THE LONGEST YARDBIRD

THE LONGEST YARD (1974)
dir: Robert Aldrich

THE LONGEST YARDBIRD
MAD #176, July 1975
w: Arnie Kogen
a: Angelo Torres

Comedy about a former football player sent to prison and made to coach a team while in prison.

Paul Crewe (Burt Reynolds) hsn't played football in eight years and in that time has been mooching off his girlfriend (Anitra Morris). She kicks him out of the house, he roughs her up, steals her car, gets chased by the police, resists arrest, and sent to Citrus State Prison.

Joe Namath did commercials for Beautymist pantyhose. Reynolds, premier male sex symbol of the seventies, frequently guest hosted The Tonight Show

Guards don't like him for his history of point-shaving. Warden Hazen (Eddie Albert) wants Crewe to coach a football team so he can have a game of inmates versus guards. Crewe refuses at first and is forced to work on a chain gang.

Burt Reynolds' big movie before this was Deliverance (see link in sidebar) about a bunch of guys who went on a canoe trip, and they were all beaten and raped by rednecks. Bogdanski (Ray Nitschke), one of the guards, had been in the Green Bay Packers in real life.

Pop (John Steadman) is the sympathetic old-timer. “Caretaker” (James Hampton), who ends up being manager of the team, is also sympathetic to Crewe and uses his connections to help him get laid and drunk. Crewe finally gives in to the demands to coach a team, even though he know he can't win, so he can boost confidence of some of the prisoners and he gets leniency himself. Hazen needs the game to show his captain (Ed Lauter) that he has power. Nate Scarboro (Michael Conrad) was also a former pro-football player and happens to see how pathetic the team is that Crew put together and offers to be a coach as well.

The nude centerfold is a reference to Reynolds posing for a spread in Cosmopoltitan that was their “answer” to the Playboy playmate.

They recruit members, including Samson (Richard Kiel) and Shokner (Robert Tessier). The black prisoners initially refuse to participate. With Caretaker's connections, they were able to steal x-rays of the opposing team and the warden's secretary (Bernadette Peters) gets a game film, as well as gives him a “quickie”, I guess because he's Burt Reynolds.

Not used in this parody is the character of Unger, who wants to manage the team instead of Caretaker, is rebuffed, so kills Caretaker in retaliation.

The day of the game comes and it turns out Caretaker left the inmates uniforms for the team they now call “The Mean Machine”. Nobody expected them to have uniforms.

During halftime, Hazen confronts Crewe in the locker room angry that the game is fair. He can't have that if he wants to keep his reputation as a tough warden and threatens to frame Crewe for Caretaker's murder unless he throws the game. He does and the whole team knows they've been betrayed, but at the last minute Crewe decides he doesn't care what the warden said, gets his enthusiasm back, and has the Mean Machine play tough again.

The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing was a Western Reynolds starred in that was a big flop.

One of the ways The Mean Machine gets ahead is by repeatedly hitting Bogdanski in the groin. Scarboro, who has scored a touchdown and Granny, a player the didn't use in this parody, are badly hospitalized.

In the huddle in the first panel is Superfan, a strip by Nick Meglin and Jack Davis. The last panel has Reynolds posing exactly as he did in his Cosmopolitan centerfold.