An underrated baseball movie finds its soul in a song

'Bang the Drum Slowly' meets 'Streets of Laredo'

The Brian’s Song of baseball.

That’s a label you could place on the 1973 movie Bang the Drum Slowly, which starred Robert De Niro and Michael Moriarty and came out two years after the James Caan-Billy Dee Williams football tearjerker premiered on ABC.

It’s not a perfect comparison, though. For one, it undersells Bang the Drum Slowly to suggest that it is belongs in another film’s category. Not to mention that its origin story goes back farther, dating back to the Mark Harris novel from the 1950s.

Moreover, while Brian’s Song has that heart-tugging score, no song in any sports movie delivers a tougher punch than “Streets of Laredo” does for Bang the Drum Slowly, which draws its title and its own score from the ageless tune.

Officially, this is a Slaylist post dedicated to “Streets of Laredo,” but I wasn’t long writing it until I found it impossible to detach the song from the movie.

In Bang the Drum Slowly — and this is the premise, not a spoiler — the 29-year-old, barely known, maybe 150-pound De Niro plays Bruce Pearson, a dimwitted backup major-league catcher. Bruce has Hodgkin’s disease, and the diagnosis is terminal. The team’s star pitcher, Henry Wiggen (played by a strapping Moriarty), who brought Bruce to the Mayo Clinic to be examined, is the only other person who is told.

“As a catcher,” Henry says in a voiceover, “he was a million dollars’ worth of promise worth two cents on delivery. Most people didn't even know he was with the club. And he was almost too dumb to play a joke on … and now he'd been played the biggest joke of all.”

Bang the Drum Slowly came out 49 days before De Niro splashed across the big screen in Mean Streets, 15 months before The Godfather Part II and 2 1/2 years before Taxi Driver, a trio of films that launched him the stratosphere. In his review, Roger Ebert called Bang “the ultimate baseball movie — and, despite what a plot summary might suggest, I think it’s more about baseball than death.”