North Dallas Forty (1979)

          Although its portrayal of professional American football as a drug-addled, morally dubious free-for-all was undoubtedly jacked up for dramatic effect, North Dallas Forty feels credible from start to finish, and it works equally well as a joke machine and a serious story. Based on a tell-all book by former Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Peter Gent, the picture depicts the odyssey of Phil Elliott (Nick Nolte), a wide receiver for the fictional team the North Dallas Bulls. Aging out of his prime and suffering the repercussions of numerous injuries, Phil’s a smart-ass who makes occasional game-winning catches and relies heavily on his close friendship with good-ol’-boy quarterback Seth Maxwell (Mac Davis). Yet Phil clashes with the Bulls’ autocratic coach, B.A. Strothers (G.D. Spradlin), who expects complete loyalty and rigorous research from his players. As Phil’s position on the team becomes more and more tenuous—he spends a lot of time on the bench—Phil starts to envision a day when football is no longer the most important thing in his life. Helping to motivate this transition are a romance with sexy bluebood Charlotte Caulder (Dayle Haddon) and the realization that Bulls owner Conrad Hunter (Steve Forrest) is willing to risk players’ health for a winning season.

          Screen time in North Dallas Fortty is divided fairly evenly between sports rituals (games, locker-room conferences, practices) and the other parts of Phil’s life. These worlds bleed into each other, so a sense is conveyed that pro players are modern gladiators who rely on dope to get through physically demanding games and then party hard to release tension. Woven into the picture is a melancholy thread of bold men watching their good years slip into the rearview mirror. Furthermore, players lament how middle managers like Emmett Hunter (Dabney Coleman) have replaced old-fashioned values of dignity and sportsmanship with profit-driven agendas. One suspects that the author of the source material stretched things a bit by portraying his onscreen surrogate as the Last Good Man in Football, but the characterization provides an effective viewpoint for observing the strangeness of professional sports.

          Director Ted Kotcheff, always a competent craftsman no matter the genre, excels on and off the field in North Dallas Forty, using atmosphere and pacing to illustrate how frat-boy chaos and merciless competition fuse into the unsustainable lifestyles of top players; Kotcheff also creates harmonious ensemble acting, no easy task. Nolte is at his very best here, prickly and sympathetic all at once, and singer-turned-actor Davis complements him with an amiably pathetic sort of me-first pragmatism. As the villains of the piece, Coleman, Forrest, Spradlin, and the great Charles Durning form a brick wall of corporate resistance, each representing a different color of uptight intolerance. Bo Svenson and real-life NFL player John Matuszak are very funny as a pair of Neanderthal linebackers, and if comely model-turned-actress Haddon gets lost amid the movie’s male energy given her flat acting, her deficiencies are not enough to detract from the picture’s overall effectiveness.

North Dallas Forty: RIGHT ON

One on One (1977)

          A charming underdog drama starring Robby Benson, the ’70s teen heartthrob with boyish features and impossibly blue eyes, One on One depicts the journey of Henry Steele, a small-town hoops star who discovers the complexities of the wider world when he’s recruited to play ball at a Los Angeles college. The story tracks Henry’s conflict with hard-driving Coach Moreland Smith (G.D. Spradlin), who becomes convinced Henry can’t make it in the big time, and Henry’s romance with sexy graduate student Janet Hayes (Annette O’Toole), who slowly realizes Henry is more than just another dumb jock.

          Co-written by Benson and his father, Jerry Segal, One on One is a perfect vehicle for its young leading man, because the story is as unassuming and warm as Benson’s onscreen persona. A brisk prologue establishes that Henry’s been groomed since childhood for basketball greatness, and the minute he pulls into LA, it’s painfully evident that he’s a corn-fed rube because he gets hustled by the first pretty girl he meets, a chipper hitchhiker (Melanie Griffith) who rips off all his cash.

          Once Henry arrives at school, he’s overwhelmed by the scale of everything—the size of the sports arena, even the size of the other players—and then, when he becomes infatuated with his tutor, Janet, he’s totally flummoxed. Henry’s resulting shaky performance on the basketball court alienates Coach Smith, who tries to intimidate Henry into quitting. Enter, as the saying goes, the love of a good woman, and soon Henry’s got the motivation to fight.

