The Natural
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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| Author | Bernard Malamud |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Harcourt Brace and Company |
| Released | 1952 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| ISBN | NA |
| The Natural | |
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 Promotional poster of The Natural |
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| Directed by | Barry Levinson |
| Produced by | Mark Johnson |
| Written by | Bernard Malamud and Roger Towne, (based on a novel by Bernard Malamud and Kevin Baker) |
| Starring | Robert Redford Robert Duvall Glenn Close Kim Basinger Barbara Hershey, Darren McGavin, Wilford Brimley Richard Farnsworth |
| Distributed by | TriStar Pictures |
| Release date(s) | January 1, 1984 |
| Running time | 137 min. |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $28,000,000 |
| IMDb profile | |
The Natural is a 1952 novel about baseball written by Bernard Malamud. The book follows Roy Hobbs, a baseball prodigy whose career is sidetracked when he is shot by a crazed fan. Most of the story concerns itself with his attempts to return to baseball later in life, when he plays for the fictional New York Knights with his legendary bat, "Wonderboy." It has been suggested that the story closely parallels the legends of Percival and King Arthur.
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[edit] The film
The Natural was adapted into a film starring Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs in 1984. The movie is not considered to be faithful to the book, since important details are changed, particularly the film's upbeat ending, which differs significantly from the novel's ending. While Malamud wrote a dark satire of a fallen hero, the film version took a traditional "Hollywood" approach.
However, the movie, like the book, concerns the experiences of Roy Hobbs, an individual with great "natural" baseball talent. Early in the movie, Roy's father tells him that his success will involve his natural ability less than how hard he works to be successful. The remainder of the movie chronicles Roy's trials and suffering.
In 1984, The Natural was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Supporting Actress (Glenn Close), and nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress (Kim Basinger). Many of the baseball scenes were filmed in Buffalo, New York's War Memorial Stadium, built in 1937 and demolished a few years after the film was produced. Buffalo's All-High Stadium stood in for Chicago's Wrigley Field in a key scene in the film.
[edit] The musical score
Randy Newman's dramatic and Oscar-nominated score, which was described by at least one complimentary critic as "Coplandesque", has been referenced frequently since then, in visual pieces underscoring other "natural" ballplayers. The music has been used in a documentary about Hall of Famer Ryne Sandberg; retellings of Ichiro Suzuki's breaking of the single-season hits record from Roy's era of 1920; and in retellings of Game 1 of the 1988 World Series, when a seriously injured Kirk Gibson hit a dramatic game-winning 9th inning home run reminiscent of Roy Hobbs' blast to win the pennant. To this day, the movie's theme is often played at ballparks when a home-team player hits a significant home run, as the Boston Red Sox did on September 21, 2006 when David Ortiz blasted his 51st Home Run of the season, breaking Jimmie Foxx's 68 year old Red Sox club record of 50 Home Runs. The theme was played as Frank Robinson walked off the field at RFK Stadium after his penultimate game as a manager.
Billy Joel traditionally uses a theme from the score as an introduction while on tour.
Also, excerpts from the score were used in the memorable series finale of the hit ABC-TV series The Wonder Years in 1993.
[edit] The plot of the film
The movie begins by showing Roy Hobbs as a grown man, looking rather old for his years, silently awaiting a train that will take him to New York for a last chance at baseball. The specifics of his early career are not revealed until later. The film then cuts to a lengthy flashback showing Hobbs as a young boy playing baseball on an American farm, somewhere in the Midwest, with his father. He is obviously a highly-talented baseball player. When a tree, under which his father had died, is destroyed by lightning, Roy takes a piece of the tree and makes a bat from it, on which he burns a lightning bolt and the label "Wonderboy". He carries the bat with him throughout his career, in a trombone case. [Little of this material is in the original novel. Hobbs did carve the bat out of a tree split open by lighting and name it Wonderboy, and he does carry it with him throughout his career, but this is revealed through exposition much later in the story. The material concerning Roy's childhood, the farm, his father, etc. are absent from the book.]
