and Aldo decides to retrace his journey back. On the way, Virginia tells him that Irma had sent him a postcard, but that she misplaced it and can’t recall what was written on it. Perhaps believing that Irma was asking him to return, Aldo goes back to Goriano to find the town is about to be bulldozed in some eminent domain scheme to make way for a military airstrip. Police try to block him from getting into town but he runs past them. He sees Rosina in the street and follows her to a house. When she goes inside Aldo looks through a window and sees Irma, happily changing a baby’s nappie. With a crushed look on his face, he walks slowly away from the window. Irma sees him, hands the baby to a servant (giving away part of Irma’s reason for leaving Aldo in the first place) and she follows him through the town. 

The streets are crowded as everyone gathers to protest the assembled bulldozers. Aldo walks to the sugar refinery where he once worked. He had mentioned to Adreina how he could climb to the top of the refinery tower and could see the house where he lived and could even see Rosina at play. Now he ascends the metal stairs to the top of the tower to – one assumes – take one last look. Just as he reaches the top, Irma arrives below and calls out to him. He looks down and, swaying with dizziness, falls to his death. “The cry” of the title is Irma’s as she watches him fall. 

I’ve recounted this much of the story because it’s all the viewer has to go on. Antonioni never quite indicates what Aldo’s motives are, since Aldo can’t put them into words. A few critics believed that Aldo climbed into the tower for the express purpose of jumping to his death, but Antonioni leaves such a pat explanation in suspense. Causation takes a considerable hit in his later films, which is one of the reasons why some of his actors chafed at his direction. What they wanted was motivation – a reason for the characters' actions, but Antonioni couldn’t give it to them. The why in his films is never indicated. 

Aside from his post-Passenger work, Il Grido is the least known – and least appreciated – of Antonioni’s films. It has been linked with his first film photographed in color, Red Desert, because of its focus on the landscapes and the environment in which his characters find themselves. Gianni Di Venanzo, the film’s cinematographer, grounds Il Grido in its landscapes. Shades of grey predominate – even under snow, it looks like the outskirts of hell. If Antonioni was using the landscapes to reflect Aldo's emotional state, Aldo must've been utterly miserable. Giovanni Fusco supplied the film with a suitably plaintive, mostly solo piano, score.

Aldo is yet another complex failure. Like Sandro in L’Avventura and Giovanni in La Notte, he is talented but unfulfilled by his profession. He attracts women but he doesn’t know what to do with them and consistently disappoints them. The women – except Irma, who knows him better – all want him to stay with them. Steve Cochran, who was clearly not an obvious choice for the lead (the film was co-produced by Robert Alexander Productions out of New York, and probably asked for an American lead), but he does what Antonioni required of him. His attractiveness to women is painfully clear. Alida Valli is fine as a somewhat more complex “bad woman.” Also memorable is Gerrino Campanilli as Virginia’s wine-loving father, who teaches Rosina communist revolution songs and hides wine bottles all over the house. 

Il Grido wasn’t released in the US until late 1962, after L’Avventura and La Notte had made a splash with critics. In the New York Times, second-string reviewer A. H. Weiler commented: “One is made to feel that Mr. Antonioni is not interested in explanations so much as in character and situations.” I think Mr Weiler hit that nail on the head.

Rabbit, Run

As a longtime admirer of his “early” short stories, forty years ago I turned to one of John Updike’s novels expecting more of the same – the same craft with words, the same attention to the mundane details of life transformed into glowing objects of beauty. I chose Of the Farm, published in 1965, the fourth of his twenty-three novels. It had the same attention to everdayness that I’d found in the stories, but, as one might expect, the pacing of the story was much more deliberate, the beautiful flourishes more widely spaced. 

I just finished reading my second Updike novel, Rabbit, Run, published in 1960 and I found it a rather hard comedown. The title refers to the nickname of Updike's hero of the story, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom and his only distinguishing feature: he runs away. He is no Huck Finn "lighting out" for the wilderness - for adventure. Nor is he Peer Gynt who abandons his home and the woman he loves to seek his fortune.

