Oldtimers' Day

The institution is as sacrosanct as sport itself. Yesterday's stars don their old numbers, puff through a token contest, then retire to ovations. The game is arthritic, to be sure, but the locker room--ah, that is where the real show is, awash with boozy nostalgia.

In professional baseball and college football, the ritual is called "Oldtimers' Day." In the movies, it is called There Was a Crooked Man. The combined age of the participants is Methuselahistic, and the plot is not much younger. For his game, Director Joseph Mankiewicz chose such veterans as Arthur O'Connell, Burgess Meredith, Hume Cronyn and Martin Gabel. Together, their gray thatches look like a stand of dandelions gone to seed. One good breath and their hair might vanish, two deep ones and the picture itself might be gone--and no one the poorer.

With the exception of one callow actor, the picture's youngster is Kirk Douglas, 54, playing with an outrageous auburn hair rinse and grinning like a Steinway with 88 white keys. He and the rest of the over-the-hill gang try to bust out of a federal pen presided over by Warden Henry Fonda, a lame graybeard with advanced ideas about penology. These notions are the only flickers of intelligence in the film.

The direction, which features bodies dragged through a ditch of urine and a man plunked face down in a John, makes one doubt that Mankiewicz ever saw, much less made, All About Eve--or, for that matter, Cleopatra.

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