Plot
In 1910s Nebraska, a young Roy Hobbs learns to play baseball from his father. After Hobbs Sr. suffers an early, fatal heart attack, lightning strikes the large tree next to where he died. Hobbs makes a baseball bat from the tree's splintered wood, burning a lightning bolt and the legend “Wonderboy” into the barrel of the new bat.
Now 19 years old, Hobbs heads to Chicago for a tryout with the Chicago Cubs, leaving behind his girlfriend, Iris. While on the train, he meets legendary ballplayer "The Whammer" (based on Babe Ruth), sportswriter Max Mercy, and Harriet Bird, a mysterious woman who is following The Whammer. At a carnival during a stopover, Hobbs wins a bet that he can strike out The Whammer with just three pitches and easily does so. Hobbs later meets Harriet in Chicago, and she asks if his boast that he can be "the best there ever was," is true. Hobbs answers yes, and Harriet shoots him in the abdomen, then kills herself.
Sixteen years later, in 1939, Hobbs is signed as a rookie to the New York Knights, a struggling ball club in last place. Manager Pop Fisher is furious that Hobbs was signed without his approval, believing him too old, making him suspect of an ulterior motive by the team's owner. He refuses to play Hobbs at first, but he later relents, electing him to pinch hit, after which Hobbs literally knocks the cover off the baseball. Hobbs becomes a baseball sensation, and the Knights' fortunes begin to turn around. Max Mercy finds Hobbs vaguely familiar but fails to place him.
Assistant manager Red Blow tells Hobbs that if Pop loses the pennant this year, his Knights ownership share will revert to the Judge, the team's shady majority owner. The Judge offers Hobbs $5,000 (equivalent to $110,000in 2023) to throw the season. Hobbs, unlike Bump Bailey, refuses the bribe. While watching Hobbs pitch during a practice session, Mercy suddenly remembers him and introduces Hobbs to Gus Sands, a gambler who has been placing large bets against Hobbs. He also meets Pop's beautiful niece, Memo Paris, who was Bump's girlfriend. Their budding new romance causes a distracted Hobbs' game to badly slump, all part of the Judge's new plan.
Hobbs' slump continues until during a game, he sees a woman dressed in all-white, backlit by the afternoon sun after she stands up, after which he hits a home run, dramatically shattering the scoreboard clock. The woman is Iris, and they later meet at a diner. She tells Hobbs she has a teenage son whose father "lives in New York." Their reunion restores Hobbs' hitting prowess, and the Knights surge into first place and within one win of the National League pennant. However, Memo (who has been colluding with the Judge and Sands) poisons Hobbs at a team party, causing him to collapse. He awakens in the hospital and learns that an old silver bullet, removed from his stomach, has caused him long-term damage. The doctor warns him it could prove fatal if Hobbs continues playing baseball without giving the surgery time to completely heal.
With Hobbs hospitalized, the Knights lose three games in a row, setting up a one-game playoff against the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Judge comes to the hospital and offers Hobbs an even bigger bribe to throw the game, threatening to expose to the press Hobbs' involvement with Harriet Bird. Memo visits Hobbs and urges him to accept the Judge's offer and to come away with her. Later, Iris also visits and assures Hobbs that he will always be remembered as a great ballplayer.
Still recovering, Hobbs rejects the bribe and returns to the team. Watching from the stands, Iris sends a note to Hobbs in the dugout, saying she has brought their son to the game. In the bottom half of the 9th inning, the Knights are trailing. The Pirates bring in a young, hard-throwing pitcher, who, exploiting Hobbs' condition, throws inside pitches to harm him. Hobbs hits a foul ball that splits his lightning-forged bat, "Wonderboy," in two. Batboy Bobby Savoy brings him his own bat, the "Savoy Special", which Hobbs had helped him to make. Now down to his last strike, his wound bleeding through his team jersey, Hobbs smashes the baseball high into the upper stadium seats, shattering the game's night lights, for a home run, winning the game and the pennant. The victory secures Pop's share of the team and his long-held dream of winning the pennant, while also defeating the dark forces that conspired against Hobbs. As Hobbs' baseball appears to sail beyond Knights Stadium, the location fades to Nebraska. Iris looks on, smiling, as Hobbs catches that baseball, thrown to him by their son in the very same field where Hobbs and his father once played.
