I don't like sports movies or prison movies but, in honor of Burt Reynolds I watched The Longest Yard. Just a few years after Green Acres, Eddie Albert played the sadistic warden.
Was sorry they destroyed a lovely Citroen SM to make the movie, although the cars were still in production at the time. Citroen could make one extra to make up for it. Burt Reynolds plays an ex-football player turned gigolo who gets into a physical fight with his lady friend and speeds off in her car. He gets into a high speed chase with police, laughs as he causes car wrecks and nearly runs down a number of pedestrians. He assaults the officers who arrest him in a bar and goes to prison. The warden runs a semi-pro team made up of prison guards. He forced Burt Reynolds to put together a team of prison inmates for a game.
Perhaps a rip-off of a 1962 Hungarian film about Ukrainian POWs playing a game against Nazi prison guards. The movie has been remade several times.
I saw it back in the '70's. It was more grim than I remembered. Has a horrible murder, has guards abusing inmates, murderers injuring guards on the football field.
I always relate it to the much more pleasant Semi-Tough made a few years later. It's nothing like The Longest Yard except for Burt Reynolds playing a football player.
Whatever you do, don't go to prison in the South. Europeans consider US prison conditions medieval. I've seen prison documentaries from Russia and they seem pretty nice over there. There was a Norwegian crime movie a couple of years ago with Serbian gangsters. "Have you ever been in prison here? Everybody's nice!"
This was filmed in the state prison in Georgia with Jimmy Carter's cooperation. Reportedly, filming was delayed a couple of times due to prison uprisings.
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