Spoilers for Slap Shot below.
On July 2nd, Alex Barasch wrote a piece in the New Yorker about the Mattel Corporation’s attempts to woo creatives with their immense toy chest of IP. From a long-gestating (and now canceled) He-Man, to Daniel Kaluya’s “Millennial angst” Barney, to Greta Gerwig’s phenomenally fun Barbie, Hollywood has descended upon properties with built-in audience awareness to fill in their production slates. Barsach grimly states, “The mandate for audience recognition has pushed artists to take increasingly desperate measures—including scrounging plotlines from popular snacks. Eva Longoria recently directed the Cheetos dramedy Flamin’ Hot; Jerry Seinfeld is at work on Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story.”
To be fair, this quest for the next brand-to-blockbuster pipeline isn’t anything new. The issue is that now that’s all there is. In Barsach’s piece, Gerwig’s agent wonders aloud, “Is it a great thing that our great creative actors and filmmakers live in a world where you can only take giant swings around consumer content and mass-produced products? I don’t know. But it is the business.”
So given the current state of the industry, watching George Roy Hill’s Slap Shot was a relief. A relief that — as the ugliest men ever put to screen call each other “fag” one thousand times and knock their skulls against the ice — a movie this abrasive will never be replicated again. A singular, blood-soaked object.
Paul Newman is the coach and de facto star player of a minor league hockey team in the icy ironworks of rural Pennsylvania. As the town’s steel mill is about to go under, threatening the team’s existence, Reggie Dunlop (Newman) attempts to drum up the team’s visibility by moving away from “old-time” hockey and into violent theatrics. Easily sidelined as vulgar, low-brow entertainment, Slap Shot is a shrewd comedy about ethics in entertainment. A distillation of “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” — for better and worse.
Over the last few months of examining great works like Fleabag and Avatar: The Way of Water, Schlub Cinema has branched out in its definition of “schlubby.” Well, consider Slap Shot a factory reset. Slap Shot has got everything: pot bellies, cigs inside, pull-tab beers, and losers of all stars and stripes. The opening match between Reggie’s Charlestown Chiefs and a neighboring team sets the stage in a hilariously depressing manner. Reggie, looking a solid forty years older than anyone else on the rink, takes his position as the Chiefs’ own fans berate him and his weary teammates. An opposing player sways forward to meet Reggie.
“How’s it goin’ Nick?” says Reggie.
“I’m drunk,” says Nick. “If I get thrown into the boards I’m gonna piss all over myself.”
The organ’s toylike sound barely fills the stadium. An American flag is hoisted up on rusty pulley chains. Nick pisses all over himself.
Nobody, even the hoarse and closeted general manager (Strother Martin), knows who owns the club, so Reggie acts the part. A dimwitted con artist at best, Reggie is just savvy enough to be a few steps ahead of the assortment of French-Canadian mooks, beer-swilling jackasses, and puppy-dog innocents that make up his team. He holds court at the local dives. He hits on his players’ girlfriends and sleeps with the wives of his opponents. Dressed to the nines in plaid bell bottoms, a teal turtleneck, and a fur-trimmed trench coat, he looks like a ringleader even before he turns the sport into a circus. The descent into theatrics starts simply enough, with Reggie goading the opposing goalie into a rage by shouting, “Your wife sucks pussy!” Things ramp up as Reggie gets the Hanson Brothers off the bench — giant, child-like goons who pummel everyone regardless if they’re players or fans. In one of the film’s most famous scenes, the brothers kick the shit out of the opposing team before the match has even begun. Eventually, Reggie goes so far as to announce on local radio that he is “personally placing a hundred-dollar bounty” on the head of the other team’s coach.
Despite Reggie making a violent mockery of his team and his sport, and more detestable acts like threatening a player’s spot on the team when they refuse to play dirty or telling a woman her kid “looks like a fag,” Reggie never steeps too deep into unlikability. Thanks to Paul Newman’s comedic talents, Reggie feels like some exhausted devil from the blue-collar part of Hell. Stooped, blue-eyed, with eyebrow-acting that rivals Jack Black, Reggie’s bigotry and selfishness make him laughable, not despicable.
