Wednesday, 17 March 2021

ALL-TIME CLASSIC MOVIE FAVOURITES – THE NATURAL (1984)

 

 “The Natural” is a sports drama, based on the novel by Bernard Malamud and Directed by Barry Levinson.

The story is about an unknown middle-aged batter named Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford) with a mysterious past, who appears out of nowhere to join a struggling team as a rookie in the 1930’s, much to the disgust of coach Pop Fisher (Wilford Brimley) who thinks the teams owner The Judge (Robert Prosky) is deliberately trying to scupper the team, so he refuses to play Hobbs on principle.

But he does have an ally in assistant coach Red Blow (Richard Farnsworth) and eventually Pop relents and Hobbs takes a losing baseball team to the top of the league with the aid of a bat cut from a lightning struck tree.

But it soon becomes apparent that it’s more important to the Judge that the team fail and when bribes don’t work, femme fatal Memo Paris (Kim Basinger) tries to distract him, and it appears to be working until his childhood sweetheart Iris Gaines (Glenn Close) appears one day in the stands and gets him back on track.

It takes reporter Max Mercy (Robert Duvall) to uncover the story of Roy Hobbs mysterious past as he begins to bask in the fame he should have had earlier in his life when, as a rising pitcher, he was inexplicably shot by a young woman, Harriet Bird (Barbara Hershey) in a hotel room.

 


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