“Slap Shot,” the 1977 movie about a minor league hockey team, is widely hailed as one of the best sports comedies ever made. It’s certainly got strong trailer material with Paul Newman smiling rakishly in the rink and a trio of affable brothers clotheslining opponents with a smile. The movie may even be brilliant as a gritty illustration of a factory town’s sudden decline, but it’s neither a comedy nor a sports movie.
Newman, the player-manager of the Charlestown Chiefs, manages to give the thing a little charm, chasing women and teasing opposing players with roguish bravado, but he’s as tragic as he is funny. Prancing about in a leather leisure suit, he can’t figure out how to win his wife back or make the Chiefs successful. There are isolated laughs about the gimmicks employed to promote a minor-league franchise, and the guileless goonery of the Hanson brothers is wondrous, but the mill is shutting down and the team is getting sold, if it’fecs lucky.
The Chiefs lose all the time, until the Hansons start crushing foes into the boards with abandon. They go on a winning streak that takes them to the championship, although we only see them score a couple of times. The crowd of poor, blue-collar workers roar with bloodlust.
Few laughs; not much sports. God, it’s grim.
Were actors and actresses a lot less attractive in the ’70s? Certainly their clothes and hairstyles are abominable, but I had a hard time imagining any of the women who star in “Slap Shot” getting a part in a movie today. The hard-drinking wife of the Chiefs star player is cute but not model thin like lead actresses these days. Newman’s love interest is menacingly tall, almost masculine, ready to stand in for Ziggy Stardust. And they’re supposed to be the pretty ones in the flick.
The friend who recommended “Slap Shot” said I missed the point. He notes that a slew of movies in that realist period presented flawed characters with average looks – scruffy, lined men and small-breasted women with minimal or bad makeup and off-the-rack clothing. “’Slap Shot’ is all about the second-rate shabbiness of the whole business and milieu,” he argues.
Oh, I got the point all right.
– Knute Rimkus
