Long Gone (1987)
Thomas Cochran
Long Gone( 1987)
Cast: William Petersen, Virginia Madsen, Dermot Mulroney, Larry Riley, Henry Gibson, Teller
Director: Martin Davidson
Rating: Not rated
Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes
Remembered by: Thomas Cochran, West Fork, author whose most recent novel is Uncle Drew and the Bat Dodger (Pelican Publishing, 2016).
West Fork
When the subject of Paul Hemphill comes up, the conversation will most likely regard his journalism, particularly his first book, The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and Country Music (1970). This is fair enough, but if I'm around I'm going to steer talk toward his 1979 novel about Class D baseball in 1950s Florida, Long Gone, as soon as there's a pause.
I found my copy on a dollar table a couple of years after it appeared, readers having generally ignored the nice notices it received in The New York Times, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated (where I originally heard about it), and elsewhere. I can't say how many times I've read it, but the number is several. I cherish it because, though it is considerably more frank (my grandmother's term for the bawdy and the raunchy) than what I grew up with, it reminds me of the sports books I read as a kid. Once in a while, I need to break it out and listen.
The film based on Long Gone, which shares its title, originally aired on Home Box Office back in 1987, when "made for television" unfairly meant second-rate, a stigma HBO was already in the process of obliterating. Martin Davidson (The Lords of Flatbush, Eddie and the Cruisers, etc.) directs from a screenplay by actor/writer Michael Norell (Emergency!, Nash Bridges, etc.). William Petersen, in his full this-guy-can't-miss-becoming-a-movie-star period, heads a cast that includes Virginia Madsen, Dermot Mulroney, Henry Gibson, the magician Teller, and Larry Riley (as Joe Louis "Jose" Brown, a black catcher masquerading as a Venezuelan to confuse the Klan).
It's not a great film any more than Hemphill's book is a great novel, but like the fiction, the picture is a very well done bit of riotous good entertainment. Certain things are changed -- the Graceville Oilers become the Tampico Stogies, for instance -- but the big-hearted, even-the-losers-get-lucky-sometimes nature of the story is intact.
One hesitates to use words like "favorite" when addressing books and movies because what is thus described today rarely retains the crown tomorrow. Still, I would venture to say that if you can somehow get yourself a copy of this film and spend the 113 minutes it takes for the perennial cellar-dwelling Oilers/Stogies to pull themselves, in spite of themselves, into contention and for Cecil B. "Stud" Cantrell (Petersen) to get himself, in spite of himself, to accept true love and make a correct moral choice after a lifetime of failing in both matters, you could well find yourself calling Long Gone your favorite baseball movie. Rest assured that if I'm nearby and hear you I'll nod and say, "Mine too."
MovieStyle on 04/27/2018