Hobbs embarks on his baseball career, not as a batter but an ace pitcher. He travels by train throughout the country, hoping to land a spot with a major league team. [This is where the novel's plot begins; the first image is that of a match igniting, symbolizing creation, followed by a train thundering out of a tunnel, representing a metaphorical birth.] Hobbs's talent is virtually infinite: in one incident at a fair, the teenaged farm boy accepts a wager to throw three pitches to "The Whammer", the top hitter in the major leagues and modeled after Babe Ruth. Honorable but young and a bit cocksure, the young Hobbs is seduced by Harriet Bird (Barbara Hershey), an alluring but dark and sinister woman who gravitates to him after judging that he is the best baseball player who ever lived. In a hotel room, Bird shoots Hobbs in the mid-section just before committing suicide. [This is fairly well-adapted from the novel, except for the part about Hobbs being "honorable," and the fact that the novel's time frame is about 10 years later than that of the film. Harriet's fate, though, is not described in the novel; there is no indication that she committed suicide, and the photos which emerge later show her dancing over his unconscious body. In addition, Hobbs' mentor Sam Simpson, who makes the bet on Hobbs' behalf, dies just before Hobbs is invited to Harriet's hotel room.]
The story skips forward 16 years. [15 years in the novel.] Hobbs is now thirty-five and has just arrived in New York by train. He helps a down-on-their-luck, fictitious National League team called the New York Knights [replacing the Giants; the other contemporary National League teams are present in the film and novel, although their uniforms are not accurately represented in the film] and is signed by a scout (in a blunder that later turns out to be part of the movie's main subplot) who thinks he is a washout, without consulting the team's manager and co-owner. The gruff manager, Pop Fisher (Wilford Brimley) is unimpressed by the aged Hobbs. However, Hobbs refuses to leave, and eventually gets a chance to take batting practice, where he hits every ball well past the fence. Still skeptical, Fisher agrees to let Hobbs play. In Hobbs's first at bat in a major league game, he hits the ball but not for a home run--instead, he literally tears the cover off the ball, sending an unraveling ball of string into the outfield. From that point on, Hobbs hits massive home runs time after time, rising to stardom and reversing the bottom-dwelling Knights' fortunes. [All this follows the novel fairly closely. Hobbs' success arrives on the heels of the failure of the team's previous star player, Bump Baily, who is a pompous lunkhead in the film and an obnoxious clown in the novel. In both versions, he is so "inspired" by Hobbs' prowess that he begins to play harder, only to crash through an outfield wall and kill himself.]
Despite his supernatural abilities and general goodness, Hobbs and his abilities are vulnerable to temptation. [That "general goodness" is not present in the novel. This is a principal difference between the original story and the adaptation. In the book, the character is shallow, vain and unmindful of the responsibilities of heroism; he is driven only by his selfish appetites for women, wealth and fame.] An unscrupulous and cynical reporter, Max Mercy (Robert Duvall), hounds Hobbs through the season. The mystery of those sixteen years is slowly revealed as Roy's childhood sweetheart, Iris Gaines (Glenn Close), returns to his life. It is later revealed that an encounter between Roy and Iris sixteen years earlier had produced a son. [None of this is true in the novel. While Iris, whose last name is Lemon in the book, does stand up at Wrigley Field to inspire Hobbs to break out of his batting slump, they were not childhood sweethearts. They had never met before. Obviously, therefore, she could not have had his child, but she did have a grown daughter and was already a grandmother at age 33. After meeting for the first time, she and Roy have a brief tryst in a park where, as it later turns out, he impregnates her.]
