Novel: 1965, Mark Harris
Movie: 1973 - 96 minutes

Plot summary for Bang the Drum Slowly (1973)

The story of a New York pro baseball team and two of its players. Henry Wiggen is the star pitcher and Bruce Pearson is the normal, everyday catcher who is far from the star player on the team and friend to all of his teammates. During the off-season, Bruce learns that he is terminally ill, and Henry, his only true friend, is determined to be the one person there for him during his last season with the club. Throughout the course of the season, Henry and his teammates attempt to deal with Bruce’s impending illness, all the while attempting to make his last year a memorable one. David Landers dml@gwis.com

Cast:

Michael Moriarty… Henry ‘Author’ Wiggen
Robert De Niro… Bruce Pearson
Vincent Gardenia… Dutch Schnell
Phil Foster… Joe Jaros
Ann Wedgeworth… Katie
Heather MacRae… Holly Wiggen
Selma Diamond… Tootsie, Hotel switchboard operator
Barbara Babcock… Team Owner
Maurice Rosenfield… Team Owner
Tom Ligon… Piney Woods
Andy Jarrell… Ugly
Marshall Efron… Bradley
Danny Burks… Perry
Tom Signorelli… Goose Williams
James Donahue… Canada
Hector Elias… Dego
Nicolas Surovy… Aleck Olson
Danny Aiello… Horse
Hector Troy… George
Tony Major… Jonah
Barton Heyman… Red Traphagen
Jack Hollander… Tegwar Player
Lou Girolami… Tegwar Player
Ernesto Gonzalez… Dr. Charleston P. Chambers
Alan Manson… Doc Loftus, Mammoth team doctor
Arnold Kapnick… Detective Rogers
Jean David… Dutch’s Wife
Herb Henry… Keith Crane
Beatrice Manley… Joe’s Wife (as Bea Blau)
Dorothy Neubert… Mrs. Pearson
Dell Bethel… Third Base Coach
Vince Camuto… Baseball Player
Jeff Sartorius… Baseball Player
Willie Lemmey… Baseball Player
Doug Major… Baseball Player
Forrest Wynne… Bat Boy
Patrick McVey… Mr. Pearson
Frederic C. Weiler… Photographer (uncredited)

Director John D. Hancock

Writing credits Mark Harris novel
Mark Harris screenplay

Cinematography Richard Shore
Producers Lois Rosenfield
Maurice Rosenfield

Original Music Stephen Lawrence

Plot keywords for Bang the Drum Slowly (1973)

* Baseball
* Terminal Illness
* Athlete
* Friendship
* New York City
* Professional sports
* Based on novel

Awards for Bang the Drum Slowly (1973)

Academy Awards 1974 Nominated Oscar Best Actor in a Supporting Role Vincent Gardenia (manager)

New York Film Critics Circle Awards 1974 Won Award for Best Supporting Actor Robert De Niro

Trivia for Bang the Drum Slowly (1973)

* First produced as an hour-long live TV drama in 1956 on the United States Steel Hour, with Paul Newman as Henry Wiggen and Albert Salmi as Bruce Pierson.

* Though the uniforms appear to be New York Yankee uniforms, they’re actually the New York Mammoths.

* To prepare for his role, Robert De Niro went to Florida to watch baseball teams in spring training, then traveled to Georgia and tape recorded conversations to study their accents.

Memorable quotes for Bang the Drum Slowly (1973)

Bruce Pearson: Everybody’d be nice to you if they knew you were dying.

Henry Wiggen: Everybody knows everybody is dying; that’s why people are as good as they are.

Dutch Schnell: Skip the facts, just gimme the details.

Henry Wiggen: Oh Katie, honey, why don’t you get yourself married and raise yourself some exemptions.

Henry Wiggen: See, it was no double birdie.

Mr. Pearson: Double Birdie?

Bruce Pearson: Whereas for, it coulda been a spread eagle.

Henry Wiggen: Probably you’ve been playing Southeastern Tegwar all your life, but in the Majors the boys all play Western Canadian style. Which, for my money, is much faster. That leaves you free for a Butchered Hog most any time, whereas, uh.

