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Sunday October 06, 2024
Movie Review: Slap Shot (1977)
WARNING: SPOILERS
Is this the first in-your-face Minnesota accent in a movie? The kind the Coens would make famous, or infamous, with “Fargo”?
More, the guys who sound Minnesotan are the Hanson brothers, bespectacled enforcers on the ice, the opposite of Minnesota Nice, who help a moribund franchise, the Charlestown Chiefs, become relevant again. They help them win games, fans come out, and at one point we hear the following conversation:
Woman #1: Aren’t those Hansons something?
Woman #2: Aren’t they, though?
Woman #1: They’re sort of funny looking.
Woman #2: Real funny looking.
No way the Coens didn’t see this growing up.
Bad News Chiefs
“Slap Shot” would make a great double-bill not only with “Fargo” but with the original “Bad News Bears,” which was released about a year earlier: April 1976 rather than Feb. 1977.
There, a disinterested coach takes over a moribund little league club that can’t win a game, but the losing, and the damage it’s doing to the kids, eventually gets to him. So he hires some ringers and does what he can to win. They make it to the championship game, where, halfway through, he realizes what an asshole he’s become and puts in all the lesser players he’s held back; they wind up losing, but poignantly. The ending is joyous.
Here, player-coach Reggie Dunlop (Paul Newman) slowly realizes that when the steel mill in Charlestown closes, the moribund Chiefs aren’t long for this world. He also realizes that the weird nerdy guys the team has hired at a discount, the bespectacled Hanson brothers (Jeff Carlson, Steve Carlson and David Hanson), are ringers who bloody noses and win hockey games. And that becomes Reggie’s mantra. The team becomes nasty and brutish, and they make it all the way to the championship game. Except beforehand, Reggie talks to the owner, Anita McCambridge (Kathryn Walker), who thanks him for making her franchise profitable, but she’s still going to fold the team. Because she can make more money with the Chiefs as a tax write-off than as a championship franchise. So now Reggie decides to go out the right way, and that becomes the mantra. And in the first period they get clobbered. So second period, they come out bloodying noses. Which is when the team’s moral authority, Ned Braden (Michael Ontkean), decides to sell sex rather than violence: He does a striptease on the ice, which so disgusts one member of the opposition that he punches the ref. Meaning that team forfeits and the Chiefs win! Plus Reggie gets hired by the Minnesota hockey club! Happy ending!
It's basically the same storyline except for when the coach sees the light and what happens afterward.
“Bad News Bears” is better to me—more poignant—because it’s one of those “we lose but really we win” movies. In “Slap Shot,” the team wins via technicalities, and Reggie wins via another technicality: an 11th-hour job offer in Minnesota.
But it’s still fun. The shocker? This violent, profane film was written by a woman, Nancy Dowd. She grew up in New England, and her brother played hockey for one of these leagues, and she put it all down. “I used the exact same language that the players do,” she told The New York Times in 1977, adding:
“The world has a weird view of women. People seem to believe that we have to write about divorce or suicide or children—so‐called ‘women's topics.’ But we've been around. … You know, when the script first went out in Hollywood. there was talk around town that ‘Nancy Dowd’ was really a man using a pseudonym.”
Shame she didn’t do more. She went uncredited on “Straight Time,” “North Dallas Forty,” “Ordinary People,” “Cloak & Dagger,” and “White Nights.” She got credits for this, “FTA,” “Swing Shift” “and “Let It Ride.” She won an Oscar for “Coming Home,” which was based on her years as an antiwar protester and living in military-base towns, but she hated how they mangled her original script. “It’s message seemed to be that doves are better than hawks in bed,” she apparently said. “And it was pious as well as sentimental.”
Redford, Newman, Chase
Newman is great here but the part is definitely not tailored for him. At one point a woman tells him, “You look a thousand years old,” which makes you wonder how the rest of us look. Plus, let’s face it, he doesn’t have the legs of a hockey player. But he makes do. He acts. It’s the kind of role Newman seemed to prize: a dude who wasn’t particularly educated but with some smarts, and some persistence, fighting a battle against the powers that be. Cool seeing Strother Martin, Newman’s bête noire in “Cool Hand Luke,” as the hapless, dead-weight manager of the Chiefs.
“Slap Shot” was directed by George Roy Hill, who directed Newman and Robert Redford in “Butch Cassidy” and “The Sting,” then directed Redford in “The Great Waldo Pepper” and Newman in this. Not a bad run. The ’80s were less kind. After completely reversing course two years later with “A Little Romance,” he had the impossible task of converting John Irving’s “The World According to Garp” onto the big screen, then did a Diane Keaton-led Mossad movie. Four years later, he directed Chevy Chase in “Funny Farm.” He deserved a better end than that. We all do.