"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.
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