Yankees fans, flush with twenty-seven World Series championships, are condescendingly magnanimous toward upstart Mets fans, who, by contrast, are relentlessly resentful. A child of Queens and a Mets fan myself, I enjoy Yankees losses almost as much as Mets victories, which, of course, makes me a Red Sox fan, too (except for 1986). That’s why the Farrelly brothers’ 2005 baseball-centric romance “Fever Pitch,” starring Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon and culminating in the Red Sox’s victory in the 2004 series, has long been a favorite in my household. But I confess: when, in the wake of the Cleveland Indians’ sweep of the Red Sox the other night, my daughters were discussing that movie, I started thinking about a different movie altogether—the 1985 film also called “Fever Pitch,” the last film written and directed by the Hollywood veteran Richard Brooks, who is best known for such dramatic classics as “Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” “In Cold Blood,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” and “Blackboard Jungle.”

I saw Brooks’s “Fever Pitch” when it came out, and was instantly smitten. Like the Farrellys’ film, Brooks’s is also a sports story—the story of a sportswriter named Steve Taggart (Ryan O’Neal), who is working on a long-term and multi-part investigation of gambling in the United States. To get a feel for the subject, Steve immerses himself in the activity—and from imitating a compulsive gambler becomes a compulsive gambler himself, continuing to pursue his story while fleeing a loan shark’s violent collector. I hadn’t seen the movie in a while, but then, out of the blue, the title again came to mind a few weeks ago. When I mentioned the film on Twitter, I received a few responses citing the critical line about the film at the time of its release—which was sharply and, I thought, unwarrantedly negative. (It stands at a robust zero per cent on Rotten Tomatoes.) And the reason I hadn’t seen it since then is connected to this fact: it has never been released on DVD, perhaps owing to its undeservedly negative reception. The only way to see it again is to get hold of the VHS tape that came out in 1986—so that’s what I did.

“Fever Pitch” still delivers the same terse, grim, and ironic power that it had when I first saw it. Brooks, whose directorial career started in 1950, brings the same gifts to bear on his last film that he exhibited throughout his career—a sense of documentary filmmaking infusing fiction, a passion for journalism as a mode of knowledge, an overlay of reportorial observation on dramatic staging. From the start, the movie’s a conspicuous throwback—O’Neal’s the star, but his taut and tormented performance is nearly upstaged by his haircut, a slightly longer and softer version of the stark prow worn by Humphrey Bogart in Brooks’s “Deadline U.S.A.” and by Glenn Ford in “Blackboard Jungle.”

Brooks’s direction is also a throwback to the hard-toned Speed Graphic vitality of nineteen-fifties film noir, starting with a credit sequence of documentary images of the production of gambling matériel, including dice and chips, rolls of coins, and stacks of bills. Brooks also wrote the script, and he revels in unspooling two distinct narratives, visually and on the soundtrack, at the same time: the ravaging ups and downs of Steve’s fortunes in the casinos, and the offstage agonies, of violence and of high-stakes confrontations and negotiations, that go along with it. Steve plays a dangerous game with his editors as well: his ongoing series focusses on one particular compulsive gambler, a so-called Mr. Green, who is, of course, Steve’s autobiographical avatar—yet he doesn’t let his editor know of his self-depiction, of the fabrication of that character, until very late in the game.

There’s a casino boss named Sweeney (Keith Hefner) who, with a reference from a local newspaper editor, opens his doors to Steve, showing him the guts of the operation—and also sending a cocktail waitress/call girl, Flo (Catherine Hicks), to his room. Steve quickly proves that he prefers gambling to sex, but their quick, money-fuelled friendship veers into one of the scenes of deep degradation that scars the movie throughout—a scene in Flo’s dressing room, where Steve shows up for a loan and crosses, in words alone, a crucial moral line (too good and too simple to spoil). There’s an international high-roller, Charley Peru (Giancarlo Giannini), who becomes Steve’s benefactor but parlays that friendship into cash profits.

But, above all, there’s violence, horror, fear, and humiliation—the paranoid frenzy arising from a hit man’s ability to track Steve down and keep him in the virtual crosshairs. There’s a flashback to the death of Steve’s wife, for which he has reason to blame himself, and forcedly heartwarming scenes of Steve with his young daughter, Amy (Bridgette Andersen), whom he’s desperately trying to protect from the gangster who considers her Steve’s “collateral.” A basement game of high-stakes squash turns into a nightmare for a star athlete; a young man attempts suicide after losing his family’s money. Steve himself has to fight hand to hand for his very life, and it’s no mere passing plot twist—he spends much of the movie physically wounded. Steve also gets covered in filth; he lifts another degraded gambler from the racetrack linoleum, and watches another gambler collapse from “casino bladder” (avoiding trips to the bathroom in order to keep pulling the slot-machine handle); he attends meetings of Gamblers Anonymous and hears tales of ruined lives.

Brooks films the action in sharply defined images with spare and aggressive angles, conjuring the inner howls of conflicting desires tearing Steve and the sordidly glossy milieu apart during even the simplest of events. Much of the action takes place in the timeless chill of casinos and the nighttime panic of the Las Vegas streets outside, and the cinematography, by William A. Fraker, expertly captures the harsh glare of overbright chandeliers, the blank allure of neon glows in primary colors, the deceptions and revelations of cruel reflections. (Fraker’s one of my favorite cinematographers, for his work with Floyd Mutrux on “Dusty and Sweets McGee,” “Aloha, Bobby and Rose,” and “American Hot Wax,” as well as on Steven Spielberg’s wildest film, “1941.”)

The movie has a strange ending that’s worth mentioning, because Roger Ebert, in his review at the time of the movie’s release, spotlighted it as “sick.” Because he spoils it, I don’t mind mentioning it: Steve swears off gambling—but is still eighty-nine thousand dollars in debt. He returns to a casino in order to win that sum, and, only then, walks away from gambling for good. In general, I think that the best way to deal with an unsatisfying ending to a good movie is simply to ignore it—mentally to give the movie the ending that you’d prefer it to have. Endings are artifices, especially in movies, where the happy ending is a convention so deeply ingrained in mass entertainment that the unhappy ending has become a similarly absurd convention of art-house productions. But I see the ending of “Fever Pitch” as false cheer masking bitter irony: even after confronting his addiction, Steve is still heavily in debt. His ability to win—and then to quit—is as much of an absurdist tag ending as the primordial and definitive one, from F. W. Murnau’s “The Last Laugh,” from 1924. Despite the apparent realism of Brooks’s ending, it plays like a smiley face stuck on a death mask.

In short, “Fever Pitch” is well worth seeing—and re-seeing—and it’s the victim of critical obtuseness, which isn’t reserved solely for high-budget, high-profile films, such as “Ishtar” and “Heaven’s Gate.” Critical obtuseness has relegated other excellent films to virtual invisibility, whether Jean-Luc Godard’s “Nouvelle Vague,” from 1990, one of his best films and the victim of an in-print assassination by the Times’ Vincent Canby, or Darejan Omirbaev’s “Chouga,” which received similar, if briefer, treatment, in 2008, by that paper’s critic Stephen Holden. These films have never been released here at all. John Ford’s last film, “7 Women,” similarly disdained at the time of its release, has never been released on DVD; neither has Vincente Minnelli’s last film, “A Matter of Time,” also widely derided when it came out. With the New York Film Festival currently presenting a wide range of remarkable films—many unheralded—and with superb independent films (such as Zach Clark’s “Little Sister”) opening in limited releases and runs, the responsibility of critics for preserving not only the cinema’s past but also its future is as great and as serious as ever.