An Over The Top Caricature Of Hockey In The 70's

Rating: 3/10 (14 February 2010)

"What do you mean this is a serious game?" asks the referee to one of the players. "This is hockey!" That about sums up the movie. It starts out with an amusing scene of a hockey player (played by an actor using an atrocious French-Canadian accent) "explaining" the rules of hockey to an American TV audience. From that point on the movie becomes a very exaggerated caricature of the game. Made in the era when the "Broad Street Bullies" (the nickname of the Philadelphia Flyers) were brawling their way to two Stanley Cups, this follows the exploits of the Charleston Chiefs and their player-coach (played by Paul Newman). The Chiefs are perennial doormats in the minor league "Federal League" and their owner is about to fold the team when Coach Dunlop stumbles upon the key to success - fight and brawl your way to the top - as a way of making the team attractive to potential buyers. There's references to the battle between those who like the new style and those who want to play "real" hockey "like Eddie Shore" - presumably a deliberate irony, since Shore was a very dirty hockey player in his era. I thought the movie spent too much time on the players' personal lives, although it made the point about the players' wives having to put up with the dreariness of minor league cities, while the players had to put up with the interminable bus rides. This is somewhat amusing, although the caricature gets taken way too far by the end, when the Chiefs' opponents for the championship change their entire roster the night before the championship game to bring in a bunch of toughs, and the player stripping on the ice at the end was just plain dumb. To its credit, the on ice action (when it was portraying hockey rather than hockey fights) was pretty well done, but overall I didn't care much for this. 3/10