Bruce Pearson: Whereas uh.

Mr. Pearson: Wh, Whereas what?

Bruce Pearson: Whereas, it, uh, keeps you from dropping dead on the board.

Henry Wiggen: These are Fifth and Two. Fifth and Queen.

Joe Jaros: Red Rooster.
[long pause, then Tegawar Player lays a 3. Joe slams down his cards]
Joe Jaros: BANJO! Ha-HAAAA! That’s the first natural Banjo since the days of Joe Dimaggio in St. Petersburg.

Henry Wiggen: Hey, wait a minute. Fifteen and Fifteen’s Thirty-One.

Tegwar Player: Hey, what’s the name of this game?

Joe Jaros: Fifteen and Fifteen is Thirty-TWO!
Henry Wiggen: Thirry-T… oh, that’s right.
[to Tegwar player]
Henry Wiggen: That’s a Double Honeybees.
Tegwar Player: I’m not too sure if I’m clear on some of these new rules.
Joe Jaros: What new rules? There hasn’t been any rules changes since the Black Sox Scandal, 1919. Big League Tegwar’s Big League Tegwar known to every big-time ballplayer from Boston to California.

Joe Jaros: Can you beat a Coney Island Tatey?

Bruce Pearson: What about this Double Ace Deucer?

Joe Jaros: I wish ya a lot of luck with it.

Dutch Schnell: [taking Piney's revolver in the locker room] Hand it over. I’m in no mood to see anybody get killed by a buller wound. Piney, I hear you have bullets with it too.

Piney Woods: Yes, sir. They’re in the gun.

Dutch Schnell: Why the hell didn’t you tell me?

Piney Woods: I didn’t think it’d go off. I’m always very careful.

Dutch Schnell: That’s what everybody says. That’s why the hospital’s full of babies.

Bang the Drum Slowly BY ROGER EBERT / August 26, 1973
(Note: early review)

BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY is the ultimate baseball movie — and, despite what a plot summary might suggest, I think it’s more about baseball than death. It takes place during the last season on this Earth of one Bruce Pearson, an earnest but dumb catcher from Georgia who learns, in the movie’s first scene, that he is suffering from an incurable disease. The movie is about that season and about his friendship with Henry Wiggen, a pitcher, who undertakes to see that Bruce at least lives his last months with some dignity, some joy, and a few good games.

On the surface, then, the movie seems a little like BRIAN’S SONG. But it’s not: It’s mostly about baseball and the daily life of a major league club on the road. The fact of Bruce’s approaching death adds a poignancy to the season, but BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY doesn’t brood about death and it isn’t morbid. In its mixture of fatalism, roughness, tenderness, and bleak humor, indeed, it seems to know more about the ways we handle death than a movie like LOVE STORY ever guessed.

The movie begins at the Mayo Clinic, follows the team through spring training, and then carries it through a season that feels remarkably like a Chicago Cubs year: a strong start, problems during the hot weather, dissension on the team, and then a pennant drive that (in the movie, anyway) is successful. There isn’t a lot of play-by-play action, only enough to establish the games and make the character points. So when the team manager and the pitcher conspire to let Bruce finish his last game, despite his illness, the action footage is relevant and moving.

BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY was adapted for the screen by Mark Harris, from his observant 1955 novel. He seems to understand baseball players, or at least he can create convincing ones; if real baseball players aren’t like the ones in this movie, somehow they should be. The director, John Hancock, is good with his actors and very good at establishing a lot of supporting characters without making a point of it (in this area he reminds me of Robert Altman’s shorthand typecasting in M*A*S*H and MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER). Some of the best scenes are in the clubhouse, an arena of hope, despair, anger, practical jokes, and impassioned speeches by the manager.

