To me, this movie is perfection.

The first must-see film of the year.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

I saw this film years ago, and remember thinking it was OK. It's a little hard to imagine now, what a big deal Burt Reynolds was in the Seventies. No other movie star came close. On a recent viewing I found this this movie to be a bit better than I remembered. Still not a classic or anything, but pretty good. The depiction of prison life is harsh, as it surely is, but it seems a different world from today's prisons, with their racial gangs and constant strife. The football game is quite reminiscent of the one in M*A*S*H, from only a few years before.

I've seen this one before, at least 2 or 3 times in my adult life and a few, I'm sure, as a kid watching with my dad. It's been a good dozen years since I last saw it and it's amazing how much of the movie I was familiar with -- about every scene. Prison movie, football movie, Burt Reynolds movie, even has a pretty good car chase! This is without a doubt a man's movie. Is that sexist? I don't want to be but it really is. I am not saying women can't watch it and enjoy it just as much as their male counterparts, but this is what being a man is all about! Don't give me no Pretty Woman or Steel Magnolias on a Sunday afternoon, give me football, hard hitting American football! Thank you director Robert Aldrich and thank you Burt for this fun and well acted 70's classic!--A Kat Pirate Screener

The Longest Yard refers not to the territory gained and lost in a football game. For Burt Reynolds its that prison yard that he's in for the next 18 months. Reynolds isn't one of the noblest athletes ever to grace the National Football League. He was a quarterback who was thrown out of the game in a point shaving scandal. Now he's doing time for stealing his mistress's Maserati and causing a lot of havoc and mayhem when she called the cops on him.The Longest Yard starts to look a little like From Here To Eternity where Monty Clift's company captain Philip Ober wants him to box for the post championship. Reynolds really isn't interested in playing football any more or helping warden Eddie Albert out with his semi-pro team of prison guards. But he's got less redress than Clift did in the army and Reynolds is not a person to make too fine a point of resistance.What Reynolds suggests is a tune-up game with a squad of the inmates to play the guards to keep them in a fighting edge. Sounds real good to Albert who has a mean streak in him that Reynolds is slow to realize. There's a lot of possibilities to inflict some legal pain and for him to reassert his authority.The Longest Yard is first and foremost about what Reynolds will do when the crisis comes. His track record doesn't suggest any heroics, but some people do surprise you.The antagonists Reynolds and Albert are given good support by director Robert Aldrich's picked cast. Foremost among them are Ed Lauter as the chief guard, James Hampton as the team manager, and Charles Tyner in a particularly loathsome role as a prison stoolie. He will really make your skin crawl.Bernadette Peters is also in The Longest Yard as Albert's secretary with the delightful name of Miss Toot who takes advantage of her position with a little sexual harassment of the prisoners. I do love that Dickensian name that was given her for this film. The only other female of note is Anitra Ford who is Reynolds mistress and whose Maserati he appropriates. When Burt says he earned that Maserati you can well believe it.The Longest Yard is in a class by itself, a sports/prison movie. A film that created it's own genre. That has to count for something.

The Longest Yard was an extremely well put together movie about prison and football all at the same time. I thought that this would be an all sport styled movie basing on the game of football, but it was more than all of that. It had the drama/comedy/sport genres all tied into one definitive movie. Burt Reynolds did fairly well for this kind of movie, as you normally see him doing Smokey and the Bandit movies which base around a huge car chase throughout the entire movie. So with this step up he really gives an all out entertaining performance as Paul Crewe and the characters really make the movie in a special way.10/10