Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

Rating: Null/10 (5 November 2013)

"Gay men are guardians of the masculine impulse. What is anonymous sex in a dark alleyway but a homage to male freedom?" ― Camille Paglia
Release "Slap Shot" in any other decade and it would feel like a vulgar comedy cynically put together by a marketing committee. Release in the 1970s, though, and it'll feels like some kind of social statement. With F bombs.
Directed by George Roy Hill, "Slap Shot" stars Paul Newman as Reggie Dunlop, an ageing hockey coach based in the steel town of Charlestown. With the closing of local steel mills, money has become scarce. To make matters worse, the owners of the Charlestown Chiefs, Reggie's team, are thinking of liquidating the club. Reggie's plan, to keep his team and his boys marketable, is to resort to violent sensationalism. He re-brands the Chiefs into a band of barbarians on ice. The public love it.
Despite being set in the macho world of sports, "Slap Shot" was written by a woman, Nancy Dowd. She has the film develop two parallel strands. One focuses on various women who find men to be emasculated, boorish and immature. These women, most of whom reject traditional femininity and are perpetually dressed in dour clothes, are unfulfilled by men and even go so far as to turn to lesbian relationships. The men put up with this. The times are changing, they rationalise.
The other half of the film deals with the arena of sport being appropriated and perverted by Big Business. Whores in skates, our band of foul-mouthed performers cater to the baser impulses of spectators. Always playing with toys, and childishly homophobic, they're also incapable of mature relationships with women. There's an infantalizing and emasculating quality to both sport and business, Dowd argues, our heroes essentially castrated and so feminized, regardless of their foul mouthed, macho tirades. Dowd's women, meanwhile, are masculinized, made courser, more cynical and harder by the market. Indeed, it is Reggie who insists upon turning women "back into women", taking them to beauty parlours in an attempt to restore old modes of masculinity and femininity.
Reggie is further shocked when he confronts the fact that the Charlestown Chiefs are owned by a svelte businesswoman, a woman who has so little regard for the bloodsport that hockey has become, that she refuses to let her own children watch games. Reggie fumes. He's deemed a pathetic product by the very people who profit from his antics.
The film ends with a Princeton educated player, Ned Braden (Michael Ontkean), staging a little protest. Throughout the film, Braden refuses to sell-out for the sake of the box office; he refuses to fight. During the film's climactic game, Braden then goes further and stages a strip-routine. "Make him stop! That's disgusting," rivals yell. The act not only makes a mockery of boardroom and bleacher violence, but the machismo of audiences, owners and players, all of whom deem violence less obscene than innocence and nudity. Ironically, Braden's wife, for the first time in the film, is here given feminine clothes, and it is an act of violence committed by the oppositional team which swiftly leads to the now-pacifist Chiefs winning their final game.
The 1970s saw a number of gritty, foul-mouthed sports movies ("The Longest Yard", "Bad News Bears" etc). "Slap Shot" was one of the last in this wave. Interestingly, Hill has the film end with a husband and wife splitting. She's a successful businesswoman who skips town, he's left alone in the rubble of Charlestown. The film's signature song is Maxine Nightingale's "Right Back Where We Started From", the song's lyrics ("it's alright, and it's coming along, we got to get right back to where we started from") perhaps speaking, amongst other things, to a masculinity which dreams of one day reasserting itself.
7.9/10 – See "Bull Durham". Worth two viewings.