NORTH DALLAS FORTY (1979)

In the late ‘70s, as Professional Football was supplanting Professional Baseball as America’s Pastime*, two major Hollywood films had the same goal: celebrate, satirize & lay bare the appeal & the hard dark hypocrisy behind the business of the game.  SEMI-TOUGH/’77 had the A-Team players: bigger stars & budget; commercially hot director; Oscar’d writers; legendary B’way producer hot to score in film.  NORTH DALLAS FORTY, from a Peter Gent bestseller (note poster), was distinctly B-Team.  Stars, director, script, all a couple of steps down.  And while DALLAS was anything but formulaic, the underdog production was true to formula in coming from behind to swamp the favorite with a surprise victory in all categories other than box-office (star names still mattered at the time); grossing a third less.   But such a better work.  Nick Nolte, easily out-acting everyone in either film, gives a tremendous perf as the aging receiver whose body is betraying him.  Especially those ‘never-fail’ hands.  He knows he’s being used up; what he doesn’t know, and what becomes the main plot, is that he’s also being used: by his coaches, by the owners, probably by best pal Mac Davis (unexpectedly fine) to further their agenda.  Director Ted Kotcheff, working looser than he did before or after, captures something open, daring & vanity-free from his cast, something he may not even have known he was getting.  And Gent’s insight shows everywhere.  (Shocking now to see how much smaller the game was at the time.)  There’s a weak link in Nolte’s love interest, Dayle Haddon a nonstarter, but everything else is spot on, violence, smoking, drugs, sexism & slowly receding racism.  Professional sports films wouldn’t be this sharp again till Ron Shelton started writing & directing them.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Out the same year, French soccer dramedy COUP DE TÊTE/’79 does professional sports tell-all as well as it’s ever been done.  Honest, appalling, funnier.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/03/coup-de-tete-hothead-1979.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *While football may rule ratings & profits, baseball still reigns, and by some margin, at the movies.