He’s played by Vincent Gardenia as a crafty, tough tactician with a heart of gold he tries to conceal. (”When I die,” he says during one pre-game pep talk, “in the newspapers they’ll write that the sons of bitches of this world have lost their leader.”) He knows Bruce and Henry are concealing something, but he doesn’t know what, and his efforts to find out are hilariously frustrated. At various times, the midwinter visit to the Mayo Clinic is explained as a fishing trip, a hunting trip, a wenching trip, and a secret mission to rid Bruce of the clap.

Gardenia, as the manager, is the third angle of a triangle that includes very good acting by Michael Moriarty, as Henry, and Robert De Niro, as Bruce. Henry is the All Star with the $70,000 contract and Bruce is a mediocre catcher who is constantly being ragged by his teammates. Henry’s his only friend, until somehow when the team comes together for the pennant stretch, Bruce starts playing the best ball in his life, and the club (somewhat predictably) accepts him.

Hancock and Harris avoid any temptation to structure BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY as a typical sports movie. Although the team does win the pennant, not much of a point is made of that. There are no telegraphed big moments on the field, when everything depends on a strikeout or a home run or something. Even Bruce’s last big hit in his last time at bat is limited, tactfully, to a triple.

Instead of going for a lot of high points, the movie paints characters in their everyday personalities. We get some feeling of life on the road as Henry talks with a hotel telephone operator who’s a baseball fanatic, and Bruce moons over the prostitute he’s in love with. Phil Foster has a great cameo role as a first-base coach with a genius for luring suckers into card games with remarkably elastic rules.

Occupying the background in a lot of shots is the team’s Cuban third baseman, who has it written into his contract that he be provided with a translator. And then, as the movie’s shape begins to be visible, we realize it’s not so much a sports movie as a movie about those elusive subjects, male bonding and work in America. That the males play baseball and that sport is their work is what makes this the ultimate baseball movie; never before has a movie considered the game from the inside out.

Fan Reviews on IMDB:

New York Mammoth star Pitcher Henry Wiggen (played by Michael Moriarty of future LAW AND ORDER fame) learns that his friend and catcher Bruce Pearson (a young Robert De Niro) is terminally ill. Because Bruce is a marginal player and, more importantly, a vulnerable, simple soul, Henry sets out to protect his compadre from the wrath of his teammates, management, and the predators of Life. Upon learning of his friend’s condition, Henry negotiates as part of his contract that Bruce will remain with the team for the entire season. He also strives (and this is perhaps the biggest crux of conflict of the film) to keep Bruce’s condition their secret for reasons far greater than mere confidentiality. Henry doesn’t know what the fallout would be from disclosure, and one of the best scenes in the film is a grilling he gets when the manager suspects that he is hiding something. Henry is also there as Bruce deals with the unsettling prospects of terminal illness.

Although the setting is baseball (and writer Mark Harris is one of the best authors of baseball fiction) the story is really about friendship and what a man will do for a friend when he knows that more is at stake than winning games. Younger viewers might not relate to a number of things that date the film somewhat, such a a player negotiating his contract without an agent and Henry’s off-season moonlighting as an insurance salesman (yes, players really did do that back before free agency). Any baseball fan will appreciate the footage of Old Yankee Stadium before it was renovated in 1974-75, drastically changing the character of the legendary old park. There is an eerie real-life foreshadowing of the fate of another New York catcher, also wearing Bruce’s number 15. It must be said that the supporting roles, such as the team’s salty old manager Dutch (Vincent Gardenia), and Bruce’s gold digging girlfriend Katie (Ann Wedgeworth), are portrayed extremely well.

