Bang the Drum Slowly

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bang the Drum Slowly was Mark Harris's most celebrated baseball novel, a sequel to The Southpaw (1953). First published in 1956 and made famous by television (1956-with Paul Newman starring) and film (1973) adaptations. Harris's narrator Henry Wiggen, a star pitcher, tells the story of a baseball season with the New York Mammoths (a fictional team based on the New York Yankees) -- a season notable for the team's success but blighted by the terminal illness of catcher Bruce Pearson. Wiggen is probably the smartest player on the ballclub, and Pearson is likely the dumbest. Wiggen tries to be supportive of Pearson while concealing his illness. It is regarded as one of the best of all baseball stories.

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 1973 film starred Michael Moriarty as Wiggen, and a young unknown actor named Robert De Niro in the role of Pearson, and 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 and Raging Bull) or a charismatic sociopath (as in The Godfather: Part II, Taxi Driver, 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.

Moriarty is the grandson of former major-league outfielder and umpire George Moriarty.

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.

In the Family Guy episode Brian Does Hollywood, Brian Griffin directs a pornographic movie and the producer compares the script to that of Bang the Drum Slowly, "except the drum is a chick".

There is no drum in the film or the book. The title comes from the song The Streets of Laredo, sung by one of the ballplayers (Piney Woods, a back-up catcher recently recalled from the minors) at a team gathering.

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.