Word: goodnesses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...response to Mr. Carter's plea, "Say something good about your country," I shall gladly oblige: A presidential election is held every four years...
...football players are mutilated, dope addled monster-martyrs who are swept up, wrung dry, and fucked over. One character explains, "We're all whores, so we might as well be the best," and that becomes the movie's warped Rockyism. These writers, producers and actors know something about being good whores, and North Dallas Forty is a grand trick; bitterly in tune with its audience, vulgar and sexy and funny enough to get up and get dressed with little loss of dignity...
...think he's capable of. That's not much, and he gets away with a lot, until his "big" scene at the end of the movie, when he emotes and rocks and gesticulates like a marionette and babbles in an elaborately whiny voice. Mostly, though, he's pretty good--funny, spirited, with a tongue-in-cheek existensial awareness made coarsely funny beside his physical pain...
...sterotype file from which it was lifted. And Mac Davis, despite his musical talent--or lack thereof--turns in an engaging performance as the team captain, alternately whooping it up with the players and then conforming to the wishes of the management. Davis is everyone's good buddy, the guy whose final compromise--to protect himself--hurts the most...
NORTH DALLAS FORTY is one of the best non-documentary sports movies ever made, but professional sports--especially football--are not particularly intriguing subjects for existential speculation. The movie is more successful before it gets pretentious; in the early scenes it out-good-ole-boys the best good-ole-boy movies, with a refreshing Texas lunacy to wipe away memories of The Deer Hunter's plodding steelworkers. But it's all that physical agony that makes the film so dificult to watch for sensitive viewers; as the movie's particulars fade away, all you may remember...