Something Wicked this Way Comes (Retro)

SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES (1983) PG 95 Minutes Director: Jack Clayton Writer: Ray Bradbury Jason Robards, Jonathan Pryce, Diane Ladd CAST Jason Robards...Charles Halloway Jonathan Pryce...Mr. Dark Diane Ladd...Mrs. Nightshade Vidal Peterson...Will Halloway Shawn Carson...Jim Nightshade Royal Dano...Tom Fury Pam Grier...Dust Witch Mary Grace Canfield...Miss Foley Bruce M. Fischer...Mr. Cooger Richard Davalos...Mr. Crosetti Jake Dengel...Mr. Tetley James Stacy...Ed the Bartender Ellen Geer...Mrs. Halloway Jack Dodson...Dr. Douglas Brendan Klinger...Young Mr. Cooger Arthur Hill...Adult Will Halloway (Narrator)

The freaks come out at night.

— Whodini, "Freaks Come Out at Night" (1984)

A few months ago, while reviewing LITTLE BIG LEAGUE, I remember thinking it was a pretty good movie, though one that made the regrettable decision to kill off Jason Robards far too early. He plays the owner of the Minnesota Twins, then dies before we have much chance to get attached to him. With Halloween approaching, I happened upon SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES, a movie in which Robards has the good sense to stick around. And is it any good? Well, you'll have to stick around for the rest of the review to find out. For now, I'll just say it isn't terrible.

Charles Halloway is convinced he's a failure as a father, and the first sixteen minutes establish it. Doc tells him at the bar to remember his heart, one drink and one cigar. At home, he tells his wife that Will makes him feel so darn old, that a man should be able to play baseball with his son. She answers, "Baseball is not necessary, not with a heart like yours." The real confession comes the next evening, when he finally tells Will about a picnic on the Indigo River. A current swept four-year-old Will into the middle of the water, and Charles stood on the bank, helpless, because his own father never thought it was right to teach boys to swim. The man who dove in without taking his boots off was Jim's father. Robards plays all of it weary and apologetic, and he never asks us to feel sorry for him. In the novel, Halloway is the library's janitor. The movie promotes him to librarian, making Dark's jab about "living only through other men's lives" more literal. Then the boys explain why they've been hiding, and Charles says he believes them. Jim objects that they aren't grownups. "That's why I believe you," Charles says. It reminded me of THE SIMPSONS episode "Lisa the Iconoclast," where Homer is the only person in Springfield who takes his daughter's side. Homer's way of backing her up involves digging up a corpse. Charles reads the boys an entry from his father's diary. He's a better dad than he thinks, and the movie has the proof ready. When Dark traps him in front of a mirror and tells him his son hates him, Will answers by shouting that he loves him. Charles shatters the glass.

The carnival works like THE MONKEY'S PAW, except nobody has to find it in a drawer. Every wish gets granted, and the bill comes with it. The movie makes sure we like Ed the bartender before it takes him. He has one arm and one leg, he swings the hammer anyway, and when the bell dings, Will and Jim hug him. It's a short, sweet moment, and then his prize arrives, a free pass to the mirror maze. Ed walks in, sees a reflection with both legs, and we hear him wishing he could run, throw, and tackle again. The next time we see his bar, it's empty. "First time in 20 years," Doc says. Miss Foley, who folks say was once the most beautiful woman in town, comes out of the same maze dazed, talking about how bright and beautiful it was. Dark later calls her a "blind girl." The diary entry Charles reads in the library supplies the rule. A lame servant girl asked the fortuneteller how she might run. "Her leg mended, and then she ran mad." "It seems they destroy people by granting their dearest wishes." Dark never has to invent anyone's unhappiness. He describes his diet in that same library, "funerals, bad marriages, lost loves, lonely beds," and Green Town had plenty of all four. The carnival offers to fix it as a favor, free of charge, and supplies the mirror.