I’ll never forget Michael Moriarty’s Henry Wiggen in a scene where he reaches out to embrace a distraught, frightened Bruce Pearson (Robert De Niro), trying his best to console his dying roommate. ” We’re all dying,” Wiggen says to his friend, and thus begins and shortly ends one of the most tender scenes ever filmed between two men, in a movie about baseball, no less. And yet it’s really not about baseball at all; yes, there are the obligatory scenes of the team at play and a humorous locker room speech by the team’s crusty manager (the wonderful, late Vincent Gardenia, who received a supporting actor Oscar nomination for this film). There is plenty of humor to go along with the pathos in this story but pathos wins out. Death hangs over everyone’s head in this picture : the message is pure and simple . To quote the movie’s poster tag line, “Nothing is more important than friendship, not even death”. I suppose a movie like this wouldn’t work as well nowadays. The team support and management along with ridiculous sky rocketing salaries and apathetic treatment of sports fans has changed everything for the worse; this sweet little movie touches on a more innocent time. BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY will not enter the record books as one of the all time greats: it’s too pat and maudlin at times (the locker room scene where Piney Woods plaintively strums the title song on the guitar is overkill, although it gets to me every time). But Moriarty and De Niro and a timeless reminder of the importance of love and friendship make this an unforgettable film.

A good little sports film that will make you cry a little and give you lines that you never forget. “From now on, I rag no one.”

Robert DiNiro plays the dying catcher. He is dumb and innocent and takes everything at face value. The key line, which he delivers is “I guess everybody would be nice to everybody if they knew they were dying.” That’s what this movie is about. There is a great musical score, a dramatic peak in the use of the title song, and great editing. Michael Moriarty in the lead has the best role he was ever given and suits it perfectly. Robert De Niro underplays the dying catcher to perfection and Vincent Gardenia, as the coach, plays a pretty stock role just as required.

There is nothing to criticize about BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY. It’s simply wonderful. And somehow, unnoticed.

When Michael Moriarty learns his friend Robert De Niro is incurably sick and will soon die, he makes a decision to give his friend a final season of friendship and support. He is equally awkward, and must move cautiously, in persuading the other players to help, and to keep mum when symptoms of the illness appear. Eventually, everybody is in on the effort to help. De Niro is welcomed into the TEGWAR games, and into the glee club. The team doctor is in the dugout at every game. The patient is able to hold up his end as catcher when the rotation brings him up to catch a game. At bat, it seems his best play all year is to hit a good solid triple and come into third standing up. In what turns out to be his last game, his team-mates see the trouble coming. The first baseman dashes in and snags a pop fly that De Niro can no longer handle himself.

In his final monologue, walking away from De Niro’s graveside, Moriarty gives what could be considered a strong contender for the best curtain line ever: “From here on in, I rag nobody.”

Three key scenes:
1) Near the opening, Bruce burns all of his old press clippings at home after getting the diagnosis. It’s as if since his future looks limited, his past no longer has meaning to him.

2) Bruce’s father, a simple man like his son, visits and has a talk with Wiggen. Mr. Pearson’s struggle to accept his son’s fate and then coming out with the words to express himself, coupled with Wiggen’s emotions during and after the talk is a marvelous scene.

3) The pennant clinching game. The ump sees Bruce struggling and uses the excuse of brushing off the plate to talk to him. “Don’t slow down the game. You all right? You don’t look all right.” Wiggen is at his best, pouring in strike after strike as the pace picks up, and then it abruptly goes to slow motion with a pop up in front of the plate. The whole game sequence is very well done.

Both actors turn in magnificent performances, but you can’t beat this film for an excellent foretelling of a major talent. By 1973, De Niro had acted in a few movies, but it was his astounding work in this film that really put him on the map. His Bruce Pearson isn’t just a simpleton for whom the audience is supposed to feel a truckload of sympathy - there are many television movies that do just that - he’s a multilayered person. De Niro squeezes more emotion out of a single sideways smile than many actors can do in their entire careers. What’s more, even though you the viewer know what Pearson’s fate is, you’re no less pulling for him.

Call this a tearjerker, and you’d be correct. But ultimately, De Niro’s conviction and a solid script put this far above most other films of this genre.

