Roger's reviews have appeared in McClatchy-Tribune News Service, Orlando Sentinel, Spin Magazine, The World, Orlando Magazine Autoweek Magazine among others. He is the founder and editor of Movie Nation
It’s
been accepted wisdom for much of my adult life that “Slap
Shot” is “the greatest sports movie of all
time.”
A
rude, bloody and irreverent 1970s story of minor league
hockey, it was the last time director George Roy Hill
teamed up with his on-screen alter ego, Paul Newman. As
their other two collaborations were “Butch Cassidy
and the Sundance Kid” and “The Sting,”
this sports comedy is in good company.
Hill
made “A Little Romance” and took a shot at
“Slaughterhouse Five” and “The World
According to Garp,” so if he’s “underrated”
among that era’s top directors, it’s not because
he wasn’t trying.
“Slap
Shot,” which I hadn’t seen in years —
my first exposure to it was when I was projectionist for
a screening at the huge, carbon-arc/16mm projector auditorium
at my undergrad school — remains a great snap shot
of late ’70s American ‘malaise.’ It’s
set in fictional Rust Belt Charlestown in the heart of
hockey country. Smoke stacks fill the (Johnstown, Pa.)
skyline, Old Style signs decorate the bars.
And
the Charlestown Chiefs are the only pro game in town,
a Federal League team that’s seen better days. Newman
plays Reggie Dunlop, the grey-haired player-coach of a
losing team, a seen-it-all skater transitioning to “the
front office,” his general manager (Strother Martin)
assures him.
But
the young-yet-jaded “star” of the team, Ned
Braden (Michael Ontkean) is the one who sees the writing
on the wall. When word gets out that “the mill is
closing,” the Chiefs are not long for this world.
Reg
is slow to catch on, missing the GM’s phone chats
about selling this or that — the team bus, for instance.
Braden and a couple of others may have slim hopes of getting
called up to the NHL. But for most, in a down economy,
even blue collar job options seem delusion.
“Back
to the f—–g Chrysler plant!”
The
womanizing Reg — Jennifer Warren plays his big-haired
hairdresser wife, the one he can’t let himself divorce
— comes up with a plan. He plants a rumor (M. Emmett
Walsh plays the local sports columnist) that “some
retirement community in Florida” wants the team.
All it’ll take is a winning streak, a spike in attendance
and finding out who actually owns this damned team, and
maybe that rumor will come true.
Avid
fans of “Slap Shot” know what’s coming,
what to wait for in the story. It’s the arrival
of The Hansons, three dopey, bespectacled arrested-development
Canadian brothers (Jeff Carlson, Steve Carlson and David
Hanson) who join the club, cheerlead from the bench and
slotcar race in their hotel room.
“I
wonder if they show ‘Speed Racer’ here?”
They
tape aluminum foil onto their fists and patiently wait
for coach to stop saying “These guys are RE—ds!”
and give them them the “OK guys, show us what you
got.”
Turns
out, they’re just the goons this team was looking
for. Brawls, cheap shots, penalties and wins follow, with
only Braden resisting this sudden change in their fortunes.
“I’m
not gonna ‘goon it up’ for you.”
I
never realized this was the debut of screenwriter Nancy
Dowd, who scripted “Coming Home,” “Swing
Shift” and the Richard Dreyfuss horse track comedy
“Let It Ride” over the course of a career
in which she was often uncredited for her rewrites “(Ordinary
People”) or wrote under a male nom de plume (“Let
It Ride”).
The
nom de plume thing becomes more understandable when you
dive into the films. You can’t just blame the boys-will-be-boys
director for something you can see in a lot of her scripts.
Dowd had a gift for reducing women characters to ‘types.’
The sexism of “Slap Shot,” with the ex who
won’t hear of a reconciliation, the “I’ve
been sleeping with women” side piece wife (Melinda
Dillon, of “Close Encounters,” “Christmas
Story” and Newman’s “Absence of Malice”)
of an opponent, the smart, crusty and not-as-tough-as-she-looks
spouse (Lindsay Crouse, who would marry pre-fame playwright/screenwriter
David Mamet later that year) Braden dismisses. Dowd wrote
interesting female characters, but had a real gift for
women who didn’t measure up to the male ones.
“Slap
Shot” proved so tempting to imitate that you can
see pieces of it in decades of sports comedies to follow
— “Major League,” “Bull Durham,”
“Semi Pro,” “The Replacements.”
There’s even a whiff of it in the whole owner/coach
dynamic of “Ted Lasso.”
But
what smacks you right in the face watching this beloved,
overlong and uneven picture now are how reliant it is
on slurs for laughs.
Sure,
it was a different era. And at least, with its hockey
milieu and all-white Rust Belt towns settings, they aren’t
racial slurs. It took a long time for most of America
to abandon the homophobic and mentally-challenged language
that this film pounds away at. I always take into account
that my hero James Garner’s Jim Rockford drops the
F-slur in the pilot of his 1970s TV series when considering
“how far we’ve come” in such instances.
But
Hill & Co. RELY on these phrases for more of the film’s
humour than most of us remember. Sure, there’s a
goofy small-city TV interview-with-the-French Canadian
goalie (Yvon Barrette) to kick things off. Mooning fans
of opposing teams from the windows of the team bus is
a timeless laugh. And the damned Hanson Brothers are a
hoot in every way and in every scene.
A
referee threatens/warns the Hansons about what won’t
be tolerated, but makes the mistake of doing it during
the national anthem.
“I’m
listening to the f—–g song!”
Much
of the humour is shock-value profanity. We’d never
heard Paul Newman talk like this in a movie, and it could
be bracing and hilarious.
Other
laughs come from Reggie’s play-the-angles manipulations,
and the Godawful plaids and brown-leather leisure suits
fashions on display. Probably not as funny back then?
Sure.
But
strip away the slurs and a lot what you/we have laughed
at in this comedy over the decades is gone.
And
watching it now, the clunkiness of the plot and the meandering
story-telling style are thrown into sharper relief. It
was hard to chase guys (or have them chase the camera)
on the ice when the 35mm cameras weighed that much. There’s
one dazzling bit of skating/fight choreography early on,
and everything that follows seems geared to hiding just
how fast — or slow — the cast (most of them)
were on skates.
Crouse
would go on to work with Newman again (“The Verdict”)
and star in the films of her then husband (House
of Games). Dillon
would make a bigger mark in the films she made following
“Slap Shot,” ones in which she was allowed
to keep her shirt on. Walsh became one of the most beloved
character curmudgeons of the cinema, and Paul Dooley —
as a manic play-by-play man calling an on-ice/in-the-stands
fight — was immortalized in “Breaking Away”
and “Popeye.”
I
became a bigger hockey fan after seeing “Slap Shot,”
and going to a college hockey power for grad school, I
became a lot more discriminating about the action and
how games were depicted. Frankly, “Cutting Edge”
and other later films had better skating (and editing).
For me, the all-time best hockey movie is “Miracle.”
And
I’m still waiting for something to surpass “Bull
Durham” as the savviest, silliest and most gloriously
sentimental sports movie of them all. Real-life jock turned
director Ron Shelton, and Costner, Robbins, Sarandon &
Co. managed a lot more laughs than “Slap Shot”
with nary a “fa—t” or “re—d.”
That
film is aging pretty well. But the more time passes, the
more this “Slap Shot” seems wide of the net.