IB Technicolor Print Bang the Drum Slowly played to rave reviews, then faded into the Hall of Obscurity, just waiting to be rediscovered. It sports a refreshingly literate script in which baseball is played for all it promises in the way of cynical observations-on the game, on life, and on those who can't seem to separate the two. And it has the cast to carry it off: Robert De Niro as a backwoods Georgian who is no more sophisticated for having been thrust into the big leagues as catcher on a major New York team; Michael Moriarty as De Niro's only friend, on a meteoric rise to the soulless big-time; and Vincent Gardenia as the team's shrewd manager, bent on discovering De Niro's secret. The fact is, he has been pitched a death sentence by the Mayo Clinic. For the role, De Niro perfected the distracted look of someone who has enough on his mind bumbling his way through a simple day, without being asked to systematize his catching method-or to understand that he is dying. The subtle transition from deadpan outwardness to baffled inwardness is De Niro's coup. Time critic Richard Schickel called Bang the Drum Slowly "Very possibly the best movie about sports ever made in this country...(Its) genius lies in its introduction of the one subject that superbly conditioned young men rarely think about: death."