I’m not going to beat around the bush – even if it flushes out a rabbit. Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is an asshole. He was intended to be a young American Everyman, circa 1959 - a former high school basketball star in his mid-twenties living in the suburbs of his mid-sized Pennsylvania hometown, in an apartment with a pregnant wife and a young son, driving a '55 Ford his father-in-law sold him at a discount, four weeks into a job demonstrating a kitchen gadget called a MagiPeeler in dime stores around town. Though Updike furnishes Angstrom's world with other characters and physical details that give it a breathing life of its own, the shadow of J. D. Salinger’s A Catcher in the Rye hangs over the story. But whereas Holden Caulfield's rebellions are fittingly those of an immature teenager, Angstrom's are merely preposterous. 

If the novel had been advertised as a comedy or even a satire (a satire that sails much too close to the reef), it might have been more palatable. Harry, whose customary reaction to the discomforts of middle class married life is to flee from them, is incapable of standing up to the pressures of having a stupid job and a pregnant alcoholic wife, incapable of resisting nearly every impulse to do and say the wrong thing when circumstances become too challenging for him, incapable of being anything close to the son that his parents - or the son-in-law for that matter that his wife’s parents - wanted, incapable of understanding that he isn’t desired by every woman he meets, incapable of facing his failure of practically everyone in his life. Updike sets us up for every one of Harry's stunts, and we are as astonished when they occur as the fictional people who witness them. (You must have a heart of stone if you fail to laugh out loud when he puts his foot in his mouth epically in the funeral scene.)

By the time he wrote Rabbit Redux in 1971, the unanticipated resumption of his chronicle of Rabbit Angstrom, Updike was well into his stride as an industrial writer of “beautiful” prose. I won’t be reading it any time soon, or any of the other Rabbit books, Rabbit Is Rich (1981), Rabbit At Rest (1990) and even Rabbit Remembered (2001). I had my say about the decline of Updike’s short stories a few years ago: 

Updike's beautiful prose, the beauty of which is by now banal, weaves a spell that sometimes illuminated the truth of a moment in time or a particular situation among his characters, but it was the beauty that drew him there and that continues to allure his readers. It is the beauty of a well-turned sentence or a pithily-expressed observation. They rarely provide enough light to illuminate the human soul. It is the beauty that moves us, not the exposed nerve, not the truth of the matter at hand. (“Leaf Season”)

Or, as Alfred Kazin said about Updike in his Bright Book of Life:

If poise is a gift, Updike is a genius. If to be "cool" is not just a social grace but awareness unlimited, Updike is the best of this cool world. All he lacks is that capacity for making you identify, for summoning up affection in the reader, which Salinger expressed when in The Catcher in the Rye he had Holden Caulfield reserve his praise for authors who make you want to call them up. 

Riddled With Bullets

5.56mm bullet

I go jogging every day for an hour and I sometimes listen to podcasts using a headset. With so many podcasts to choose from, I have narrowed down my choices to Marc Maron's WTF, Harry Shearer’s LeShow, which I listened to in the 90s on the radio (remember those things?), Al Franken, and the late Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast! I prefer listening to funny subjects while I jog, but I will listen to a serious discussion if the subject interests me. 

Sam Harris has a subscription podcast called Making Sense that I listened to once last year when his guest was Ricky Gervais and they were discussing the stupidity of Cancel Culture. A few days ago I downloaded a Making Sense podcast that was recorded on May 31, six days after the mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas. It was a discussion titled “Gun Violence in America” with Graeme Wood. 

I started to jog while Harris somewhat solemnly explained why he himself is a gun owner. He detailed his justification for owning a gun quite unnecessarily in tones that seemed to me to sound like a kind of apology. I know very little about Sam Harris, but based on the subjects he chooses to discuss, he seems to be an intelligent, sensible person without apparent radical biases. Unfortunately, after listening to his apologia for being a gun owner for a minute or two, I had to stop listening to the podcast. I'm rather tired of people who feel they have to qualify their opinions. To his credit, Harris thinks acquiring a gun should be a draconian process, comparable to acquiring a license to fly a plane. But I felt that listening to him any further would've been like listening to two cokeheads talking about Mexican drug cartels. I switched over to an older Gilbert Gottfried podcast with Dick Cavett. Cavett sounds ancient – which, of course, he is. For the first time in my life I wanted to know what Dick Cavett thinks about gun violence in America and what should be done about it. 