The corrupt owner of the Knights, The Judge (played by Robert Prosky), who hates bright light, tries to persuade, even bribe, Hobbs to throw the remainder of the season owing to a contractual agreement between The Judge and Pop Fisher, whereby The Judge will obtain full ownership from Pop if the team fails to win the pennant. Hobbs feels strong loyalty to Pop, the archetypical gruff but loveable coach, particularly as Pop has confided to him that his one dream is to win the pennant; Pop doesn't care about winning the World Series, he just wants to be there. Hobbs cares little about money and stands firm against The Judge's attempts to buy his honor. [Hobbs cares little for Pop in the novel; he approaches the Judge on his own initiative, seeking a raise on the premise that he deserves it due to his on-field contributions. However, not only does he end up getting nothing, the Judge (whose name, incidentally and ironically, is Goodwill Banner) makes him pay the cost of one of his uniforms, which Baily had earlier destroyed in a prank.] However, The Judge realizes Hobbs's one weakness--he can be corrupted by a woman. A gambler associate of The Judge, Gus Sands (Darren McGavin), introduces Hobbs to his mistress, Memo Paris (Kim Basinger). [In both the film and the novel, Memo was Baily's girlfriend and there were rumors, debunked by Baily, that they were engaged. It is not clear in either version whether Memo is intimately involved with Gus. The novel shows a hostility developing between Baily and Hobbs after the latter "accidentally" sleeps with Memo when he and Baily switch hotel rooms; she went into the wrong room. She treats Roy with contempt from then on until finally agreeing to date him after the encounter with Gus at the Pot of Fire.]
Hobbs battles through many distractions and adversities, including succumbing to the sexual persuasions of Memo, who, while not as clearly sinister as the woman who shot him years ago, is most definitely an amoral and corrupting character. As Roy falls further into Memo's embrace and away from his honor, his play suffers, as if he has been reduced from partly divine to just a flawed, over-the-hill man. Before the pennant-deciding game, Hobbs eventually resolves to break free of Memo's and The Judge's web, and The Judge resorts to poisoning Hobbs (leading to a reaggravation of the injuries to his stomach sustained in the shooting). Whether or not the Judge had anything to do with Hobbs' incapacitation is left somewhat ambiguous, it may merely be a recurrence of the old bullet injury being aggravated by Hobbs' intense play and the stress of a pennant race with the entire team on his shoulders. Up until the last minute it is doubtful Hobbs will be able to play, after he collapses while attempted batting practice, against doctor's orders, in collusion with the trainer and some of the Knight's players.
Hobbs, of course, plays in the game even as his stomach bleeds through his shirt. The game stays close, in part because at least one key member of the Knights has clearly been paid off by the Judge's underworld associates and is trying to throwing the game.
[This is where the film truly departs from the novel; in the book, Roy accepts the bribe and does not decide until well into the ballgame to change his mind and try to win. This occurs when Roy is at bat deliberately hitting foul balls into the stands at an obnoxious fan called Otto Zipp; he accidentally hits Iris, who he didn't know was there, and who tells him that she is pregnant with his child. He resolves to win the game for her, and for the child. By this time, however, it is too late...]
As befits both an epic poem and a baseball movie, Roy comes to bat in the bottom of the ninth, with a chance to win the game. He looks to the stands and sees Iris Gaines (Glenn Close), his childhood sweetheart and as pure and good a person as the other two female characters are predatory and poisonous. She stands up, shrouded in white light. (Actually, she stands up earlier in the film, helping Hobbs break his unlucky streak.) She is with a boy, who looks to be about sixteen and bears a striking resemblance to Robert Redford. Despite this, Hobbs fails to put two and two together until Iris hurriedly passes a note down through the crowd to Hobbs. He reads it, presumably saying that the boy is his son, and with the realization that he is redeemed, again becomes more than human: Roy Hobbs, The Natural. His stomach is bleeding more than ever, and he realizes that he may die; of course, it is his duty and destiny to stand at bat. As he steps up to the batter's box with divine determination, he swings Wonderboy, infused with the soul of his father, at the first pitch: the culmination of his quest. And gets around on it: hard and dead foul. Having dropped the bat, Hobbs looks down and sees that Wonderboy had shattered. No longer able to depend on his tools, Hobbs tells the awkward but good-hearted bat boy to pick a good one for him. The bat is not magical in the way that Wonderboy was, but it is a good bat, one Hobbs had helped the batboy make earlier, as he had made Wonderboy as a boy, and Hobbs grips it in his hands, realizing that his success or failure is his own. His stomach has started bleeding more profusely, and he accepts the fact that the biggest swing of his life will probably kill him. Hobbs shrugs off the umpire's concern about the bleeding, telling him to play ball and staring down the pitcher (apparently a young pitching phenom, much as Hobbs had been at the beginning of his career). Unfortunately, the pitcher's sneer is no match against the demi-god Hobbs, and Hobbs proceeds to hit a towering home run, which soars into the stadium's lights and starts a chain reaction that bursts the lights and rains sparks down over the field and the Judge and his cronies in his private box and over Hobbs as he runs the bases, in a famous and really quite beautiful scene, backed by Randy Newman's iconic score (which is often played at baseball games following homeruns).
