Slap Shot

My fellow Minnesota native George Roy Hill (born across the Mississippi River from where I was born and where the Republican Convention was held) is best remembered for two movies he directed that costarred Paul Newman and Robert Redford, "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (1969) and "The Sting" (1973). He went on to direct Redford without Newman in "The Great Waldo Pepper" (1975) and Newman without Redford in "Slap Shot" (1977). The last of these is IMO the funniest of Hill's movies and The Great Sports Comedy of all times.

"Slap Shot" is also of considerable current relevance, less because of the suddenly famous (but still being kept under wraps even from Fox News) self-styled "hockey mom" (defined by her as like a pit bull with lipstick) Sarah Palin has made Levi Johnston, the 18-year-old who knocked up the 17-year-old, unmarried Bristol Palin (another instance of the (in)efficacy of abstinence-only miseducation) famous for "living for hockey" along with not wanting to have children. (Reportedly he is going to get around to "doing the right thing" and giving the child he does not want legitimacy). There are no "hockey moms" in evidence in "Slap Shot." Neglected wives/"hockey widows," yes, their frustrations are recurrently shown, but the mother of the most avid hockey players, the Hanson Brothers, is not on view. Given how Sarah ("the Barracuda") Palin behaved as mayor of Wassilia until becoming governor of Alaska a year and a half ago, I imagined her in the role nonetheless.

The Hanson brothers, bespectacled as she is (and with hair about the same length as hers), are as ruthless as Mayor Palin was and almost as funny in their disconnect from the world beyond ice rinks.

The sleazy owner of the hockey team, the "Charlestown Chiefs," in "Slap Shot," played with his usual obvious calculatingness by Strother Martin hires the Hanson brothers, who lack inhibitions and do not seem to have much talent on the ice for anything except mugging opponents is brought in to get attention. The Chiefs, under aging player-coach Reg Dunlop (Paul Newman as a sort of John McCain to the Hanson Brothers' Sarah Palin and her son-out-of-the-law Levi) have been losing.

The Hanson brothers shake things up. The major local employer (I think a steel mill, especially since "Charlestown" seems to be in upstate Pennsylvania -- it was filmed in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, though the skating rink is Colgate University's Star Rink in Hamilton, New York) is closing.

The most educated (Princeton, no less) Chief, Ned Braden (Michael Ontkean) learns that the team is going to be disbanded at the end of the season. I guess it would constitute "plot-spoiling" to reveal who owns the Chiefs, but the owner tells Reg that selling the team (what he is hoping will happen) will not provide the tax advantages of liquidating it.

Shutting down American companies (both the steel mill and the hockey team in "Slap Shot") is also the focus of "Other People's Money" which I recently watched. It is this loss of American jobs that seems particularly relevant as job loss under Republican (mis)rule continues, and the US Labor Department reports the highest unemployment rate in six years. (In Alaska, one out of three jobs depends upon federal "earmarks," which Governor Palin is pretending she opposes, though the current issue of the persistently pro-Bush Economist reports that "between 1996 and 2006 per-capita federal spending in Alaska rose from 38% above the national average to 71% above" and that two-thirds of Alaskans believe that its indicted senior senator, Ted Stevens is "at least as ethical as most politicians.")

With the Hanson brothers in the lineup, the Chiefs win and turn profitable, but there is no bail-out for them (or for the local mill).

There is a small-city parade celebrating the Chiefs at the end, after a championship game in which sports(manship) has been completely supplanted by violent entertainment of the professional wrestling kind. Ned Braden's form of protest drives the opposing thugs nuts, but I won't go into what that form is.

Along with the comedy of the clueless thugs turning the Chiefs from losers into winners, there are some melancholy romances involving Reg, Ned, and their frustrated wives, Francine (Jennifer Warren) and Lily (Lindsay Crouse). Not to leave out the craven sportscaster (a former career of Sarah Palin), played, I think by M. Emmet Walsh with a spectacularly bad toupé.

The widescreen video transfer of the 25th anniversary special edition, especially the on-ice scenes, is quite good. (Those who have seen the movie panned and scanned on broadcast television with much of the dialog censored have not really seen "Slap Shot"). The sound sometimes sounds a bit muffled, even if the dialog is no longer censored.

This edition also includes an interview featurette of the three actors who played the Hanson brothers (only one is a Hanson--both the real Hanson brothers, and the two who play Hanson but are actually Carlson brothers, were professional hockey players). They report having raised seven million dollars for charities with personal appearances. They also recall being delighted to meet Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and by Newman's practical jokes while filming. They also provide a commentary track on the movie and their scenes are available detached from the movie that they invigorate. There is also a trailer and talent files.

The little team that could is on view, but don't expect "Slap Shot" to have many other resemblances to "Hoosiers" (or even the uplift of "Mystery, Alaska" in which the underdogs don't win). It is much closer to Robert Altman's 1970s deconstructions of genres other than sports films (war movies, detective stories, westerns in M*A*S*H, The Long Goodbye, McCabe and Mrs. Miller).

"Slap Shot" is much darker comedy than "Butch Cassidy" or "The Sting." I think that the George Roy Hill movie to link it to is "Slaughterhouse Five," though I'm not sure whether it is Reg or Ned who is more like the innocence of Billy Pilgrim (Reg definitely gets the erotic companionship that Billy gets far from Dresden in the form of Melinda Dillon...)



I don't think that one's views about the suddenly prominent "hockey mom" and her hockey fanatic son-not-in-law matter to enjoying or not enjoying "Slap Shot" in general or the hijinks of the Hanson brothers in particular. The duplicity of Strother Martin in it reminds me of John McCain's pretending not to be an enabler and would-be continuer of George W. Bush's disastrous reign, but the movie can be enjoyed by those who see it as a satire of the workings of American business (which have precious little to do with laissez-faire and much more to do with manipulating the tax code as exemplified by the owner of the Chiefs in "Slap Shot") and by those who revel in the ways in which sports have become circuses (violent entertainment) in the "provide them bread and circuses" approach to keeping the masses quiescent. (And I am well aware that one could expend more words on making money from satires of American business closures.)

We have yet to learn what books Sarah Palin as mayor wanted banned for "bad language" before she tried to fire the librarian for not cooperating with her Christianist mayoralty (see www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1837918,00.html). "Slap Shot" has no locker-room nudity but a lot of "locker room" language, so might be among the works Palin sought to have removed.


© 2008, Stephen O. Murray