The Terrific 1987 Baseball Comedy-Drama Long Gone Is So Much More Than Just a Minor Footnote in the Bull Durham Story
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
My patron-funded exploration of the complete filmography of Virginia Madsen has only just begun. We’re only up to 1987 on the timeline of the prolific TV and film actress and voiceover artist’s career. Yet I’ve already encountered a slew of underrated, overlooked sleepers I either didn’t know existed or was underwhelmed by the first time around but thoroughly won me over when I watched them for this project.
I found myself very much enjoying Steve Barron’s electronic New Wave romance Electric Dreams and David Lynch’s infamous adaptation of Dune. I knew nothing about the 1986 teen romance Fire with Fire or the 1986 comedy Modern Girls but enjoyed both, particularly Modern Girls.
The delightful surprises continue with 1987’s Long Gone, an HBO television movie that would probably be dismissed as a Bull Durham wannabe if it didn’t come out a year before Ron Shelton’s beloved baseball comedy or adapt a 1979 novel. If anything, Bull Durham might have stolen from Long Gone, since Shelton attended its premiere and, according to Madsen at least, jotted down notes of all things he wanted to “borrow" for his cult baseball sex comedy.
It makes sense that Long Gone would have its roots in the late Jimmy Carter years because its gleeful profanity, candor about race, sex and class and unabashedly adult nature mark it as a welcome throwback to the raunchy sports comedies of the 1970s.
Like the best sports comedies, Long Gone is fundamentally a human story about complicated, multi-dimensional and sensitively realized characters who just happen to be athletes.
Long Gone is such a gloriously non-sentimental anomaly that it almost feels like a betrayal when it becomes the kind of movie that climaxes with a tie score during the big game.
William Peterson followed up 1985’s To Live and Die in L.A and 1986’s Manhunter with an assured lead performance in 1987’s Long Gone as Cecil "Stud" Cantrell, a brash and cocky minor league player-manager for the Tampico Stogies in 1957 who never made it to the big leagues due to injuries sustained in World War II.
He earned his nickname through a predilection for indiscriminate womanizing that eventually leads him to a sordid fling on the team’s bus with world-weary beauty queen/clerk Dixie Lee Boxx (Virginia Madsen) that evolves into something much more.
Madsen’s vixen is only twenty years old yet she seems every bit as worldly and world-weary as her much older lover. She’s experienced an awful lot in her two decades on the planet and seizes upon Stud as her future.
It’s the Susan Sarandon Bull Durham role of a sexually experienced and aggressive woman who knows exactly what she wants and goes after it without shame or embarrassment. It’s yet another terrific performance from Madsen, at once scorchingly sexy, funny, foul-mouthed and more than a little melancholy.
A baby-faced Dermot Mulroney, whose career at that point consisted primarily of having starred in an Afterschool special about drug abuse, plays Jamie Weeks, the Tim Robbins role of the naive, green kid who is mentored in baseball and the mysterious ways of sex and life by an older father figure, in this case Stud.
Only instead of being one third of a love triangle, Jamie woos and impregnates a quintessential good girl whose protective parents are none too keen on their sheltered daughter dating a professional athlete.
The Stogies’ fortunes brighten considerably with the acquisition of Joe Louis Brown (Larry Riley), a black catcher and power hitter with a John Henry physique whose presence on the team inspires the ire of Southern racists.
There’s a great scene where the Stogies happen upon the Ku Klux Klan lighting a cross on fire in a failed attempt to intimidate the team and its new star. The Stogies aren’t impressed at all, and a group of professional athletes armed with bats has no problem defeating middle-aged men in bedsheets.
Henry Gibson and Teller of Penn & Teller fame are perfectly cast as the team’s penny-pinching cheapskate owners. They look uncannily alike and have a wonderful dynamic, with the younger man essentially serving as a ventriloquist who whispers words and ideas into his father’s ears that he then spits out as his own.
In its rambling first two acts, Long Gone does not appear to be one of those sports movies that care about winning the pennant or the big game or any of that other overly familiar hogwash.
That changes, however, when Stud is offered a shot at the big time if he agrees to throw an all-important game against the farm team of the team that wants to hire him and give him a major promotion.
It’s the kind of sweepingly melodramatic plot point that the movie really does not need. It particularly does not need Stud and Joe Louis finding their consciences at the last possible minute and swooping in to save the day.
But if Long Gone does not need the cliches and stakes of its climax it has the weight and substance to make its embrace of hokey conventions forgivable if regrettable.
Director Martin Davidson and screenwriter Michael Norell, who very ably adapts journalist turned author Paul Hemphill’s 1979 novel, do justice to both sides of the comedy-drama equation, resulting in a sleeper that’s alternately poignant and powerful and raucous, lively and gloriously lived in.
Long Gone deserves so much better than to be a minor footnote in the Bull Durham saga, a movie that came out around the same time with a similar plot and main dynamic.
This charming throwback should be appreciated for its own tremendous value, not just due to its resemblance to a much better known movie.
I am thoroughly enjoying my trip through Madsen’s filmography. It’s been full of wildly over-achieving little movies like this. Will the Bobcat Goldthwait talking horse comedy Hot to Trot, the next movie on my journey, also prove much better than expected?
Probably not but I can’t wait to find out!
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