The Natural is a 1984 American sports drama film based on Bernard Malamud's 1952 novel of the same name. Directed by Barry Levinson, the film stars Robert Redford, Robert Duvall, Glenn Close, Kim Basinger, Wilford Brimley, Barbara Hershey, Robert Prosky and Richard Farnsworth. Like the novel, the film recounts the experiences of Roy Hobbs, a man with great "natural" baseball talent, spanning his long but interrupted career in the sport. In direct contrast to the novel, the film ends on a positive tone. It was the first film produced by Tri-Star Pictures.
The film was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Supporting Actress (Close), and for a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress (Basinger). Many of the baseball scenes were filmed in 1983 at War Memorial Stadium in Buffalo, New York, built in 1937 and demolished in 1989. All-High Stadium, also in Buffalo, stood in for Chicago's Wrigley Field in a key scene.
Plot In the 1910s Midwest, Roy Hobbs learns baseball from his father Ed, who suffers a fatal heart attack. Lightning strikes a nearby tree, from which Roy makes a bat that he brands with a lightning bolt and the legend "Wonderboy".
In 1923, 19-year-old Roy leaves behind his girlfriend, Iris Gaines, for a tryout with the Chicago Cubs arranged by scout Sam Simpson. On the train, Sam and Roy are snubbed by "The Whammer," a swaggering batter in the mold of Babe Ruth and sportswriter Max Mercy. While stopped at a carnival, Sam bets Max that Roy can strike out the Whammer in three pitches. Roy does so, drawing the attention of Harriet Bird, who has a murderous fixation on athletes. Harriet lures Roy to her Chicago hotel room, shoots him in the stomach, then throws herself out the window. Health complications derail Roy's baseball career.
Despite his age and unknown past, in 1939 the 35-year-old Roy is signed to the New York Knights, Major League Baseball's last-place team. The team's manager and part owner, Pop Fisher, nearly demotes Roy to the Class B league but is impressed by his power hitting during batting practice. During a game against the Philadelphia Phillies, Roy pinch hits for star player Bartholomew "Bump" Bailey. Using "Wonderboy", Roy hits a triple that knocks the cover off the ball, making him an overnight sensation.
News of Roy's growing fame reaches Iris, now living in Chicago. In a game against the St. Louis Cardinals, Bump dies after crashing through the outfield wall while trying to make a catch. Roy becomes the starting right fielder and his hitting pulls the Knights up the National League standings. Assistant manager Red Blow reveals that Pop was forced to sell controlling interest in the team to a new owner, the Judge, but will regain ownership if the Knights win the pennant. Unlike Bump, Roy refuses the Judge's bribe to throw the season.
At practice, Max sees Roy pitch a fastball that almost tears through the backstop's netting, then recognizes him from striking out the Whammer. He introduces Roy to bookie Gus Sands, and Roy begins a romance with Gus's confidante Memo Paris, Pop's niece. Pop believes Memo is bad luck and Roy and the Knights drop into a slump, which continues into a Wrigley Field game against the Cubs. Spotting Iris in the stands, Roy shatters the scoreboard clock with a game-winning home run. They meet briefly and after another win the following day, Roy walks Iris home, and she reveals she has a teenage son named Ted. Their reunion restores Roy's prowess and the Knights surge into first place.
At a party, Roy collapses and is taken to a hospital. A doctor discovers Harriet's silver bullet, shows it to Roy, and tells him it may prove fatal if he continues playing. The Knights lose three games in a row, setting up a one-game playoff against the Pittsburgh Pirates at Knights Field. The Judge offers Roy $20,000 () to throw the game and reveals he has already bribed another player. When Roy refuses, the Judge threatens to reveal photos of Harriet's body and blame Roy for her death. Roy rejects the bribe and is not intimidated by the blackmail.
During the game, Roy deduces that the Knights' pitcher was also bribed but convinces him to play his best. In the dugout, Roy receives a note from Iris, who is attending the game with Ted, and learns that he is Ted's father. With the Knights trailing in the bottom of the ninth inning, Roy hits a foul ball that splits "Wonderboy." He tells batboy Bobby Savoy to choose another bat and Bobby retrieves the "Savoy Special", a bat he made with Roy's guidance. Bleeding through his uniform, Roy smashes a home run into the stadium lights, destroying them in a power surge that cascades into a shower of sparks, winning the game and the pennant for the Knights. Back on their farm, Iris watches Roy and Ted play catch in the same field where Roy and Ed used to play.