This is where I part ways with the story. Dark's pitch to Charles is a countdown that starts at 30 and gives up at 52 with a "Your loss!" The movie takes place in the 1930s, when a man in his fifties might have felt older than he would today, but I still have trouble accepting fifty-four as an age worth mourning. If I woke up tomorrow twenty years old, I don't think my friends and family would stop caring about me. I'd still be the same person inside, with a couple of extra decades to get to the things I haven't. Dating would be trickier, since I'd have little in common with people my age, but old souls already deal with that. The people who really need this story's warning are Uncle Rico in NAPOLEON DYNAMITE and Al Bundy in MARRIED... WITH CHILDREN, men who would get their youth back and spend it reliving the fourth quarter coach never let one of them play and the four touchdowns the other scored once. No carousel fixes that. Dark's offer to Charles is smarter than that, though. He counts up through "You might still learn to swim" and "a year when you could run up the stairs without panting for breath," which are Charles's own regrets, not a generic wish for youth. Wanting more time to live and being unable to enjoy the life you're in are two different problems. Dark pretends he can solve the first because he knows Charles suffers from the second.

Jim Nightshade is the boy with the most to lose, and the movie shows us why before the carnival arrives. He tells anyone who will listen that his father is in Africa and coming home with a parrot and a shrunken head, and Will points out that Jim's father never writes. Things aren't much better at home. Mrs. Nightshade tells him to find something in the icebox because "Mother's just all tired out." Later he asks her whether he looks like his father. "Too like," she says, and adds that the day he leaves home, her Harry will be dead forever. A mother who can't look at her son without seeing her husband gives him one more reason to want out, and Jim wants out. He's the one who keeps threatening to remember things "when I'm older, darn it," and the one Will accuses of planning to ride the carousel the other way. Compare Will's mother, who marches him upstairs for sneaking out and calls Jim a bad influence. It isn't kind to Jim, but it's the sound of someone paying attention. Dark hears the difference. Calling to the boys in the library, he asks Jim how he'd like to be grown up, not looked down at, not told to run away and play. Then he says, "I'm the father you've been waiting for." Jim has spent the movie waiting on a letter from Africa. Dark shows up in person, which is more than his real father has managed.

The 1980s were good at movies that were creepy without being scary, the kind that ruin one night's sleep and then get watched again the following October. SILVER BULLET is another example, and SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES belongs in the same company. A lot of the charm is in the casting. Jonathan Pryce plays Mr. Dark like a courteous showman, introducing himself with "My name is Mr. Dark. I advise you to respect it," and later explaining that his people butter "plain bread with delicious pain." Pam Grier, who made her name in COFFY and FOXY BROWN, says little as the Dust Witch and is still the most frightening person in any scene she enters. Royal Dano gets some of Bradbury's most colorful dialogue as Tom Fury, the lightning-rod salesman, a man who wants to know what color lightning is and where the thunder goes when it dies. "Did I take the name? No, sir. The name took me." When I read the novel, I figured this would be tough to pull off today, even with modern CGI and expert practical effects. The movie doesn't pull it off entirely. Green Town was built on the Disney Studios backlot, and it looks like exactly that, a storybook street constructed for the occasion. The supernatural events have the handmade look of something put together with a lot of fog and whatever tricks the filmmakers could devise. That's part of why it works. A carnival that arrives in the middle of the night on a train nobody is sure they heard doesn't need to look real. It needs to look like a story somebody told you.

The movie's rough edges make more sense once you know how it got made. Bradbury first wrote a screenplay in 1958 for Gene Kelly, and it took until 1981 and Disney to get it shot. Bradbury and director Jack Clayton eventually fell out over an uncredited rewrite by John Mortimer. The draft I read is dated August 1981 and still has pages revised on September 30, two days after cameras started rolling. Then the test screenings went badly. Disney effectively took the film out of Clayton's hands, reportedly spent another $5 million overhauling it, and brought Bradbury back for a new opening narration and a new ending. Georges Delerue's score was dropped for being too sinister, and James Horner wrote a replacement on short notice. The film planned for Christmas 1982 finally opened on April 29, 1983, which is a strange time of year for a movie about October. The reshoots came long enough after the original shoot that the boys had visibly grown. In a couple of scenes, Will seems about a foot taller. It's almost the MADTV FULL HOUSE reunion sketch, where the Olsen twins, who split the role of Michelle, can no longer pass for the same girl because Nicole Sullivan plays a considerably heavier Mary-Kate. This is a movie about a carousel that rewinds people's ages, and it can't keep its own boys the same age from one scene to the next.