[In the novel, he strikes out. The confrontation with the Judge, Gus and Memo in the Judge's office takes place after the game; in the film, it happens before the game. In the book, Roy angrily gives back the bribe money and physically assaults the Judge and Gus; Memo tries to shoot him and misses, as she does in the film.]
The Knights have won the pennant, and true to Pop Fisher's dream, we don't see what happens in the World Series. It's the end of baseball for Hobbs, and the film ends with a scene of Hobbs playing catch with his son in a sun-dappled cornfield, with Iris standing by. [The novel ends with Roy losing everything as his career is over, his chance at fame and fortune is gone, the bribe scandal hits the papers along with a photo of him and Harriet Bird after she shot him, and his records are likely to be stricken. A small boy says to him, "Say it ain't true, Roy!" as he sits on a bench weeping "many bitter tears," realizing too late that he never learned anything from his failures in life and must continue to suffer for them.]
[edit] Influences
The Natural is the first narrative novel about baseball and includes numerous parallels to Arthurian legends, while the plot structure follows The Odyssey to some extent. The similarities to The Odyssey include a long, sidetracked journey involving sexual encounters (Calypso and Circe in The Odyssey, Memo Paris in The Natural), and finally the arrival home to his son and his mother (Penelope and Telemachus in The Odyssey; Iris and her son in The Natural).
There are also parallels between the Roy Hobbs character and Achilles, the figure in Greek mythology whose mother dipped him in a river that granted divinity and immortality, but did so while holding Achilles by the foot, partially retaining his mortal nature. Hobbs is similarly more than a mere mortal--the movie clearly portrays him as semi-divine. When Hobbs is at his best, he plays baseball better than any mortal, hitting more than one home run that appears to travel over 1,000 feet, far further than any human could. Hobbs is also invulnerable to almost every earthly temptation: he is not interested in money, power, or luxury. But, he has his Achilles heel, the part of him that is flawed and mortal: he is attracted to seductive but wicked women, and becomes corrupted by them. Once seduced by these women, his divine side recedes and he is simply a man: weak, mortal, without his skills.
After a spectacular start in the Majors, Roy goes into a deep slump. He comes out of this slump when a woman in a brightly colored dress rises out of the crowd. The woman's name is Iris, the same as the messenger of the gods from Greek mythology.
Among major league players, Roy Hobbs bears a certain similarity to Ted Williams and also (in the book, at least) Shoeless Joe Jackson with one critical incident referencing Eddie Waitkus. Roy begins his baseball career as a pitcher, good enough as a teenager to strike out the Major League's leading hitter in an impromptu exhibition; later in life he becomes famous as a home run hitter with extraordinary power. The arc of Roy's career, beginning as a dominant pitcher and ending as a phenomenal hitter, parallels the career of Babe Ruth.
Williams, the Red Sox great, said that his goal in playing baseball was for people to say, when he walked down the street, "There goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived." Hobbs has a similar, though somewhat more ambitious, desire for people to say he was the greatest ball player who ever lived. Like Hobbs, Williams missed years of his career during his prime (owing to military service during World War II and the Korean War, the year of the book's publication), and both later returned to baseball as stars. Other similarities are that both Hobbs and Williams played the outfield, wore the number nine on their jerseys, hit home runs during their last Major League at-bats, and each won one pennant in his career. The last two facts only occur in the movie; the book was printed eight years before the end of Williams' career and ends in a strikeout.
