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The chase scene in the beginning of this film is still one of my favorites of all time.

Oh, and the rest of the film ain't bad either... 👌

Tongue and Cheek satire and sports movies generally are not exactly two movies genres that you combine together, however Burt Reynolds did not believe that, and as a result he starred in a movie that manages to be funny, poignant, intense, and everything in-between. I really don't know how the writers, producers and directors came up with something that turned out to be so awesome. The Longest Yard is masterful, it is funny, but it isn't a comedy, there is a lot of football but it is more than a just a sports movie, this is a hard movie to classify and maybe that is the reason it is so good.

Burt Reynolds plays a washed up football player who winds up in the slammer for drunk driving. While there the warden asks him to put together a football team to go up against the prison guards, who play in a semi-professional league. The prisoners are an interesting group of misfits and criminals, played perfectly by the various character actors in the parts. Burt Reynolds manages to be a brilliant lead of all of these crazy cons, and is perfect in this part. This movie is great but it doesn't exactly scream out greatness at first. This is a movie where you will be half way through and you will realize this is just a great movie to watch.

Aside from the fact it is just an off-beat movie it is hard to understand why this movie is so good, I don't know why myself, the jokes are not really laugh out loud hysterical, but it becomes apparent the reason this movie is so good is because it really ventured into areas that few films had, and while there are references to racial problems, homosexuality, although very muted, prison violence, crooked law enforcement officials and other issues rarely discussed on screen.

What I am surprised at is that these issues become prominent, and something you heed in the movie, and at the same time the over the top satire merges with this movie perfectly. Even watching a movie like this as compared to other comedies that raise marginally controversial issues like racism, such as Police Academy, Police Academy sort of makes a comedy out of racism and sexism, and to a lesser degree a movie like Caddyshack, but this movie puts the comedy and the controversial issues together, not making them one, but two completely different facets of the movie. Normally when you have a movie that is as intense as this it is hard to have such satirical elements in a movie and be a good movie, but this movie combines the two elements so effortlessly.

This is definitely an underdog movie, in that the prisoners are supposed to lose, they are a bunch of cons that rarely if ever played football, and have no chance going up against a semi-professional team. The characters, too numerous to name make this movie that much better. The movie also is a prison movie, and is successful at that, this is one of those movies, everything just clicked right, and the result is near perfection. One reason to watch this movie is Eddie Albert, as the ever smiling and smugly pleasant prison warden who is the mastermind of the entire affair, he is just perfect here, so meticulously uttering every word to the point that he looks like he is in pain, and he is perfect in the role. James Hampton also has an excellent part as Reynolds' sidekick in prison. This is just an all around great movie excellent in so many different ways.

I watch a movie like this, and I wonder why there are so few movies like this today, movies so offbeat but funny, movies that actually have decent acting, movies that are this interesting, instead of typical silly fare you would get like a dumb teen movie or a dumb action movie. This movie is priceless in a way. When I first heard of the movie I didn't think it would be that good, but when I watched it I realized why it was Oscar nominated and so well thought of. I don't know why it clicked, but it did, and the result is a film definitely worth seeing, and one of the best of the 1970s.

If there ever was a manipulative film, this is it. By the end you are rooting for the prisoners (the nice guys, you know, armed robbers, murderers, rapists, child molesters) against those awful guards. Those poor sweet prisoners, being taken advantage of by those sadistic guards. Then there's the warden, Mr. Douglas from Green Acres, Eddie Albert. Rotten to the core. Bert Reynolds is his mugging best, first selling out, then winning one for the Gipper. It is violent, raucous, ridiculous from the stolen uniforms to the cross dressing cheerleaders. I am a non violent person, I knew everything was designed to work over my prejudices and my primitive feelings of revenge. And yet, when the game started, I was transfixed. I don't get it. Have I no taste?

Burt Reynolds plays Paul Crewe, a reprehensible character discovering, in a prison, dignity and esteem… You see him, at the beginning of the movie—as a rising star—beating up a woman, stealing her car, drunken driving, insulting cops in a bar, resisting arrest… He's seen so funny when he insulted the miniature cop who's about to arrest him, while the cop's partner is laughing openly…

Eddie Albert was very charming when he meets Paul Crewe at his arrival to Citrus State Prison… Aldrich wanted to play Warden Hazen as the guy who had the veneer of normalcy, the veneer of being a good executive, the veneer of keeping it all together till it starts unraveling… He really was just a despicable, oily, warden type… In one game scene, we see him over and over again, getting up just with that same look of shock on his face…

Ed Lauter (Captain Knauer) is wonderful… He runs the football team… He is a bad guy and he represents everything that is wrong with that prison system and everything else… He changes as a result… And to see that is just so delightful… He's got the classic Ed Lauter's scene at the end… James Hampton plays Caretaker, the character who brings the team all together and pushes Burt's character ahead to win the game…

Ray Nitschke plays the toughest, meanest linebacker in football… Richard Kiel, Bob Tessier, Charles Tyner, Michael Conrad, and Harry Caesar give the film a certain veracity, you almost thing you are in jail

The Longest Yard refers not to the territory gained and lost in a football game. For Burt Reynolds its that prison yard that he's in for the next 18 months.

Reynolds isn't one of the noblest athletes ever to grace the National Football League. He was a quarterback who was thrown out of the game in a point shaving scandal. Now he's doing time for stealing his mistress's Maserati and causing a lot of havoc and mayhem when she called the cops on him.

The Longest Yard starts to look a little like From Here To Eternity where Monty Clift's company captain Philip Ober wants him to box for the post championship. Reynolds really isn't interested in playing football any more or helping warden Eddie Albert out with his semi-pro team of prison guards. But he's got less redress than Clift did in the army and Reynolds is not a person to make too fine a point of resistance.

What Reynolds suggests is a tune-up game with a squad of the inmates to play the guards to keep them in a fighting edge. Sounds real good to Albert who has a mean streak in him that Reynolds is slow to realize. There's a lot of possibilities to inflict some legal pain and for him to reassert his authority.

The Longest Yard is first and foremost about what Reynolds will do when the crisis comes. His track record doesn't suggest any heroics, but some people do surprise you.

The antagonists Reynolds and Albert are given good support by director Robert Aldrich's picked cast. Foremost among them are Ed Lauter as the chief guard, James Hampton as the team manager, and Charles Tyner in a particularly loathsome role as a prison stoolie. He will really make your skin crawl.

Bernadette Peters is also in The Longest Yard as Albert's secretary with the delightful name of Miss Toot who takes advantage of her position with a little sexual harassment of the prisoners. I do love that Dickensian name that was given her for this film. The only other female of note is Anitra Ford who is Reynolds mistress and whose Maserati he appropriates. When Burt says he earned that Maserati you can well believe it.

The Longest Yard is in a class by itself, a sports/prison movie. A film that created it's own genre. That has to count for something.