Filming locations for Bang the Drum Slowly (1973)

Clearwater, FL
New York City
Queens, New York
Washington, DC

Above adapted from: http://imdb.com/title/tt0069765/

Bang the Drum Slowly (film) From Wikipedia

Budget $1,000,000
BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY is a 1973 film adaption of the 1956 baseball novel of the same name by Mark Harris. The film was directed by John D. Hancock and stars Michael Moriarty as Wiggen, and a then young unknown actor named Robert De Niro in the role of Pearson. It was met with box office success and critical acclaim. De Niro’s performance in the film and in MEAN STREETS, released two months later, brought him widespread acclaim. Compared with other roles which have seemed to typecast him as a troubled loner (as in THE DEER HUNTER, RAGING BULL, and TAXI DRIVER) or a charismatic sociopath (as in THE GODFATHER: PART II, ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, GOODFELLAS, and CAPE FEAR, to name a few), the Pearson role has been regarded as one of his more tragic and sensitive characters.

Production
The opening scenes of the movie show the stars running the track at Yankee Stadium before its 1973 to 1976 renovation, but due to the renovation, the baseball scenes were filmed in Shea Stadium.

The film and book include a fictional card game known as Tegwar, which means “The Exciting Game Without Any Rules.” It is a game basically designed to separate a sucker from his cash. Henry Wiggen plays this game along with other ballplayers and coaches, to sucker passers by in the lobby of the team hotel. It is generally believed that Bruce Pearson is too dumb to be able to sucker people, so he is excluded. However, Henry begins to include Bruce in the tegwar games as the story progresses.

This film is reportedly Robert De Niro’s colleague Al Pacino’s favorite film. Legend has it that Pacino was originally cast in the Pearson role, but was offered the coveted role of Michael Corleone in THE GODFATHER, which he accepted. De Niro, also cast in THE GODFATHER but in a smaller role, was offered up as a substitute by Francis Ford Coppola.

In reviews, Wiggen is often referred to as “the Tom Seaver character.” Reinforced by the Shea Stadium locale, this has led some viewers to incorrectly believe that the story is factually based. The result is that when the film came out, Seaver, more than once, had to reassure concerned fans that battery mate Jerry Grote was alive and well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bang_the_Drum_Slowly_(film)

New York Times
Mark Harris, Author of ‘Bang the Drum Slowly,’ Is Dead at 84
By Frank Litsky, June 2, 2007

Mark Harris, who took readers on a literary journey through the life of a mythical baseball player in four well-received novels, including BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY, which became the basis of a 1973 movie, died Wednesday. He was 84 and lived in Goleta, Calif.

His death, at a hospital in Santa Barbara, was caused by complications of Alzheimer’s disease, his son Henry said.

BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY (1956) was the second of Mr. Harris’s tetralogy of baseball novels, following THE SOUTHPAW (1953). The others were A TICKET FOR A SEAMSTITCH (1957) and IT LOOKED LIKE FOR EVER (1979). BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY, named one of the top 100 sports books of all time by Sports Illustrated, was the most popular of the four.

The books follow the adventures of Henry Wiggen, a gifted pitcher for the fictional New York Mammoths. Wiggen himself narrates the tales in a colloquial voice laced with dry, country humor. All the books grapple with moral and social issues.

In BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY, Wiggen befriends a slow-talking catcher from Georgia named Bruce Pearson who is more ridiculed than respected by his teammates. When Pearson learns he is terminally ill with Hodgkin’s disease and is to be sent to the minor leagues, Wiggen rallies his teammates to keep the catcher among them and inspires Pearson to become a better player before his time runs out.

The book, wrote the New York Times sports columnist George Vecsey, “has one of the loveliest last lines in American literature, a regret from Wiggen for the way the players made fun of a slow-witted and now-dead teammate: ‘From here on in, I rag nobody.’ ”

The film version, adapted by Mr. Harris, starred Michael Moriarty as Wiggen and Robert De Niro as Pearson. In 1956, the story was the basis of a teleplay shown on CBS, with Paul Newman as Wiggen and Albert Salmi as Pearson.

THE SOUTHPAW recounts Wiggen’s rookie year. Here the narrator debates how to handle four-letter words and references to baseball players’ sex lives and decides in the end to leave them in, because they are part of the game.
Critics called it a serious work of fiction, comparable to Bernard Malamud’s baseball novel of the year before, THE NATURAL.