I am neither a gun owner nor a gun advocate. To give the dead horse a few more lashes of the whip, the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution has been misinterpreted so many times in so many ways according to so many agenda, that at the very least it is in serious need of annotation. 

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. 

Twenty-seven words written by James Madison and incorporated into the Constitution in 1791, eight years after the Treaty of Paris, the formal "Cessation of Hostilities between the United States of America and the King of Great Britain." The Continental Army had been largely disbanded, so there was no standing army. This is hard for some people to believe, but until the 20th century most countries did not see the necessity of having standing armies at the ready all the time. Some countries still don’t. 

What the United States after 1783 had instead of a standing army was a “well regulated militia.” “Regulated” means what it has always meant: supervised, monitored, controlled. Since the Continental Army consisted of members of the civil population who fought for their country during the Revolutionary War, their de-mobilization was carried out with the proviso that they would be called on – as a militia – whenever the security of the state was threatened. The flintlock musket was the common weapon, which was easy to manufacture and acquire. 

Since 1791 the attitude of the civil population toward the government in America has gone through some alterations. By now, the government is regarded with either healthy skepticism or outright hostility. According to a November 2020 Gallup Poll on gun ownership, 32% of respondents claimed to own a gun, while 44% lived in a household in which a gun was kept. A citizen who is a registered Republican is twice as likely to own a gun as a Democrat, and rural and Southern states have by a wide margin the highest number of guns per capita. 

Returning to Sam Harris, he had expressed his opinions about violence and about guns long before Uvalde. In an article from 2013 called “The Riddle of the Gun” he stated: 

Most of my friends do not own guns and never will. When asked to consider the possibility of keeping firearms for protection, they worry that the mere presence of them in their homes would put themselves and their families in danger. Can’t a gun go off by accident? Wouldn’t it be more likely to be used against them in an altercation with a criminal? I am surrounded by otherwise intelligent people who imagine that the ability to dial 911 is all the protection against violence a sane person ever needs. 

But, unlike my friends, I own several guns and train with them regularly. Every month or two, I spend a full day shooting with a highly qualified instructor. This is an expensive and time-consuming habit, but I view it as part of my responsibility as a gun owner. It is true that my work as a writer has added to my security concerns somewhat, but my involvement with guns goes back decades. I have always wanted to be able to protect myself and my family, and I have never had any illusions about how quickly the police can respond when called. I have expressed my views on self-defense elsewhere. Suffice it to say, if a person enters your home for the purpose of harming you, you cannot reasonably expect the police to arrive in time to stop him. This is not the fault of the police—it is a problem of physics. 

I contend that physics isn't the problem - psychology is. Harris's assertions are part of my own argument against gun ownership. 13 years ago on this blog I wrote: 

If one listens to proponents of the liberty of gun ownership, it becomes clear that, to a substantial degree, their arguments are informed by a paranoid siege mentality. They often sound as if they are being hemmed in, not just by crime and criminals but by the government and the police. Crime is threatening their property – the age-old shibboleth – and laws and their enforcers are threatening their rights. 

I must admit that, if I lived in a society – or, more to the point, perceived that I lived in a society – in which I did not feel safe enough inside my apartment or going to and from work or shopping for groceries without having to arm myself with even a snub nose .22 caliber pistol, I would move somewhere else. I love my country, but not so much that I would find living in Canada intolerable. For all the mistrust and lack of confidence that gun-owners tacitly demonstrate in the ability of their government to make laws and in the police to enforce them, they might as well move to another country too. 