From Will shouting "I love you" at the mirror to the final "Tie!," my subtitle file clocks about six minutes, and a lot happens in them. Jim climbs onto the carousel beside Dark, lightning hits, Dark withers into a husk, the carnival tears itself apart, and a man with a bad heart saves a boy by acting like an idiot. That last part is the best of it, and it's faithful. Charles snaps Will out of his tears, tells him the night people love them, and dances around announcing that he's the great whooping crane, which is nearly line for line what the novel does. Fighting evil with laughter and love is a nice idea, and the movie sells it. What it skips is the novel's other half. In the book, Dark isn't killed by lightning. He has ridden the carousel backward into a lost nine-year-old boy, and Charles recognizes him, holds him close, and starves him with kindness, on the theory that evil has only the power we give it. Afterward, Will asks whether they'll ever come back. "No. And yes," Charles says. "Maybe they're already here." The boys look around and see nobody but themselves. Then all three, including Charles, briefly consider taking another ride on the carousel. The movie replaces that conversation with a narrator telling us that "being old was all right now" for his father, and a footrace that ends in a tie. It's sweet, but the novel leaves all three characters vulnerable to temptation, and the movie lets us go home reassured. The carnival is gone, and everything it fed on is still in town. The movie doesn't need a longer climax so much as a couple more minutes to consider what happens after it.

So, is it any good? I said at the start that it isn't terrible, and I'm willing to go a little further than that. It's uneven, the ending is rushed, and you can see the effects of Disney's attempts to make it more accessible. But Robards is the real thing, the atmosphere holds up, and the ideas under the carnival are better than the film has time to develop. Dark makes his living on dissatisfaction. He finds what someone is missing and sells it back as a favor, always in the politest terms: "Excuse me, gentlemen, I am a stranger in this town." He merely wishes, he says, to give the boys "the valuable rewards that they so richly deserve." Charles has no such manners. He sings badly, dances worse, and gives up his dignity to save a boy who isn't even his. What Dark sells has a price, and what Charles gives away doesn't. Bradbury called the finished film "not a great film, no, but a decently nice one," and I like that he reached for the word nice. Dark has the better manners. Charles has the better heart, bad as it is.

Final Verdict: 77 out of 100

Sidenote: What's Halloween without a little Salem Saberhagen?

Little Big League (Retro)

LITTLE BIG LEAGUE (1994) PG 119 Minutes Director: Andrew Scheinman Writers: Gregory K. Pincus, Adam Scheinman Luke Edwards, Timothy Busfield, John Ashton

CAST Luke Edwards…Billy Heywood Timothy Busfield…Lou Collins John Ashton…Mac Macnally Ashley Crow…Jenny Heywood Kevin Dunn…Arthur Goslin Jason Robards…Thomas Heywood Billy L. Sullivan…Chuck Miles Feulner…Joey Jonathan Silverman…Jim Bowers Dennis Farina…George O'Farrell Wolfgang Bodison…Spencer Hamilton Duane Davis…Jerry Johnson Leon Durham…Leon Alexander Kevin Elster…Pat Corning Joseph Latimore…Lonnie Ritter Bradley Jay Lesley…John "Blackout" Gatling John Minch…Mark Hodges Michael Papajohn…Tucker Kain Scott Patterson…Mike McGrevey Troy Startoni…Larry Hilbert Antonio Lewis Todd…Mickey Scales

ROOKIE OF THE YEAR is about a child allowed to play adult. LITTLE BIG LEAGUE is about a child forced to become one.