In the last of the novels, IT LOOKED LIKE FOR EVER, Wiggen, now 39, has lost his fastball. The novel “is not so much about baseball as it is about aging, just as BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY was not so much about baseball as it is about dying,” wrote the poet and critic Donald Hall in The New York Times Book Review.

Mr. Hall added, “Writing like Harris’s helps us to understand, even to withstand, disaster — Vietnam, the meaningless death of the young, an enlarged prostate gland and, in an earlier work of art, the failure of Mudville’s Casey.”

In all, Mr. Harris wrote 13 novels and 4 nonfiction books. His nonfiction books included MARK THE GLOVE BOY, OR THE LAST DAYS OF RICHARD NIXON (1964); an autobiography, BEST FATHER EVER INVENTED (1976); and SAUL BELLOW: DRUMLIN WOODCHUCK (1980). He also edited SELECTED POEMS OF VACHEL LINDSAY (1963) and THE HEART OF BOSWELL: SIX JOURNALS IN ONE VOLUME (1981) and wrote book reviews, critical essays and articles.

DIAMOND, a collection of Mr. Harris’s baseball essays, was published in 1994.

Mark Harris Finkelstein was born on Nov. 19, 1922, in Mount Vernon, N.Y., and reared there. Harris legally changed his name in the 1940s when, his son said, “he was advised that his career as a writer would take better root if he did not go by a Jewish name.”

After Army service in 1943 and 1944, he worked for newspapers in Port Chester, N.Y., and New York City. He also wrote for Negro Digest and Ebony. His first novel, TRUMPET TO THE WORLD (1946), concerns racial inequality and tells of a black writer who rises from poverty to the best-seller list.

Mr. Harris received a bachelor’s degree in 1950 and a master’s in 1951, both in English, from the University of Denver, and a Ph.D. in American studies in 1956 from the University of Minnesota. He taught English at five universities, the final one Arizona State University from 1980 to 2002.

He married Josephine Horen in 1946. He is survived by his wife; a daughter, Hester Jill, of San Francisco; two sons, Anthony, of Santa Barbara, and Henry, of Los Angeles; three grandchildren; and a sister, Martha Harris, of Pittsburgh.

“There is nothing I can say which will explain myself,” Mr. Harris said in an interview in 1959. “To some extent, I have said what I know in my books.”

To the poet Mr. Hall, Mr. Harris’s achievement was in distilling that knowledge into lyrical stories of a game. “Mr. Harris’s literary game of baseball is a version of pastoral — a small, intact reduction of the world,” Mr. Hall wrote. Speaking of Wiggen, he added, “If I had a vote, I would put Henry up for Cooperstown.”

Cordelia Candelaria, the author of SEEKING THE PERFECT GAME: BASEBALL IN AMERICAN LITERATURE, has rated Harris’ THE SOUTHPAW and BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY among the top five baseball novels ever written.

Candelaria, who taught creative writing at Arizona State University at Tempe, said that Harris’ contribution to American literature was not limited to his baseball writing, though his greatest influence, she said, was through the character of Wiggen.

“He’s every bit as permanent and important as Huckleberry Finn, as Ishmael and Ahab in ‘Moby Dick,’ and as Nick Adams in Hemingway’s short stories,” Candelaria said. “Henry Wiggen struggles with his individuality, his place in society and the moral dilemmas he faces. All of those struggles are as much about him as an American character as they are about baseball.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/02/sports/baseball/02harris.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
http://www.broowaha.com/article.php?id=1690

Ending of the book:

On October 7, Henry gets the call from Bruce’s father informing him that Bruce has died. Henry offers this affecting epitaph:

In my Arcturus Calendar for October 7 it says, “De Soto visited Georgia, 1540.” This hands me a laugh. Bruce Pearson also visited Georgia. I was his pall-bear, me and 2 fellows from the crate and box plant and some town boys, and that was all. There were flowers from the club, but no person from the club. They could of sent somebody.

He was not a bad fellow, no worse than most and probably better than some, and not a bad ballplayer neither when they give him a chance, when they laid off him long enough. From here on in I rag nobody.