Though we've left out some sentimental choices — cry us a river over "Brian's Song" another time — we're confident that you'll discover some new favorites
We dare you to watch Hoosiers, the 1986 ode to underdogs starring Gene Hackman as Hickory High School basketball coach Norman Dale, and not get chills or shed a tear or two. Why? Start with the stirring score, which earned composer Jerry Goldsmith an Oscar nomination. Then there’s, well, the score: tiny Hickory High 42, mighty South Bend Central 40, in the Indiana state finals, with the greatest shooter in cinematic history, Jimmy Chitwood, sinking the winning bucket at the buzzer. (This year, a Harvard student figured out that, while “ignoring scrimmages and rapid-fire montages,” Chitwood hit 20 of his 23 shots in the film.) Plus, Dennis Hopper steals several scenes as Shooter, the town drunk turned assistant Hickory High coach. (“We’re gonna run the picket fence at ‘em … Now, boys, don’t get caught watchin’ the paint dry!”) The role got him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. So before next year’s NCAA basketball tournament, we suggest you do yourself a favor: fire up Hoosiers, even if for the 300th time. You’ll be thirsting for March Madness to begin.
You might shed hot tears as some basketball or football underdog pursues its impossible championship dream, but no one ever got misty watching a movie about pool. The billiard parlor is ringed with all-night cigarette smoke, populated by sharpies and losers. Even the player’s posture, bent over as his cue taps the ball, suggests a safecracker’s posture at the tumbler. So the few pool-hall dramas must revel in seediness, with antiheroes as cavemen, learning to use guile over brute strength to earn their dominance.
In adapting Walter Tevis’ novel to the screen, director Robert Rossen (Body and Soul) cast Paul Newman as the hero-heel who’s a pleasure to watch in action, right up to the climactic comeuppance. Newman, who could fill most of a top-10 list of sports movies — boxing in Somebody Up There Likes Me, hockey in Slap Shot, race-car driving in Winning and Cars and baseball in the TV film of Bang the Drum Slowly, not forgetting the broken football star he plays in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof — had the prowling grace for any crafty athletic endeavor, including pool hustling. His Fast Eddie Felson saunters into some anonymous joint, pretends to be an average player and then, when real money is put on the table, crushes the opponent with his remorseless skill. He has talent, no question; but what the smart guys, like Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason), think Eddie lacks is character — that he’s “a born loser.”
The fun in this moody, pounding, overlong, rewarding bring-down of a film is seeing Eddie’s curled lip of contempt, which he flashes at all the suckers, freeze into a rictus when he gets his. Twenty-five years later, that grimace had softened, when Martin Scorsese directed Newman and Tom Cruise in The Color of Money, based on Tevis’ sequel novel. Newman’s older, wiser, not quite so Fast Eddie earned the actor his only competitive Oscar.
As we prepare for the Game of Thrones finale, we recognize Joffrey and nine other baddies who showed us that terrible, horrible things can come in small packages
