Great Scenes: “The Natural”

“He swings — violently and perfectly — the ball exploding off his bat.”

Seeing as spring training is just around the corner, I figured it was time to feature a Great Scene from a baseball movie and what a scene it is: The ending sequence from The Natural (1984). With a screenplay by Roger Towne and Phil Dusenberry, based on a novel by Bernard Malamud, The Natural builds on the mythic elements in Malamud’s book: Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford) like the knight Percival in Arthurian legends, his bat Wonderboy like Arthur’s Excalibur. The mythic themes work so well in the movie version of The Natural because baseball itself is one big fat metaphor for, well… just about anything.

The movie differs in one huge respect from the novel: The ending. In the book, the Protagonist Hobbs ends up a broken man, his baseball career doomed by suspicion that he helped lose a big game on purpose. In the movie, Hobbs gains redemption by winning the big game. There have been arguments back and forth about the moral validity of changing the ending, but what else could we really expect from Hollywood — they like ‘happy’ endings. Moreover, it’s a helluva final sequence with a fitting and emotionally satisfying denouement.

We pick up the action in the 9th inning of what amounts to the championship game for the New York Knights. Two men on, two men out, Hobbs coming up to…