Hobbs' severe gunshot wound by a vengeful woman, who then leaps to her death, combines and exaggerates a couple of incidents involving real-life major leaguers. In the early 1930s, Billy Jurges was accidentally shot while trying to wrest a gun from a suicidal former girlfriend. In 1949, Eddie Waitkus was shot by a female stalker unknown to him and whom he had unwisely agreed to visit in her hotel room. Waitkus' story is often cited as "inspiring" Malamud to write the book. Both players recovered from their wounds and resumed their careers. The women were institutionalized.
In the book (though not in the film), when Hobbs is found to have taken a bribe, a boy cries, "Say it ain't true, Roy!" This is an obvious reference to Joe Jackson and the Black Sox scandal of 1919. Jackson was often labeled a "great natural hitter".
[edit] Baseball references
- References to the book and movie title have been frequent. Will Clark was known by the nickname "The Natural" throughout his career after his first-career-at-bat, first-pitch home run off of Nolan Ryan, which suggested the scene in which Roy Hobbs "hits the cover off the ball" in his first career-at-bat. The Sports Illustrated cover story for August 29, 2005, featured Atlanta Braves rookie sensation Jeff Francoeur and was titled, "The Natural".
- On October 16, 1988, the day after Kirk Gibson hit his dramatic homerun off of pitcher Dennis Eckersley to win Game 1 of the World Series for the Los Angeles Dodgers, NBC spliced together clips from Robert Redford and his at-bat in the Natural with Kirk Gibson's at bat and subsequent homerun. The theme to The Natural supplied the background music.
[edit] References in popular culture
In the third-season episode of The Simpsons titled Homer at the Bat, Homer joins the nuclear plant's softball team and leads them to the championship game using a hand-crafted bat named Wonderbat (with a sloppy lightning-bolt drawn on the side). Music reminiscent of the score from The Natural plays when Homer hits home runs. The references cease when major-league players are brought in to win the championship game, and Wonderbat is destroyed by Roger Clemens, who burns it in half with a laser-like underhand pitch.
In another episode featuring Homer's attempt to bowl a 300, the music that was played before Roy Hobbs' game-winning home run is used as a background for Homer's final strike. The action pans other characters, including a group of old-time photographers snapping pictures as Homer releases the ball. Like Hobbs' destruction of the ballpark lights, Homer's last strike causes all of the other pins in the other lanes to explode; balloons and streamers fall from the ceiling. The actual scene of exploding lights is often parodied on the show during scenes involving baseball. Also, much of the music from the show itself is based on Randy Newman's score.
The episode "The Natural" of It's Garry Shandling's Show mirrors the movie, except that ping-pong is the sport instead of baseball. A special paddle is the mythical "Wonderboy".
The pilot episode of Quantum Leap (sometimes called "Genesis") ends with Sam Beckett scoring the season-ending run for a minor league team, shortly after Al tells him "Well, you're not Roy Hobbs, either." The script notes that "from this point on, we duplicate the shooting style of The Natural." Parallels between the two scenes include Sam asking the bat boy to choose a good bat for him and unexpected lightning, slow motion and similar music. However, Sam misses the ball, and scores on a wild pitch and two errors.
In the movie BASEketball, numerous references are made to The Natural, including the ball that the main character calls "La-Z-Boy", because he made it himself from a recliner.
In a Peanuts comic strip published on March 30, 1993, in his final at bat of the little league season, infamous character Charlie Brown hit a home run for the first time in any Peanuts comic. Afterward it was revealed he hit it off of the great-granddaughter of the fictional Roy Hobbs character. Hobbs' grandaughter returned to the strip intermittently through the mid-nineties. In one series, she tried to sell an authentic bat signed by Roy Hobbs to Charlie Brown. Charile Brown refused and Lucy bought the bat thinking it was a rare collectible item. Eventually, she admitted to the fact that Roy Hobbs was fictional.
