Strong Medicine

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

NORTH DALLAS FORTY

Directed by Ted Kotcheff

Screenplay by Frank Yablans, Ted Kotcheff and Peter Gent

North Dallas Forty is a painful movie. That is to say, it is a movie mostly about pain--the god-awful physical consequences of playing professional football for a living. It is about the sport's normal bruising, which can render a fit young stud so lame that it is agony for him to roll out of bed the morning after a game. But more important, it is about pain at the abnormal levels, about the anesthetizing pills the guys pop to endure daily practice, and the even more dangerous stuff they receive in shots on game day so they can play hurt. The film is also about what living this way does to one's head. To block out their day-to-day athletic agonies, the players must constantly indulge in mindlessly violent pleasures--sexual, alcoholic and generally macho-rowdy.

Based on former Footballer Peter Gent's good novel, the film shows this sadomasochistic world through the eyes of Phillip Elliott (Nick Nolte), a pass catcher with good hands and, in the view of the coaches and owners, a bad attitude. Elliott's insouciance springs from a developing conviction that he and his mates are exploited (if well-paid) field hands, risking their lives, or anyway their health, to assuage their owner's ego and their coach's desire to turn them into ciphers.

Elliott's rebellion usually stops at smart wisecracks, for he is held to both the pain and the surrounding childishness by a hidden hook--that pure and purifying joy he feels when displaying his skills on the field. He needs that high as surely as a performer in the more elevated arts needs it, and North Dallas Forty is shrewd to make this often neglected observation about athletes. Moreover, Nolte is very appealing as a man inescapably infected by the crudity of his team's raucous (and vividly rendered) behavior at work and play; he struggles to give Elliott an intelligence beyond the character's ability to articulate. The star is well supported by Mac Davis, as a smooth ole star quarterback who's learned to get ahead by going along, and by G.D. Spradlin as the head coach, Charles Durning as the assistant coach-enforcer, Steve Forrest as the owner and Bo Svenson as an animalistic lineman.

The picture breaks down awkwardly when it tries to express directly what it has already said better by implication. This generally occurs in earnest scenes between Elliott and his all too dense girlfriend. Dayle Haddon's inexperienced playing adds nothing even faintly convincing to the badly written love interest, and the rest of the film has to struggle to recover from the resulting dead spots. Still, North Dallas Forty retains enough of the original novel's authenticity to deliver strong, if brutish, entertainment.--Richard Schickel

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