The distinction matters more than it first appears. Henry Rowengartner's fastball is a fluke, a loophole, a summer-long suspension of the rules that govern who gets to stand on a major league mound. Nothing is asked of him beyond showing up and throwing. Billy Heywood's inheritance comes with no such suspension. When Thomas Heywood dies and leaves the Minnesota Twins to his twelve-year-old grandson, the film doesn't hand Billy a fantasy — it hands him a job. Roster decisions, trade negotiations, a clubhouse full of grown men who outweigh him by a hundred pounds and have every reason to resent taking instruction from a kid. Henry gets to play. Billy has to manage.

It's worth sitting with how strange the premise is once you look past its high-concept pitch. Thomas Heywood would have understood, better than almost anyone, what running a baseball team requires — the meetings, the travel, the late nights, the toll. He hands all of it to Billy anyway, with no transition period and no safety net beyond Mac Macnally and a general manager who isn't sure whether to take orders from a child. It is a premise that collapses under literal scrutiny, yet the film still invites questions its fantasy framework cannot entirely contain. The fact that those questions are worth asking is what makes LITTLE BIG LEAGUE more interesting than ROOKIE OF THE YEAR ever needed to be.

Billy has already lost his father before the story begins, and the film is reluctant to dwell on it. Thomas Heywood's death isn't the first hole in this family, it's the second. By the time Billy inherits a baseball team, he has already absorbed the loss that's supposed to be the rarer, harder one for a child to survive — and the film asks him to do it again, in public, with a payroll attached. Billy says as much himself, early on, almost in passing: he'd rather have his grandfather. Not the team. Not the job. His grandfather.

It would be easy to call Billy mature, and the film occasionally settles for that word itself. But maturity isn't quite what's on screen. Maturity can be performed — a kid playing at being older, borrowing the postures of adulthood without believing in them. Billy isn't doing an impression of competence. He simply means everything he says, with a directness that has nothing to do with age. Watching his grandfather's will on video, Billy hears the lawyer prompt him toward the obvious response — isn't it wonderful, his grandfather gave him the Twins — and doesn't take it. He'd rather have his grandfather. The room is full of adults — his mother, a lawyer, Arthur Goslin — and the easy answer was sitting right there for him to pick up. He's telling the truth, the way children do before they learn that adults usually want something gentler. That quality — sincerity, not maturity — is what makes the rest of the film's premise bearable to watch instead of merely strange.

LITTLE BIG LEAGUE is unusually direct about what it thinks adulthood is. When O'Farrell refuses to use a player Billy and Arthur both rate higher, Arthur tells him, with all due respect, that he's acting like a first grader — and he isn't wrong. O'Farrell's response is to mock Billy for playing in the owner's box with his "little buddies" and suggest he go home and build a fort, the age insult as a last resort from a man who's been told he's the one behaving like a child. He's fired within the same scene. The resistance within the clubhouse isn't much better at first — a grown man taking instruction from a sixth-grader is, fairly enough, a hard thing to swallow — but the film repeatedly lets that resentment curdle into something closer to tantrum than principle. Mac Macnally and Lou Collins are the exceptions, and they're exceptions for a specific reason: they're the only adults in the film who respond to Billy as if his age and his sincerity are two different facts, worth treating separately. Everyone else conflates them, and in doing so makes themselves look smaller than the boy they're refusing to take seriously.

There's a small, specific pleasure in watching this movie as someone who grew up rooting for the team on the other side of the ball. Late in the film, Lou Collins gets all of a Randy Johnson pitch and sends it toward the stands — and Griffey takes it away at the wall before it can leave the yard. I remember watching that scene for the first time, younger than Billy is in this movie, and feeling no suspense at all. Of course Griffey caught it. That's what Griffey did. The film isn't asking me to believe something about its fictional world; it's just confirming something I already knew about the real one.

