Director: George Roy Hill
Writer: Nancy Dowd
Stars: Paul Newman, Strother Martin and Michael Ontkean
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Index: 2025 Centennials.
I’ve seen a lot of Paul Newman movies, from early films like Somebody Up There Likes Me to late ones like Road to Perdition. Somehow I not only hadn’t seen Slap Shot but hadn’t realised it was a comedy.
I knew that it was an ice hockey movie from the seventies and that it was violent, famously so, but I was under the impression that it was a more realistic equivalent to Rollerball. Well, it isn’t. It’s violent, for sure, but I found it to be a drama, first and foremost, that often took time to be funny. I liked it more than I expected to.
The humour is almost cartoonish, so much so that it’s not very realistic, but the funniest thing of all is that almost everything that feels unrealistic actually happened in real life. This is no documentary, but it seems to be true to the spirit of what was happening in the minor hockey leagues during the early seventies and, in many instances, the detail as well.
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The script was by Nancy Dowd, who based it largely on her brother Ned’s experiences as a member of the Johnstown Jets. She even used him and many of his teammates in the movie as players in the fictional Charlestown Chiefs or their opposition.
There are still recognisable faces. The most established player, Reggie Dunlop, who is also the team’s coach, is played by Paul Newman, for whose centennial I’m watching. He hadn’t won an Oscar yet—that would come for 1986’s The Color of Money—but he had been nominated four times. Joe McGrath, the team’s publicity agent, is Strother Martin. When did I last see him in something that wasn’t a western? And Ned Braden, the best of the Chiefs players, is Michael Ontkean, who I know best as Sheriff Harry S. Truman in Twin Peaks.
Initially, the Chiefs are a joke. The various players on the team are capable but they lose a lot anyway and everyone hates them, their spouses included. However, things quickly get worse. Charlestown is a steel town in the heart of Pennsylvania and they’re about to close the local steel mill, putting ten thousand workers out of their jobs. That means that it’s the final season for the Chiefs before they’re closed.
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Dunlop lives for the team, so does all that he can to keep it alive. Initially, that means lying and scheming to generate interest, and trying to figure out who actually owns the team so he can plead a case to them to sell not close. He also uses underhand tactics to improve their win rate, like goading an opponent goalkeeper into starting a serious fight by telling him that his ex-wife’s a lesbian (he doesn’t explain that he knows that because she told him in bed).
Eventually, though, he hits on the winning strategy: violence. McGrath has brought in the three Hanson Brothers and eventually Dunlop plays them in a game. They turn out to be fast and violent, quick to both score and be sent off for bad conduct, and he notices that the crowd cheers them all the way.
So he plays them a lot and he lets the whole team fight and he builds that reputation, even offering a bounty on an opponent player. A lot of the fun here is in watching the reaction to that approach grow, not only from a growing Chiefs fan base—they suddenly have a Booster Squad of young ladies following the team from game to game—but the opponents too. There’s a joyous scene when they get to Hyannisport for a game to find protestors lining the streets. Everyone on the bus moons them as they pass.
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As much fun as this gets—and I laughed out loud during a few scenes—I found the stories in between the games touching and engaging and they’re what stayed with me.
While Dunlop lives for hockey, he spends an awful lot of time and effort trying to persuade his wife Francine not to leave him. He uses a similar scenario, with Ned’s wife, Lily, wanting to leave him, as fuel to persuade Braden into violence, given that he’s refused to go there.
Many of my favourite moments happen off the rink. There’s a glorious scene with Dunlop following Lily into a park with a bottle in her hand. He warns her that there’s been a murder and a couple of rapes there over the past year. “I didn’t do it,” she replies deadpan. There’s an oddly touching scene in a bar, full of tough hockey players quietly empathising with some soap opera on TV.
These moments highlight how this is always about the characters that populate hockey far more than it’s about violence. The cast live up to that task wonderfully. Strother Martin is on top form, as are Jennifer Warren and Lindsay Crouse, playing Francine and Lily respectively. The team are mostly hockey players but they do a good job as actors too. However, it’s Paul Newman who serves as the glue for the movie and he’s the focal point beyond the script.
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He’d played hockey as a young man, so was in heaven working the ice with real players. He has said that he had more fun making Slap Shot than any other movie and Reggie Dunlop was right up there with his favourite roles.
As a huge name long before 1977, there are a lot of those to choose from. He’d found the acting bug young, performed on stage as a kid and studied drama at and after college. He got his first Broadway lead in Picnic in 1953, a year before his big screen debut in The Silver Chalice. Two years later, playing boxer Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me made his name.
His first Oscar nomination was for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but he’d follow that up with more for The Hustler, Hud and Cool Hand Luke. In the end, he’d rack up ten nominations in all.
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Amazingly those ten didn’t include films as iconic as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, Slap Shot, Fort Apache, the Bronx and The Hudsucker Proxy. What’s perhaps most notable is that he could play it all, whether he needed to employ serious power or a light touch. The sixties began for him, for instance, with a set of four films—Exodus, The Hustler, Paris Blues and Sweet Bird of Youth—and they each needed a very different approach that he nailed.
What’s more, few actors have succeeded off screen like Newman. He found love for racing cars while shooting Winning in 1969 with his wife, Joanne Woodward, and, as P. L. Newman, built another career racing them for real, even starting his own team, Newman/Haas Racing. He won national championships and finished second at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1979. He was still racing in 2007, a year before he died.
And, if that wasn’t enough, he started a food company, Newman’s Own, from which he gave all the profits to charity. That brand has raised more than half a billion dollars for charity.
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