          Although there’s nothing groundbreaking in One on One, it’s a thoroughly watchable movie. The script balances Henry’s journey from wide-eyed innocent to toughened-up competitor with sweet romantic interludes and easygoing comic vignettes, like Henry’s close encounters with Coach Smith’s sex-crazed secretary, B.J. Rudolph (Gail Strickland). As directed by reliable journeyman Lamont Johnson, the movie is paced comfortably, and the sports scenes have effective documentary-style realism.

          The cast is filled with several vivid actors who make an impact thanks to well thought-out characterizations; for instance, Hector Morales plays a cranky campus groundskeeper in one amusing scene. The main focus is, of course, the love story, and that works well: O’Toole’s tough-cookie vibe makes a strong counterpoint to Benson’s puppy-dog routine. And while it’s true that Benson’s character makes a couple of abrupt leaps, Henry’s overall arc feels credible, and Benson is, as O’Toole describes him the picture, adorable. Spradlin, probably best known for his small roles in important movies like Apocalypse Now (1979), meshes domineering cruelty and obsessive focus, bringing a militaristic, weakness-will-not-be-tolerated quality to his role.

          The fruity songs by soft-rock duo Seals & Crofts that punctuate the soundtrack might be too precious for some viewers (particularly since the lyrics comment on the action a bit too specifically), but the music adds to the picture’s evocative snapshot of a particular moment in time. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

One on One: GROOVY

Apocalypse Now (1979)

          One of the definitive cinematic statements of the ’70s, Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War drama is indulgent, pretentious, and undisciplined, but the film’s narrative excesses perfectly match its theme of men driven mad by an insane world. Famously adapted from Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness by gonzo screenwriter John Milius, then rewritten by Coppola and sprinkled with evocative narration by Michael Herr, the harrowing movie follows the journey of military assassin Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), sent by his U.S. Army masters to take out a rogue Green Beret, Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who has established an ultraviolent fiefdom in Cambodia. The irony of the Army condemning one of its own killing machines for being too bloodthirsty is just part of the film’s crazy-quilt statement about the obscenity of war in general and that of the Vietnam conflict in particular; even though the narrative wanders into many strange places along the way, it always returns to the maddening central idea that murder is acceptable as long as it’s done according to plan.
          Moving away from the classicism of his early-’70s triumphs and entering a vibrant period of expressionist experimentation, Coppola oversees a string of bold and inspired sequences, many of which have become iconic. The opening salvo, with hallucinatory intercutting of jungle imagery and a sweaty Saigon hotel room while the Doors’ menacing song “The End” plays on the soundtrack, goes beyond masterful and enters the realm of tweaked genius. And how many scenes in other movies match the audacity of the helicopter attack scored with Wagner’s “Flight of the Valkyries”? The film’s dialogue is just as vivid, from “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” to “The horror, the horror.” Sheen is extraordinary, channeling his intensity and remarkable speaking voice into a performance of perverse majesty, while supporting players Robert Duvall and Dennis Hopper match him with crystalline personifications of two different brands of lunacy. Famously overpaid and uncooperative costar Brando gives Coppola fragments of brilliance that the director stitches into something weirdly affecting, and the fact that Brando’s performance works is a testament to the heroic efforts of a team of editors including longtime Coppola collaborator Walter Murch.
          Speaking of behind-the-camera participants, it would be criminal not to sing the praises of Vittorio Storaro’s luminous photography, which somehow captures not only the heat but also the suffocating humidity of the jungle. Actors Timothy Bottoms, Laurence Fishburne, Albert Hall, and G.D. Spradlin all contribute immeasurably as well, and Harrison Ford pops up for a bit part. After consuming the powerful 153-minute original version, consider exploring the fascinating (and even more indulgent) 202-minute extended cut titled Apocalypse Now Redux, and by all means seek out Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, possibly the most illuminating behind-the-scenes documentary ever made.

Apocalypse Now: OUTTA SIGHT