A TV ad for XM Satellite Radio radio, played during the 2006 Major League Baseball championship series, referred directly to the climactic scene in the film. It showed an animated baseball flying toward an animated light tower, shattering the lights, accompanied by the corresponding portion of the film score.
In "Two Guys a Girl and a Pizza Place" season 1 ep.6 "The Softball Team" Mr. Bauer takes a cue from The Natural, against Tessio's Pizza.
In World Wrestling Entertainment, wrestler Bret Hart uses the moniker "The best there was, the best there is, and the best there ever will be.", a quote from the movie.
[edit] Metaphors
One metaphor is the grand allusion to the story of King Arthur and Percival.[citation needed] Percival is a country boy (like Roy) whose father was a great knight (like Roy's father was a great semi-pro ballplayer). Percival comes to be one of Arthur's knights in search of the Holy Grail. He comes upon the Waste Land, which The Fisher King rules over. The Fisher King is ill, and when he is ill, the land is ill. The Fisher King is like the coach of Roy's baseball team, Pop Fisher. Pop has a disease on his hands like athlete's foot. When Roy comes along and makes his first hit, and the team's long losing streak ends, Pop's hands start to heal and it rains for 3 days making the grass green again. But Roy, like Percival, gets distracted from his duties by his infatuation with a woman.
Another metaphoric aspect may involve a gothic theme, specifically vampire imagery. This may seem far-fetched but is supported by the text and occurs when Roy encounters Harriet Bird on the train, and in the hotel where she shoots him. In the novel, it is mentioned that someone had been shooting talented athletes with silver bullets, and we can assume the shooter to have been Harriet. Silver bullets are believed in some circles to kill the undead - such as vampires. However, Roy Hobbs does not die as a result of the attack on him, indicating that he is not a "vampire." On the other hand, his survival, and certain other "magic realistic" aspects of the novel suggest that he is not entirely human.[citation needed]
A chief character metaphorically indicated as a vampire is the owner, as mentioned in the following passage found on page 89: “The Cigar glowed, the Judge blew out a black fog of smoke, then they were once more in the dark. Lights on, you stingy bastard, Roy thought. ‘Pardon the absence of light,” the Judge said, almost making him jump. “As a youngster I was frightened of the dark - used to wake up sobbing in it, as if it were water and I were drowning - but you will observe that I much prefer a dark to a lit room.”
With this allusion to vampires, Bernard Malamud is suggesting that although many may perceive baseball players as corrupt, money- hungry figures, the actual problem lies with the Owners who are "sucking the life" out of baseball by introducing greed into the game.[citation needed]
Contemporary critics noted how the imagery of women in the film, in general, is starkly separated into timeless traditions of "good" and "evil". The two "evil" women (Harriet and Memo) often wear dark clothing and are both sexy and sinister. The "good" woman (Iris) takes on a literally angelic character in a crucial moment in Chicago, when she stands and her white hat is haloed by sunlight, as she catches Hobbs' attention and leads him "to the light", and out of the batting slump brought on by Memo's nefarious distractions.[citation needed]
[edit] Criticism and impact
Critics were not universally impressed when the film appeared. Leonard Maltin said it was "Too long and inconsistent". Another critic said, "The ending is so hokey you don't know whether to laugh or cry." Roger Ebert fairly savaged it, calling it "idolatry on behalf of Robert Redford." However, Gene Siskel, Ebert's TV partner, rated it one of 1984's top 10 films.
The film proved to have broad appeal among fans of the game and, along with its imagery and music, has had significant staying power. The final baseball scene, as Roy's home run soars into the ballpark lights, and he runs the bases showered with sparks, remains one of the most memorable and widely known movie scenes. Both the novel and the film are usually included in lists of the greatest sports-related books and movies.
[edit] External links
Man of the Year • Envy • Bandits • An Everlasting Piece • Liberty Heights • Sphere • Wag the Dog • Sleepers • Disclosure • Jimmy Hollywood • Toys • Bugsy • Avalon • Rain Man • Good Morning, Vietnam • Tin Men • Young Sherlock Holmes • The Natural • Diner
