Word: rivalled
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...freshness and smiles to fill it out; but her voice is so stirring and powerful that it overwhelms any deficiencies in her acting. By contrast, Linda Anne Kirwan is a gifted comedienne, handling the part of Pheobe with real comic flair and singing well, if less vigorously than her rival. Roberto Gaston makes an extraordinarily winning Fairfax, with his broad toothy grin, strong tenor and charming Gilbertian sense of the absurd...
...Bears may be terrible, but they are enthusiastic. Misfits all, playing-even miserably-gives them a shot at self-respect. Buttermaker considers this and, out of his beery fog, figures the kids deserve a break. His motives are not entirely altruistic, however. On a rival team, there is a gung-ho, supercilious coach (well played by Vic Morrow), and Buttermaker hates his guts...
Grumbling all the way, gargling his booze, Matthau is better than he has been in years, and all the kids are wonderful, full of spirit and spunk. (Inquires one fearless sad sack of a combative rival: "How'd you like me to stick that bat where the sun never shines?") The movie has some very traditional concerns-about the value of playing as opposed to winning, about trying to achieve a certain minimal dignity-but deals with them lightly and with charm...
...however, are a little forced. Nelson got divorced and remarried, something common enough in America, but Collier and Horowitz build that up into a life-destroying crisis. Their billing of David as a failure has to do with the Chase Manhattan Bank losing a little gound to its chief rival. Even Winthrop, the most convincingly unsuccessful of the brothers, doesn't elicit much sympathy for his lowly role as millionaire cattle rancher and governor of Arkansas...
Times staffers, whose assiduity in reporting on in-house power shifts can rival that which they display on their own beats, lost no time proposing Kremlinological explanations. The first instant replay went: "Max lost, Abe won." Relations between the two had known points of strain since Frankel moved up from Washington bureau chief three years ago to command the Sunday edition. It was said that Frankel would sometimes commission pieces for his Sunday paper after learning daily staffers were already working on the same subject. In turn, Times managing editors have itched for years to seize the Sunday department...