For all the responsibilities the film places on Billy, it never mistakes him for a child genius. Half the Twins roster ends up crowded around a chalkboard, trying to solve a math word problem from Billy's own homework: if Joe can paint a house in three hours and Sam can do it in five, how long would it take them together? They get nowhere until Jim Bowers produces the answer. Billy, fluent in trade value and bullpen management and reading a pitcher's mechanics the way other kids read comic books, has nothing to add to his own assignment. He is not a genius. He is a baseball savant, and the difference matters — his gift has a shape, and that shape happens to be exactly what a baseball team needs from him and nothing else.

That narrowness is its own kind of warning sign. The friendships survive, but they no longer occupy the center of Billy's life. Baseball does. The job is technically optional — Mac would run things, Arthur would run things, the team would survive a season without a twelve-year-old owner attending every game — but managing wasn't even part of what Billy inherited. He takes it on himself, and the film never seriously asks whether he should have. He can handle the job. That's not the same as belonging in it, and the film is more honest about the difference than its premise has any right to be.

Jason Robards appears in LITTLE BIG LEAGUE just long enough to haunt the rest of it. Thomas Heywood gets a handful of scenes before the video will makes his death official, and the film doesn't ask Robards to do much in them beyond be warm, be wise, and be gone. That's enough. Robards has the kind of presence that doesn't need screen time to accumulate weight — he carries the authority of a man who makes the bequest feel emotionally plausible, even when the logistics remain absurd. Every adult who fails Billy afterward, every player who resents him, every ounce of resentment Billy has to absorb without complaint, traces back to a grandfather who survives only as a video recording. Robards isn't in the movie to dominate it. He's there so that his absence has a face.

That's the case for the movie. The case against it is shorter, but harder to ignore.

The film knows what baseball mythology sounds like. Billy says as much himself, in a speech to his own players about playing in the same outfield as DiMaggio and Mantle, stepping into the batter's box where Ted Williams once stood — Fenway and Yankee Stadium invoked by name, treated as something closer to sacred ground than real estate. It's a good speech. The trouble is what the film does with the real thing once it gets there. Billy's own trip to Fenway amounts to him asleep through most of it — the one park in the movie steeped in exactly the history he finished describing moments earlier, and he isn't awake to see it. The Metrodome, where the bulk of the movie lives, is the opposite kind of problem: a controlled, artificially lit interior that never once looks like the cathedral Billy describes in his own dialogue. Comiskey Park gets closer — one of the few moments in the film where baseball feels like a place rather than an environment — but it's a brief exception in a movie that otherwise keeps choosing the version of the sport with the natural light switched off, even as its dialogue keeps reaching for something grander.

The performances tell a similar story. Luke Edwards is convincing exactly where the film needs him to be — on a mound, in a dugout, reading a clubhouse — and noticeably less so in the scenes that ask him to carry ordinary adolescence, as though the role only fully fits him when there's a baseball in the frame. The supporting cast often compensates, except where the film leaves the most obvious opportunity sitting on the table. Lou Piniella, playing a version of himself, is given almost nothing to do with his own reputation; a manager known for kicking bases and screaming his way through arguments shows up oddly restrained here, and the film never cashes in on the obvious joke sitting right there in his casting. The comedy elsewhere is similarly uneven, landing more often in the margins — Billy's friends get sharper lines than the plot does — than in the scenes the film is clearly building toward. None of this would matter much at ninety minutes. At nearly two hours, a film this thin on plot starts to feel its length, stretching a premise that was always better suited to a tight, economical run at the idea.

The film has its real ending sitting right there in the locker room, and chooses not to use it. Billy tells the team he's retiring — not from ownership, just from the job of running them day to day — and gives them the only reason that's mattered for two hours: he wants to go fishing, he wants to play Little League, he wants to be a kid again before the option disappears. It's the quietest scene in the movie and the only one that fully earns everything this review has spent its time building. Then the film immediately gets nervous about it. Billy walks back outside to find the crowd still waiting for him, and LITTLE BIG LEAGUE closes not on a boy deciding to put the job down, but on a boy walking back into the spotlight one more time, to applause, with triumphant music swelling underneath. The movie wrote the ending it needed. It just didn't trust it enough to let it be the last thing we see.

Final Verdict: 67 out of 100

Sidenote: