Cinema: Infield Hit

THE BINGO LONG TRAVELING ALL-STARS AND MOTOR KINGS

Directed by JOHN BADHAM

Screenplay by HAL BARWOOD and MATTHEW ROBBINS

This is a friendly, no-account movie full of intermittent high spirits. Although it never fulfills the richest possibilities in the raffish misadventures of a barnstorming black baseball team of the 1930s, it does come close from time to time.

The screenplay by Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins is full of prime ideas and opportunities, like a sequence in which the newly formed All-Stars learn how to parade into a small Midwestern town. First they Tom it up, as if auditioning for a minstrel show, then the team starts strutting with a fine, brassy pride, sweeping the local citizenry along. Handled right, that scene could have had the jazzy fervor of a jam session at high noon. Director John Badham, however, seems mostly concerned with producing the kind of fancy optical effects that used to punctuate Busby Berkeley routines.

Aside from the insouciance of the story, the pleasures of Bingo Long can be attributed mainly to some ingratiating lead performances. Billy Dee Williams, an actor of impermeable charm, plays Bingo, a veteran pitcher for the Negro National League who figures the time has come to stand up against the gangsterism of the club owners. He puts together his own club, with some of the league’s best talent and with the help of a heavy-hitting catcher named Leon Carter (James Earl Jones). An actor with the kind of power that can easily turn to bluster, Jones here is at his best; he makes Leon appropriately larger than life without ever letting him be come a sports-page cartoon.

Shut Out. Bingo is composed mostly of sketches showing the All-Stars trying to make a go of independence and then trying to break back into the league from which they have been summarily shut out by the owners. For social significance, the movie includes a player who functions as a sort of Jackie Robinson surrogate. For contrast there is Richard Pryor, an actor-comedian of buckshot brilliance. Pryor calculates every line and gesture for small, explosive effect, and his aim stays true. He shows up here as Charlie Snow, a third baseman who hopes to break into big-league ball by passing himself off as a Cuban.

Snow’s Spanish accent is dismal, so he spends his idle moments attempting to figure out his batting average. He struggles with an intractable decimal point, tries dividing times at bat by number of pitches missed, then multiplying the hits. As Pryor plays him, Charlie is a fellow of wit and resource, and his struggle with these impossible calculations is, much like his whole life, a slowly losing battle against absurdity. Jay Cocks