But there is another bone I want to pick. My father was a 31-year Army veteran and we didn’t have a flag in my household. I am a disabled military veteran and I don’t own one either. Yet my patriotism, like my father's  is unquestionable - especially by people who never served. People on the Right like to show off their patriotism at every opportunity. They enjoy waving American flags or wearing them sewn into their clothes or on ballcaps. Politicians like to wear a tiny American flag one their lapels. Yet those on the Right are the most vociferous proponents of the 2nd Amendment. I think it is a funny kind of patriotism that dismisses the role of law-enforcement entirely. And why do people on the Right talk about the “blue line” and use the asinine slogan, in direct opposition to Black Lives Matter, that Blue Lives Matter when they don’t even trust the police to uphold the law and the security of their households? Just look at how they treated the Capitol police on January 6, 2020, when the police were within their rights to form ranks, draw their weapons and mow down the insurrectionists like spring hay.

The Natural

Our response to baseball is not different in kind from our response to Dostoevsky or to the stock-in-trade of our lives. Until we learn this, we shall continue to fail to be affected by either in the way that counts. “Achilles in Left Field,” Norman Podhoretz 

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." Maxwell Scott (played by Carleton Young) in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance 

Innocence is the theme of The Natural, both the novel and the movie: for Bernard Malamud, in his first novel, it’s Innocence Betrayed and Destroyed; for the makers of the movie, the script-writers Roger Towne and Phil Dusenberry, and the director Barry Levinson, it’s Innocence Threatened and Affirmed. As redolent as the novel is of the special accoutrements of the game, it’s obvious that Malamud was trying to evoke something other – something more – than baseball. The makers of the movie seem to have operated under the assumption that the audience they hoped to attract were lifelong fans – from childhood throughout the belated childhood that is adulthood for so many Americans. 

I am fond of baseball because my father loved it. He wouldn’t like most of today’s players, but only because of their long hair and beards, but it is essentially the same game that it was in my father’s lifetime. I had a few sports heroes when I was a kid, like Hank Aaron and Johnny Unitas (what a terrific name), but since then I’ve looked elsewhere for my heroes. 

The movie opens with bucolic scenes of a boy growing up in Farmland USA that look and sound uncannily like Clark Kent’s boyhood in Richard Donner’s Superman. Roy Hobbs, the hero of The Natural, has some kind of superpower too, except it’s confined to throwing and catching baseballs. He also has a childhood sweetheart named Iris who figures later in the script. When Roy is 19 he is spotted by a baseball scout who takes him by train to Chicago to try out for the Cubs. (The year isn't indicated, but it's some time around 1923.) He meets a mysterious woman on the train named Harriet Bird. On arrival in Chicago, Roy checks into a hotel. The phone rings in Roy's room - it's Harriet and she invites Roy to come downstairs to her room. When he gets there, he finds Harriet is dressed provocatively in nothing but a sheer chemise. She then opens a hat box, removes a black veil, puts it on her head and shoots Roy with a pistol. 16 years pass, and Roy is travelling once again by train, this time to New York where he has been signed to play for the last place team the Knights. Pop, the team's co-owner and manager, is justifiably suspicious of a 35-year-old rookie, but Roy’s phenomenal hitting and fielding quickly win him over. 

The movie’s changes to Malamud’s story are sometimes trivial but ultimately crucial: Hobbs is a rightfielder in the movie, a leftfielder in the novel. Iris Lemon, renamed Iris Gaines (played by Glenn Close) is a blonde instead of a brunette and wears a white dress instead of a red one when she stands up in the bleachers to inspire Roy to break out of his batting slump. She is his childhood sweetheart, whom he has somehow not seen in 16 years, instead of, in the novel, a stranger who simply wanted to help a man she regarded as a hero. Memo, Pop’s niece, and Bump Bailey’s girlfriend (played by Kim Basinger) is blonde instead of a redhead. Roy falls for her in the novel, but she takes her sweet time getting over Bump. In the movie she and Hobbs are together in a matter of minutes and as long as they’re together Hobbs doesn’t seem to care when the Knights go on a losing streak. Two sexual encounters are implied in the movie, but Malamud doesn’t skimp on sexy details, such as when Roy puts his hand on Harriet Bird’s “ample breast,” and tweaks her nipple, and when Bump plays a joke on Hobbs and switches hotel rooms with him Memo, “this naked redheaded lovely,” enters the room in the dark, slips into bed with him and spends the night, supposedly mistaking Hobbs for Bump the whole time. And weeks after making love with Hobbs by a cold lake, Iris writes him a letter announcing she is pregnant and that he “must win for our boy.” 

