One must of course be willing to go a certain distance, however grumblingly, with the movie's chosen premise: the mixture of baseball lore and Arthurian Romance preserved from the Bernard Malamud novel. But the road downward from Arthurian Romance to the latest issue of Baseball Digest is not short and not uncluttered. The problem isn't only, or even mainly, that "Casey at the Bat" might be thought to have put a permanent end to the epic approach. The problem is also, and mainly, that there have been plenty of other treatments of divine (or Satanic, or otherwise supernatural) intervention into the game of baseball. The Natural inevitably bears a closer family resemblance to them than to any distant Arthurian ancestor, and those others -- Angels in the Outfield, Damn Yankees, It Happens Every Spring, et al. -- have established the tone for such stories as whimsical. The Natural makes perhaps one attempt to get into that spirit, with an absurdist gag about a right fielder who, like a character in a cartoon, crashes through the outfield fence in pursuit of a fly ball, but who, unlike any character in a cartoon, manages to break his neck in the process. This sort of gag cannot come off here -- not amid all the golden photography, backlighting, and slow-motion, still less amid the flapping and crowing Aaron Coplandisms of the Randy Newman musical score (performable as a concert piece, perhaps, entitled something like An Outfield Overture or Fanfare for the Uncommon Sportsman). In this context a momentary lapse of judgment is a disaster; a single "harrumph" can start a landslide. With Robert Redford, Robert Duvall, Wilford Brimley, Glenn Close, and Kim Basinger; directed by Barry Levinson. (1984) — Duncan Shepherd