For many of us growing up 30 years ago when "The Bad News Bears" first came out, this is the film that peeled back the suburban sheen of middle-class American life and used that anchor of conformity, Little League Baseball, to lay it all bare: the false values, the fear of mediocrity, coming to grips with the hard truths of life. Like many gut-punch films, like "Great Dictator" and "The Graduate," it takes the form of a comedy, a pretty funny one that dares to show kids swearing and being themselves.<br /><br />The Bears' arrival is bad news for the West Valley League of southern California, forcing them to accept kids deemed not up to their high standard. There's a shrimp named Tanner Boyle with plenty of fight but no coordination, a fat kid named Engelberg who smears chocolate on the ball when throwing it back to the pitcher, a pair of Mexicans no one understands, a bookworm who keeps track of foul balls but can't hit for beans, and Timmy Lupus, a painfully shy small fry who Boyle calls a "booger-eating spaz." Coaching the team is ex-minor league pitcher Morris Buttermaker (Walter Matthau), now reduced to cleaning pools and drinking himself into semi-consciousness.<br /><br />Making no bones about telling Buttermaker he's not wanted is the manager of the West Valley powerhouse Yankees, Roy Turner (Vic Morrow): "It's not us. It's the boys. The boys themselves want it that way, and that's the way they want to keep it." Buttermaker just wants his check, but he finds himself regaining a fighting spirit as others shove their arrogance down his throat and those of the boys he is charged to look after.<br /><br />When the team tries to quit after getting pasted by the Yankees in their first game, 26-0, Buttermaker delivers a line that resonates, like so much in this movie, down through the years: "This quitting thing, it's a hard habit to break once you start." Matthau is terrific, creating a wisecracking but poignant center. Director Michael Ritchie and screenwriter Bill Lancaster knew what they were after and deliver it, a pitch-perfect social satire dressed as a sports film with a cast of mostly unknown kids who lack for professional finesse but seem to lay their souls bare to the camera.<br /><br />It's not perfect. "The Bad News Bears" struggles at times to keep things funny as Buttermaker's self-loathing and the falsity of the other adults threatens to overwhelm the thin comic casing. Buttermaker's solution to overcoming the Bears' respect problems also feels a bit of a dodge: He brings in a couple of ringers, Amanda Whurlitzer (Tatum O'Neal) and Kelly Leak (Jackie Earle Haley), both of whom add to the film, but water it down some, too, diluting the connection between Buttermaker and the original Bears.<br /><br />But there's a lot of depth to the film, depth of a dark but compelling kind. Buttermaker and Amanda try and fail to patch up their long-ago relationship as substitute father and daughter. Roy Turner, a fundamentally decent man who just lost sight of what's important, deals with the realization he has probably lost his son to his all-or-nothing winner's mentality. Timmy Lupus tries to melt into every background God gives him until called upon to do something special like mixing a martini for Buttermaker. Baseball may be treated as a joke in this film, but there is something vital to it, too, a rite of passage very different to the kids themselves than to the adults, who like Turner look at the scoreboard and miss the bigger picture.<br /><br />"You didn't come into this world to sit in a dugout all your life," is the way Buttermaker puts it to Timmy Lupus. I identified with Lupus, which is probably why I winced through the movie watching it in a theater in 1976 and embrace it now. It's a real slice-of-life film with all the discomfort that implies. You may go in thinking you are going to see a nostalgic, foul-mouthed spectacle of spunk and charm, and you are, but you may well leave like I did wondering if there's a little of you still lying on that baseball field, too.