‘The Natural,’ an electric baseball fable, turns 40

The 1984 baseball movie starred a way-too-old Robert Redford as a 1930s baseball prodigy whose home runs do magical things

Baseball Week continues with a look at a classic baseball movie, which has set off four decades of arguments…

Barry Levinson’s The Natural should not have worked for all sorts of reasons. 

The film, which arrived in theaters 40 years ago this week, starred Robert Redford, who was 47 years old, as an active baseball player. Based on Bernard Malamud’s novel, it completely reverses the book’s cynical ending, changing the message from “your heroes will let you down” to, well, “your heroes will NOT let you down.”

Roy Hobbs, while played by Redford with an undeniable movie star charisma, isn’t all that interesting a character beyond his seemingly magical baseball abilities, and the film is way more interested in the hagiography of Robert Redford than anything else. The women in it are all either angels (Glenn Close) or evil harlots (everyone else), and the plot amounts to “how a star athlete rebuilt his career many years after a crazed woman shot him for no reason.”

Also, the physics of what happens with the exploding stadium lightbulbs in the final home run scene don’t make a lick of sense.

So why does it work? It’s a great-looking movie with a true movie star at its center and a cast chock-full of fantastic character actors (Wilford Brimley! Joe Don Baker! Michael Madsen! Richard Farnsworth!). It boasts one of the best movie themes of all time, from Randy Newman, one of those things where when I think of the movie, those notes are the first thing that springs to mind.