The Natural 1984 123movies

Watch: The Natural 1984 123movies, Full Movie Online – An unknown middle-aged batter named Roy Hobbs with a mysterious past appears out of nowhere to take a losing 1930s baseball team to the top of the league in this magical sports fantasy. With the aid of a bat cut from a lightning struck tree, Hobbs lives the fame he should have had earlier when, as a rising pitcher, he is inexplicably shot by a young woman..
Plot: An unknown middle-aged batter named Roy Hobbs with a mysterious past appears out of nowhere to take a losing 1930s baseball team to the top of the league.
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Ratings:

	7.4/10 Votes: 49,519
	83% | RottenTomatoes
	61/100 | MetaCritic
	N/A Votes: 495 Popularity: 12.212 | TMDB

Reviews:

The Wonder of Wonderboy.

The Natural is directed by Barry Levinson and adapted to screenplay by Roger Towne & Phil Dusenberry from the novel written by Bernard Malamud. It stars Robert Redford, Robert Duvall, Glenn Close, Kim Basinger, Wilford Brimley, Barbara Hershey, Robert Prosky and Richard Farnsworth. Music is by Randy Newman and cinematography by Caleb Deschanel.

The Natural is a wistful sports movie, one that asks every person who views it to buy into the whimsy and mythologising on show. If able to do that then it’s a film of beguiling beauty, awash with strength of the human spirit and of luscious technical credits. The Arthurian core to Roy Hobbs’ (Redford a superb presence yet calmness personified) second chance ensures we always know this is fanciful stuff, but that’s just fine, we are in Field of Dreams territory here and fans of such fare are rewarded royally. Period art design, photography and musical score are grade “A”, snuggling up nicely with a support cast to Redford that is of high end proportions. If it’s in you and you know what sort of film to expect, you may well, come the end, be punching the air whilst having a tear in your eye. Lovely film making. 8.5/10

Many, many years ago when I was a bit of a sports fan, I remember reading stories about scouts who had seen athletes in the olden days like Roy Hobbs. Players who could hit a ball a mile or throw a hundred mile per hour fastball, but who never made it to the big league for some reason. But of course, this movie is based on a novel by Bernard Malamud, though there are hints of actual events here and there.

It is an entertaining movie, presenting baseball as America’s game and therefore, ultimately, above corruption. It has an old timey feel, perhaps even older than the 1939 setting that is presented. The movie is less gloomy than the book, and I guess the purists don’t like that, but for me, life is gloomy enough and the mood and ending were just fine with me. (And I did read the book.) Since actual events and people from bygone days are cleaned up and mythologized for our history books, why get upset when fictional stories are purified with a rose colored lens?

Book Schmook! The Movie is VASTLY superior!
As a writer, I am often compelled to read the books on which my favorite movies are based. Since its original release, I have loved The Natural as one of my favorite movies of all time, but it was only recently that I read Bernard Malamud’s novel on which the movie was based. I cannot tell you how disappointed I was.

Malamud was a great writer, and was best known for winning a Pulitzer and the National Book award for The Fixer. His award winning work usually dealt with themes closer to his own heart, and Malamud didn’t seem to “get” baseball in this book. Either that, or he had some axe to grind about baseball, and wanted us to hate it and all the people involved in it.

The Natural was Malamud’s first novel and, as such, it suffers from shallow, simplistic characters, a muddy, at times almost unintelligible plot, and poorly attenuated subplots that almost seem like afterthoughts or clumsy devices slathered on to shore up weak story objectives. He does, however, have a historical understanding of baseball, and most of the events related to baseball in this story are composites of everything from the Black Sox to Babe Ruth to Christie Matheson and a string of other legends.