In any other sports movie, a character like Reggie should have a come-to-Jesus moment — where they realize they’ve gone too far and they need to return to some semblance of moral balance. That never really happens in Slap Shot. Late in the film, the Charleston Chiefs' trail of violence has awarded them major-league fame and proper “Heel” status.1 Rival fans wave Bibles and protest the Chiefs outside the stadiums. The team bus driver, hilariously dressed as a Nazi, smashes their ride with a sledgehammer to make it look more mean. Dave Carlson (Jerry Houser), a naïve sweetheart at the start of the film, now wears a cape and demands to be called “Killer.” With all this hoopla and chaos swirling around their sleepy industrial town, Reggie takes a moment to reflect and reminisce with the team manager, Joe. He walks around Joe’s office, admiring the stately photos of games and players long gone. Yet, instead of remembering the glory days of hockey, becoming inspired to right his wrongs, Reggie fondly recalls a night he and the old team got piss-drunk.
“My god, Joe. Did we ever get shitfaced,” he grins, “God — did we get shitfaced.”
If all of this seems like an inordinate amount of masculine bullshit, that’s kind of the point. Like Elaine May before her, and Kathryn Bigelow after, screenwriter Nancy Dowd uses film to explore masculinity at its more cartoonishly heightened. The Hanson Brothers (real-life hockey players Jeff Carlson, Steve Carlson, and David Hanson) are men stripped of any pretense of living in a rule-bound society. When Reggie first meets the trio, they’re beating the absolute hell out of a vending machine after it didn’t give them their candy. Later, Reggie walks out of the team’s hotel room, where the men are smoking, drinking, and gambling, and passes the Hanson’s room – the brothers are playing with toy cars. On the rink, they’re deadly. They weave through bodies like icebound birds of prey, smashing players' teeth in with an elbow, and pummeling fans for daring to jeer. In Dowd’s excellent screenplay, the Hansons are as hilarious as they are frightening — all the childishness of men without any thought of restraint.
Dowd’s script is also ahead of the time in making sexuality a key theme — something that feels scarce even 46 years later. While some rare movies like Barbie succeed by simply hiring queer actors and queer artists, more often we’re given movies like Red White & Royal Blue which verbalize their queer message so embarrassingly cheerful and corny that watching them makes me yearn for the closet. Dowd’s script is relentless in its use of homophobic language. Not only does the bigotry feel authentic to the time and place of the film, but it heightens the hypocrisy and sexuality of men slamming their bodies against each other, flashing their cocks to one another, and coveting each other’s partners. Dowd crafts a gentle and pivotal scene early on, as Reggie sleeps with another goalie’s wife, Suzzane (Melinda Dillon). Suzzane admits that she’s been having a string of lesbian affairs, to which Reggie says “I don't blame you though Suzanne, I mean, well see, women's bodies are beautiful. But men's bodies, see I see 'em everywhere you know, in the locker rooms, their cocks all over the place and everything...Now maybe all that'll change, maybe I'll end up sleeping with old goalies. I mean, things bein' what they are, who knows?”
However, not every character has Reggie’s laissez-faire attitude to sexuality.2 Suzzane later admits that her husband attacked her when she told him of her affair. Not because of the infidelity, but because “He... he said if I was a dyke that made him a queer.”
This gay panic takes center stage in the film’s finale. The Chief’s second-best player, Ned Braden (Michael Ontkean), has refused to play dirty the entire film and watches in disgust as both teams brawl to rapturous applause during the championship game. A handsome, moody, seventies dreamboat, Ned decides that if he’s going to play dirty, he’s going to play dirty his own way. In a joyous reversal of sexual codes, Ned skates across the ice, sensually stripping his clothing in a grand strip tease. The brawl stops. The band begins to play a bawdy number. The crowd erupts. Reggie, who once threatened to kick Ned from the team and cuckold him, now watches enraptured. The opposing team, unable to handle their feelings about a man being naked in a sexual context, forfeits the match.
Earlier, when I said I felt relief that a film like Slap Shot wouldn’t be remade, that’s only half true. I don’t want films that are ugly, homophobic, and violent for the sake of it. And I especially don’t want films that try to be that with nothing to say for themselves. Slap Shot uses these abrasive tools to speak on how men and women view sexuality and violence, and how they recoil when one gender uses their sexuality instead of violence. More importantly, it uses these themes authentically, without moral grandstanding — it’s a shaggy comedy true and true, full of vile meatheads and goons. But between punches, these goons might just teach us something.
Slap Shot is streaming on Netflix and available to rent on Amazon Prime.
Special thanks to Austin Smoldt-Sáenz, Elena Bruess, Joshua De Lanoit, and Max Seifert
A “heel” is a wrestling term, meaning a professional bad guy. A heel’s job is to be booed by the crowd.
Laissez-faire might be too generous. Reggie threatens to out his general manager, then doubles back, “I'm sexually liberated. I don't care who's a fag no more. I mean who cares? It's natural, it's all around us.”