The biggest difference between the book and the movie is Roy's integrity. In the novel, when offered the promise of $45,000 to throw the pennant-winning game – the game Pop has spent a lifetime pursuing – Roy agrees so Memo will marry him. In the movie the Judge, shadowy co-owner of the Knights, tries to blackmail Roy by threatening to expose his misadventure with Harriet Bird if he doesn’t throw the game. The story hinges on no one recalling what happened to Hobbs on his first attempt to play in the major leagues. Why? His being shot and seriously wounded by Harriet Bird, a homicidal maniac, certainly wasn’t his fault. Malamud doesn’t tell us what becomes of Harriet. She is last seen dancing nearly naked over him “and she, making muted noises of triumph and despair, danced on her toes around the stricken hero.” In the movie the Judge shows Roy a photograph of Harriet lying on the street after she apparently jumped from her hotel window. 

Malamud’s Roy Hobbs is a bungling hero, engaging in things that a true hero oughtn’t, like stating – more than once – that he will be the “greatest that ever was” and, before the final game that could win the team – and Pop – the pennant, making a deal with the Judge to throw the game. Even when he has a change of heart during the game, he fails, and the novel ends with his tears. The movie’s Roy Hobbs, probably because he is played by Robert Redford (who probably had a hand in altering the story), manages to keep himself clean and wins the game with one more spectacular homerun. 

Because the movie was rated PG, it had to eliminate almost all traces of sex. On the single occasion in which Hobbs is in bed with Memo, who had just entered his room clad in nothing but a fur coat, he awakes from a dream of an elevator door opening to reveal Harriet Bird. 

At the novel’s climax Roy’s fall is complete - he swings at a “bad ball” and strikes out. Had he not, and had the pitch got away from the Pittsburgh catcher, Flores, who was on third base, would’ve stolen home and the game would've been tied. Hobbs would’ve walked and been the go-ahead run on first. But “the fix” – Malamud’s design – was in, and Hobbs ends the Knights’ chance at the pennant. 

Of all the devices in a filmmaker’s bag of tricks, slow motion is the most overused and, by now, the most clichéd. Aside from shots of Hobbs swinging Wonderboy, his hand-made bat, in slow motion, Barry Levinson treats us to flying baseballs, exploding klieg lights, and Bump Bailey crashing through the outfield wall – all in slow motion. 

Some critics singled out the thuddingly banal music by Randy Newman for praise, calling it “Coplandesque,” without for a moment thinking that it was Newman’s intention that his music reminded them of something Copland wrote (like "Fanfare for the Common Man" or "A Lincoln Portrait"). 

Finally, there is Robert Redford. I think I first saw him in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Aside from having the chiseled looks of a hero, he always managed to keep his feet on the ground. By the time he got around to playing Roy Hobbs, Redford's image was becoming quite unwieldy and he found himself having to play off of it. In The Natural, not for a single moment did I forget that I was watching Robert Redford instead of Roy Hobbs, and not because Redford was 47 years old rather than 35 (or 19 in the opening scenes). He never stopped being Robert Redford, despite all the homework he reportedly did learning how to swing a bat like Ted Williams. And I had the feeling that the major changes that were made in the script – Hobbs being victorious in the climactic scene – were made because no one could possibly accept Robert Redford cheating and losing. If there were any real heroes in the movie they were two old men – Wilford Brimley as Pop and Richard Farnsworth as Red, the two coaches of the Knights. Too bad that some of their combined integrity didn’t rub off on Barry Levinson.