The main character, Roy Hobbs, is almost certainly based on the real life character Eddie Waitkus, and Malamud does little to imbue him with likable traits that would deepen him as a literary character. He even throws in a little Joe Jackson to compromise the character even further. The fact that he is called “Roy” is an obvious allusion to Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th century opus “Le Morte D’Arthur.” (Recall that “roi” is French for “king.”) Why Malamud chose this story as a model is a mystery, since although he goes to great lengths to reinforce the Aurthurian connection (the baseball team is called the “Knights”, the bat, “Wonderboy” is obviously “Excalibur”), he creates little of the Arthurian heroism in Roy Hobbes, or, for that matter, the sport of baseball as an allegory for the jousting of Chivalric heroes.

The character of The Whammer, played in the movie beautifully, if all too briefly, by Joe Don Baker, is more Ruth than Ruth, but he’s gone in a flash, leaving yet another heroic void in the original story. And the women in The Natural are shallow, conniving and cheap and I have never been able to understand Malamud’s literary allusions with regard to Morgan LeFave and Guinnevere, the women in Arthur’s life. The Bad Guys in the book are ALL Bad, everyone else is mostly neutral, and there isn’t any real good, or anything uplifting or affirming or positive in the whole thing.

Thank god for the movie. Barry Levinson’s direction is gilded and glowing, and the whole film has a luminous aura that seems magical and enchanted and, compared to the wooden novel from which it came, a satisfying recast of the Arthurian legend. The screenplay was done by Roger Towne, who recently gave us The Recruit, and the changes he made to the story make all the difference in the world; less literary, perhaps, but more beautiful and elegant and not nearly so cynical and pessimistic. Compared to the Levinson/Johnson magic, the novel is almost amateurish, and recalls Ayn Rand’s facile characters and stories, didactic and pedantic, and almost completely obscuring the Arthurian magic that Levinson coaxes from the story.

Once, when I had the chance to mention personally to Mark Johnson how beautiful The Natural was, he responded with a sincere modesty that fit the innocent tone of the movie, and he even gave me a keepsake from the film that I have to this day as a reminder of just how amazing an achievement this movie was, coming from so flawed a novel.

This was the first movie in which I loved Redford. He was older and deeper as an actor, and this was the beginning of his real golden age. Glenn Close was delightfully virginal and beautiful as a character almost completely created by the screenwriter, not the novelist. Kim Basinger is gorgeous and dangerous as the femme fatal, a portrayal that she would echo in her Oscar winning turn in L.A. Confidential.

Randy Newman’s brilliant score was recycled a dozen times in subsequent movies, but none captured the beauty and nostalgia of The Natural. There are only a handful of movies so magnificently driven by their score, and The Natural remains Newman’s best and most satisfying work.

In short, this is the best baseball movie ever. Whereas Malamud wanted to show baseball as jaundiced and commercial, Towne’s screenplay shows us the baseball we loved as kids, and more. Malamud’s dark and wholly unsatisfying ending is also rewritten, and if you find the final scene a little sweet, ask yourself if you really wanted to see the dismal finale that Malamud supplied.

Other Information:

Original Language en
Runtime 2 hr 18 min (138 min), 2 hr 24 min (144 min) (director’s cut) (USA)
Budget 28000000
Revenue 47951979
Status Released
Rated PG
Genre Drama, Sport
Director Barry Levinson
Writer Bernard Malamud, Roger Towne, Phil Dusenberry
Actors Robert Redford, Robert Duvall, Glenn Close
Country United States
Awards Nominated for 4 Oscars. 3 wins & 8 nominations total
Production Company N/A
Website N/A

Technical Information:

Sound Mix Dolby Stereo, Dolby Atmos
Aspect Ratio 1.85 : 1
Camera Panaflex Camera and Lenses by Panavision
Laboratory Technicolor, Hollywood (CA), USA (prints), DuArt Film Laboratories Inc., New York, USA (processing)
Film Length 3,348 m (Sweden)
Negative Format 35 mm (Eastman 125T 5247, 400T 5294)
Cinematographic Process Digital Intermediate (4K) (2019 remaster), Spherical
Printed Film Format 35 mm