Cast
Production
Pre-production Malcolm Kahn and Robert Bean acquired the rights to Bernard Malamud's 1952 novel The Natural in 1976. Phil Dusenberry wrote the first adaptation. 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. In 1983, newly formed Tri-Star Pictures acquired the rights to the film adaptation, its first production. It was Robert Redford's first acting role in three years. 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 felt that it had "legitimized him as a writer."
Casting Darren McGavin was cast late in the process as the gambler Gus Sands and was uncredited in the film. Out of a disagreement, he chose not to be credited, though Barry Levinson later wanted to credit him and McGavin refused. 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 had recorded that part of the audio track himself.
Filming Two-thirds of the scenes were filmed in Buffalo, New York, mostly at War Memorial Stadium, built in 1937 and demolished in 1989. At the time of filming, the stadium was the home of the Buffalo Bisons, a Minor League Baseball team who were then playing in the Double A level Eastern League and would move up to Triple A and the International League in 1985 (that team was actually the second Buffalo Bisons to play at the stadium. The original Bisons had actually played in the Triple A International League and were tenants at the stadium from 1961–1970). With a spectator capacity of 46,206, it was the second-largest venue in the Minors in 1983/84 (behind Denver's then–75,123 capacity Mile High Stadium), and the sixth-largest regular Minor League stadium in history.
Although War Memorial Stadium had long been used as a baseball stadium, it was in fact a rectangular venue built primarily for football. As such, it had both right and right-center field fences between 20 and 30 feet closer to the diamond than those in left field. The film's directors were careful not to include any high shots of the stadium that would show the compromised field dimensions (especially since Robert Redford's Roy Hobbs character is a left-handed power hitter, right field being his natural pulling side), while any views of the right-field fence and stands were shot from ground level, no closer than the pitcher's mound, to make the stadium appear to be a baseball field of regulation size. Balls Roy hits into the stands are shown in slow motion to exaggerate their distance. Since the diamond was close to the field's northwest corner, the directors were also careful not to show the long distance between the left-field outfield fences and the bleacher seats at the stadium's eastern end. The home plate was in the northwest corner, placing the diamond on the opposite side of the field from the main grandstand and press box, so that the main stand for football became the center-field bleachers during baseball games.
Buffalo's All-High Stadium, with post-production alterations, stood in for Chicago's Wrigley Field in a key scene in the film. Additional filming took place at the New York and Lake Erie Railroad depot in South Dayton, New York. Cece Carlucci, an umpire from the Pacific Coast League, made the umpiring gear used in the film.
Cinematography and post-production Director of photography Caleb Deschanel had a long-running fascination for autochrome photography, the earliest commercial color process. This photographic process, invented by the Lumière brothers in 1907, involved light filtered through randomly-aligned grains of potato starch that had been dyed in the primary colors and then used to expose a black and white glass negative. When developed and seen in transmission, like a film slide (the only means of viewing an autochrome), the effect was a somewhat desaturated color monoprint made from three, sandwiched glass panes with a tonal range reminiscent of watercolors. Deschanel searched for a way to replicate this look for the flashback scenes in The Natural.
He hit upon an unusual post-production process. Deschanel struck a black and white print of the film and used an optical printer to combine this footage with a color print of the same material in which the color saturations had been strongly raised. The result was an answer print with delicate, bloomed colors and a strong black register. Because the effect diminished in generations more distant from the original interpositive prints, Deschanel's intentions for the film are best seen in high-resolution, home media formats such as 4K Blu-ray releases.
Release
Reception Variety called it an "impeccably made ... fable about success and failure in America." James Berardinelli praised The Natural as "[a]rguably the best baseball movie ever made". ESPN's Page 2 selected it as the sixth best sports movie of all time. 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." 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."Barry Levinson, Costas at the Movies, MLB Network, February 11, 2013
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,(May 19, 1984) 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 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". 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 Outline