The Longest Yard (35mm)

(Robert Aldrich, US 1974, 121 min., 35mm)

Paul “Wrecking” Crewe (Burt Reynolds) has made a lot of mistakes in his life. After getting banned from the NFL for shaving points, he steals his lover’s car, leads police on a chase, and dumps the car in the ocean, earning him eighteen months in state prison. There he is cajoled into putting together a football team of inmates to act as a punching bag for the prison’s semi-pro team made up of prison guards. But when his parole is threatened, Crewe sees a chance to lash out at the world in the form he’s most familiar with, and provides the inmates with one last chance to leave everything on the field. Inspired as much by Paul Newman’s anti-hero characters as Reynolds’s own tough-guy image from Deliverance, The Longest Yard is a violent and ribald look at anti-authoritarianism through sport.