Production
Malcolm Kahn and Robert Bean acquired the rights to Bernard Malamud's 1952 novel The Natural in 1976. [4] Phil Dusenberry wrote the first adaptation. [4] In October 1981, Roger Towne, a Columbia Pictures story editor and brother of Robert Towne, quit to produce and write the screenplay, with Bean set to direct and Kahn co-producing. [5] [4]
In 1983, newly formed Tri-Star Pictures acquired the rights to the film adaptation, its first production. [4] It was Robert Redford's first acting role in three years. [4]
The film's producers stated in the DVD extras that the film was not intended to be a literal adaptation of the novel, but was merely "based on" the novel. Malamud's daughter said on one of the DVD extras that her father had seen the film, and his take on it was that it had "legitimized him as a writer." [6]
Darren McGavin was cast late in the process as gambler Gus Sands and was uncredited in the film. Due to a disagreement, he chose not to be credited, though Levinson later wanted to credit him and McGavin said no. [7] [8] Levinson stated on the DVD extras for the 2007 edition that because there had been too little time during post-production to find a professional announcer willing and able to provide voice-over services, Levinson recorded that part of the audio track himself. [7]
Two-thirds of the scenes were filmed in Buffalo, New York, mostly at War Memorial Stadium, [9] built in 1937 and demolished a few years after the film was produced. Buffalo's All-High Stadium, with post-production alterations, stood in for Chicago's Wrigley Field in a key scene in the film. [10] Additional filming took place at the New York and Lake Erie Railroad depot in South Dayton, New York. [11] [12] Cece Carlucci, an umpire from the Pacific Coast League, manufactured the umpiring gear used in the film. [13]
Release
Reception
Variety called it an "impeccably made ... fable about success and failure in America." [14] James Berardinelli praised The Natural as "[a]rguably the best baseball movie ever made". [14] ESPN's Page 2 selected it as the 6th best sports movie of all time. [15] Sports writer Bill Simmons has argued, "Any 'Best Sports Movies' list that doesn't feature either Hoosiers or The Natural as the No. 1 pick shouldn't even count." [16]
Director Barry Levinson said on MLB Network's "Costas at the Movies" in 2013 that while the film is based in fantasy, "through the years, these things which are outlandish actually [happen] ... like Kirk Gibson hitting the home run and limping around the bases ... Curt Schilling with the blood on the sock in the World Series." [17]
Leonard Maltin's 18th annual Movie Guide edition called it "too long and inconsistent." Dan Craft, longtime critic for the Bloomington, Illinois paper, The Pantagraph, [18] wrote, "The storybook ending is so preposterous you don't know whether to cheer or jeer." In Sports Illustrated , Frank Deford had faint praise for it: "The Natural almost manages to be a swell movie." [3] John Simon of National Review and Richard Schickel of Time were disappointed with the adaptation. Simon contrasted Malamud's story about the "failure of American innocence" with Levinson's "fable of success ... [and] the ultimate triumph of semi-doltish purity," declaring "you have, not Malamud's novel, but a sorry illustration of its theme". [19] Schickel lamented that "Malamud's intricate ending (it is a victory that looks like a defeat) is vulgarized (the victory is now an unambiguous triumph, fireworks included)," and that "watching this movie is all too often like reading about The Natural in the College Outlineseries." [20]
Roger Ebert called it "idolatry on behalf of Robert Redford." [21] Ebert's television collaborator Gene Siskel praised it, giving it four stars, also putting down other critics that he suggested might have just recently read the novel for the first time. [22]
In a lengthy article on baseball movies in The New Yorker , Roger Angell pointed out that Malamud had intentionally treated Hobbs' story as a baseball version of the King Arthur legend, which came across in the film as a bit heavy-handed, "portentous and stuffy," and that the book's ending should have been kept. He also cited several excellent visuals and funny bits, and noted that Robert Redford had prepared so carefully for the role, modeling his swing on that of Ted Williams, that "you want to sign him up." [23]
The film review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes retrospectively compiled reviews from 46 critics to give the film a score of 83%, with an average rating of 7.1/10. The website's consensus reads: "Though heavy with sentiment, The Natural is an irresistible classic, and a sincere testament to America's national pastime." [14] The film received a Metacritic score of 61 based on 19 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews". [24]
The initial DVD edition, with copyright year on the box reading "2001", contained the theatrical version of the film, along with a few specials and commentaries.
The "director's cut" was released on April 3, 2007. [27] A two-disc edition, it contains the featurette "The Heart of the Natural," a 44-minute documentary featuring comments from Cal Ripken Jr. and Levinson; it is the only extra released originally with the 2001 DVD. Sony added a number of other extras, however, including: "When Lightning Strikes: Creating The Natural," a 50-minute documentary discussing the origins of the original novel and the production of the film; "Knights in Shining Armor," which addresses the mythological parallels between The Natural, King Arthur and the Odyssey ; and "A Natural Gunned Down" which tells the story of Eddie Waitkus, a baseball player who was shot by Ruth Ann Steinhagen, a female stalker, in an incident which inspired the fictionalized shooting of Roy Hobbs. [28] The film itself has been re-edited, restoring deleted footage to the early chapters of the story. These scenes expand on the sadness of Hobbs, focusing on his visits to his childhood home as an adult and his childhood memories. [28] The "gift set" version of the release also included some souvenirs: a baseball "signed" by Roy Hobbs; some baseball cards of Hobbs and teammates; and a New York Knights cap.
