The Longest Yard

From Viennale

THE LONGEST YARD was the last of the major box-office hits that allowed Aldrich to continue his career with an unwaveringly uncompromising spirit. Ironically, it was in the hitherto notoriously unsuccessful genre of sports comedies that he established a formula which has since been copied countless times, albeit without ever matching the power of the original (which was spiced with a pinch of existentialism), to say nothing of the breathtaking staging of the decisive match, which Aldrich, a self-confessed fan, wanted to make more exciting than a real game: the epic result even manages to captivate viewers with no interest in American football. Burt Reynolds plays a disgraced football star now in prison who puts together a team of inmates to take on the hated guards. Eddie Albert shines as the villainous prison governor, whom Aldrich cast as President Nixon’s doppelgänger, as he also commented: “Eddie Albert is Nixon! When I put him in those clothes, and put the flag in there, and had the football talk, and the guy turning on and off the tape recorder—on the set, everybody said: ‘You can’t do that Bob, you’re going too far!’ I must say I thought I did go too far, but obviously I didn’t go half far enough, because nobody, nobody understood.” (Christoph Huber)