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...they are definitely unethical...

...Like Rodney Dangerfield and other pop comics, De Vito specializes in obnoxiousness without the leaven of wit...

...Indeed, the last sequence betrays the teamwork that Hackman labored so hard to teach...

...But places like Deerlick, Oolitic, Cedar Knob, and people like Opal and Cletus give Hoosiers a strong local habitation and down-home names...

...he preaches fundamentals—passing, rebounding, defense— and drills the players to death with them...

...But graceful winning and losing are important, and, from the first Periclean gymnasia, have been pursued liberally...

...Hackman tries to teach his charges that shooting is the least important part of the game to practice...

...In most cases, Levinson is convincing, and especially so with one of his stars, Richard Dreyfuss...

...Dreyfuss and De Vito have a car accident, and, when each blames the other, start a steadily escalating feud...

...All these are marked by affection for locale that never degenerates, a la Woody Allen, to denigration of other parts of the country...

...Will the new coach and team overcome such obstacles...

...Her agent has cornered the nostalgia market, and both here and in Tin Men she uses her sultry but ragged look to fit a bittersweet mood...

...It would have been similarly brave to explore the pyschology of losing the Big One...

...Divorcing sports and ethics has not led to an increase in ethics, but to recruiting scandals, the kidnapping of college athletes, and an obsession with being "number one...

...Too bad Hoosiers ignored the dark side...

...Having employed the same regional detail in the masterly Diner (1982), in Tin Men Levinson proves you can go home again, this time to regale us with tales from the adult side of the same diner's booths...

...A fine moment occurs when Hackman, the gnarled unbeliever, actually stops and listens late in the film...

...Some rough, sexist scenes follow, redeemed by the ironic twist that Dreyfuss actually falls in love with Hershey...

...Anspaugh is brave to tackle Hopper's alcoholism, which Hackman tries to cure by hiring him as an assistant coach in one more redemption scheme...

...But often they seem thrown in with no dramatic reference to the plot...

...Hopper got an Oscar nomination for his role as the town drunk, and is especially compelling when lost in his memories of missing a key shot and losing the Big One way back when...

...10 April 1987: 215 Hackman plays a fierce coach returning to the profession after ten years of disbarment for striking a player in New York...

...TOM O'Brien 216: Commonweal...

...But its merit is evident from the opening credits shaped like chrome brand-names on the sides of late fifties cars...

...The motif is stronger for not being underlined...

...Hoosiers could have been novel in other ways...

...Hoosiers is an unashamedly corny tale of the high school basketball team of Hickory, Indiana, nicknamed the Huskers...

...Nevertheless, the film has real strengths, above all acting which invigorates sentimentality with conviction...

...Tin Men's supporting cast illustrates perfectly the film's strengths and weaknesses...

...Hackman aptly catches the coach's conflict between humane leadership and manic desire to win...

...Starring Gene Hackman, Barbara Hershey (again), and Dennis Hopper, Hoosiers has enough health and heartiness to fill a 4-H club...

...Perhaps Levinson just has too much to say...

...Gayle gets off funny lines, especially about Bonanza and other sixties shows...

...Tin Men is both rich and uneven, a stylish and ambitious film that doesn't quite know its own mind or market...

...As noted, subtlety is not Hoosiers' strong point...

...Tin Men's strength lies in writer-director Barry Levinson's knowing, loving use of his Baltimore setting...

...Levinson plots this tale of feud and romance against the larger issues of the legal regulation of the tin men...

...Or rally from an opening string of losses...

...Director Michael Anspaugh provides the earnestly obvjous subtitle: "Indiana, 1951...

...His plot concerns aluminum siding salesmen at the peak of their influence and chicanery in the early 1960s, before their novel sales methods were regulated by a local ethics commission...

...Will the team ultimately win the Big One...

...Hoosiers' use of religion sums up its problems...

...Lesser examples include Night of Day (about a troubled brother and sister who turn to rock careers in Cleveland), Billy Galvin (the story of a Boston construction worker and son), True Stories (David Byrne's look at Texas eccentricities, including the taste for astroturf jackets), and even Jim Jarmusch's bittersweet views of Cleveland in Stranger than Paradise and of New Orleans in Down by Law...

...Anspaugh photographs his gyms to resemble churches, with emphatic shafts of light pouring down from high vertical windows...

...Its strength is not subtlety: an early clue occurs just after the opening sequence of credits as Hackman drives his forties Dodge into town...

...It is both short-sized and short-handed, without its star player, who is depressed after the offseason death of the old coach...

...Will they convince the town's know-it-all nay-sayers...

...The shot itself is worth five current films...

...Mahoney plays an old pro tin man who embodies both huckster wisdom and pathos: the saddest scene in the film occurs when he suffers a heart attack during a sale, and then curses his failure to get the customer's signature...

...Anspaugh's camera focuses on too many scoring shots...

...But the film's best small touches involve the parson's son, whose long prayers before games are treated with gentle irony...

...Dreyfuss and De Vito both have partners (John Mahoney and Jackie Gayle), distinguished minor actors who have paid their dues in off-Broadway theater, nightclubs, and quality films...

...We don't need fewer sports films, but better ones...

...Was Levinson unable to get this film past studio heads without blunting his irony with stupidity...

...Stealing a page from David Mamet's portraits of white-collar crime, Levinson doesn't romanticize his antiheroes...

...As a teacher protecting both the academic and emotional well-being of the star who won't play, Hershey is good despite having to trek the old route from hatred for the coach to respect and inevitable romance...

...At first, it sticks close to its subject...

...The whole nation plays basketball, but Indiana carries a disproportionate weight, having given the sport its best (Larry Bird) and worst (Indiana coach Bobby Knight, whose Tartar antics are covered in the best seller, On the Brink...

...But also, he insists, likable...

...at times he manages a soft fusion of comedy, romance, and nostalgia—only to have De Vito's comedic broadsword shred the delicacy of the director's vision...

...He finds a team which, like himself, is in desperate need of redemption...

...Anspaugh is braver yet in leaving Hopper's story unresolved...

...At times in Tin Men Levinson handles De Vito so well that the character even provokes pity for his boorish aggressiveness...

...Dreyfuss, a bachelor, aims at what he thinks is the ultimate revenge, stealing De Vito's wife, played by Barbara Hershey...

...At one point Levinson provides a gorgeous photograph of Dreyfuss embracing Hershey in a slinky black slip, like Liz Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof...

...the result is often flat vulgarity...

...Regionalism in Hoosiers is not as strong as in Tin Men or Breaking Away — a biking film that used Indiana granite mines and prairies to great advantage...

...TV increasingly uses specific locale: Spenser for Hire (based on Robert Parker's mysteries set in Boston), Jack and Mike (the yuppie comedy/thriller set in Chicago), and the brave women's detective show Cagney and Lacey (which heavily uses Queens...

...But the screenplay calls for too many close, last-minute wins...

...Hoosiers' mixed success with themes of victory and virtue place it between Chariots of Fire and Rocky I (a series now degenerated to Over the Top...

...But the co-star, Danny De Vito, poses several problems...

...Of course some viewers hate sports films, convinced of a link between athletic competition and proto-fascism...

...He stresses team play, and at first the film documents that complicated, disciplined reality...

...Levinson matches Dreyfuss with the moody, sweetly melancholy Mahoney, and De Vito with the jokester Gayle, wisely choosing the concept of teamwork over contrast...