FOOTBALL, PLAY AND OBSESSION

...For some time to come, denials and willed acts rather than spontaneity are likely to rule his life...

...For Elliott, the juvenile clowning he goes through—giggling during an "inspirational" talk by an assistant coach, running backward like a movie in reverse when told he is so slow he looks as if he were running backwards—is a way of asserting a sense of proportion, of keeping alive the boyish feelings he has for football...

...Kotcheffs abbreviated version of North Dallas Forty allows him to use comedy to explore what American sports movies with their past emphasis on the athlete as noble sufferer (Pride of the Yankees, The Babe Ruth Story, Fear Strikes Out) and their current Nader-inspired emphasis on the athlete as exploited performer (Bang the Drum Slowly and Slap Stick) have rarely treated as their primary subject—sport as play...

...Missing Mail It is possible that some mail sent to the Dissent office during November-December 1979 has been lost on the way...

...and as North Dallas Forty unfolds, the logic of his clowning becomes increasingly apparent...

...And because he can play a whole game only when filled with novocaine, he allows the team physician to deaden his knee to the point where he can feel nothing...

...The hitch is that the kind of distancing that works for Elliott when he is on his own does not finally work with the North Dallas staff...

...GEE 505-Fifth Avenue New York 10017 112...

...in the end black comedy and murder dominate his story, as the woman Elliott loves is murdered by a psychotic fan and Elliott's "Bad Attitude" leads his coach to bench him and finally the team owner to force him out of the league on trumped-up drug charges...

...Only when they use a trumped-up drug charge to break Elliott's contract does he stop his clowning and compromising and quote back to them the Pauline homily the coach has always used to chastize him, "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child . . . but when I became a man, I put away childish things...

...He cannot breathe freely without using Q tips to clear a passage in his bloody nose...

...The final scene of North Dallas Forty brings all of this home...

...For him, the bottom line is getting to play, and he will do whatever is required, short of total selfabnegation, to make that happen...

...For them, football has ceased to be a game of personal skills in the same way that modern warfare has ceased to depend on individual bravery...

...game plans win games, and the best player is not the man motivated by a feel for the game but the man who loyally accepts the game plan...

...In their eyes players do not win games...

...The first brand of comedy sets the tone for North Dallas Forty, and we see it in the opening scene, when Elliott tries to get himself going on the morning after a tough game...

...By contrast, director Ted Kotcheffs North Dallas Forty, which Gent helped write, is not nearly so ambitious...

...The two talk for a few minutes, and then as Elliott walks away, Maxwell, who has brought a football with him, throws him one last pass...

...When Elliott defends himself by pointing to his game performance, all he does is emphasize how threatening he has become...

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...In this undertaking, North Dallas Forty relies principally on the comedic talents of Nick Nolte as Phil Elliott, but North Dallas Forty is in the best sense a gang comedy and Elliott is never forced to carry the picture by himself...

...The real lack of perspective, as Kotchefr s direction has emphasized over and over, is with the North Dallas coaches and owner, who falsely equate professionalism with seriousness and fail to understand the chance the game provides for genuine play, for freedom from routine and coercion...

...What makes for the comedy here is not, of course, Elliott's pain, but the virtuoso style he uses to deal with it...

...But again Elliott pulls off a virtuoso comic performance, 111 drawing Joanne to him despite his screams and flinchings, and the end result is the same as before . we are made aware of Elliott's liberating capacity to trade in pain and function as two different men...

...Because his coach puts him in the game only when North Dallas is losing, he sits on the bench rooting for the opposition...

...In Gent's novel, Elliott's struggle to maintain his independence and stay in a game he loves is a heroic, losing battle...

...It is the North Dallas management that finally says, enough...

...For the most part, the comedy of North Dallas Forty centers on two related concerns: the way Phil Elliott simultaneously accepts and distances himself from the pain he is in in order to go on playing football and the way he uses the juvenile role the North Dallas coaches and owner inflict on him to escape the business ethic they would inflict on the game...

...Each time the passionate Joanne touches Elliott, she hits a tender spot, and what ought to be moan of pleasure turns into a cry of pain...

...On the one hand, we see a youthful Elliott moving about like an arthritis patient and, on the other hand, we see that the same Elliott has calmly accepted this state of affairs as no more than an inconvenience...

...he cannot make it to the tub without first popping codeine pills, and every joint in his body seems damaged...

...Elliott, the man "with the best hands in the league," sees the ball coming, but just as it gets to him, he puts his arms down and lets it bounce off his chest...

...But what remains is by no means a violation of Gent's book...

...Gone is the bloody climax of Gent's novel and with it many of the social and political questions he explicitly raised...

...But in the context of North Dallas Forty, it is a sad moment as well, Elliott ought not to be the one quoting St...

...What makes the comedy of North Dallas Forty so special, however, is that only rarely does it settle for easy targets—a smarmy monsignor who leads the team in pregame prayers, an assistant coach who angrily orders the players "not to scratch their nuts" during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner...

...Mac Davis, as his buddy quarterback Seth Maxwell, is a perfect sidekick, and as foils there are the whole North Dallas coaching staff plus Bo Svenson and Oakland Raider John Matuszak as two terrifyingly funny brutish linemen...

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...In it a disconsolate Elliott leaves the supersleek office complex of the North Dallas owner and finds Seth Maxwell waiting for him...

...Paul this way, nor in a position where he must equate growing up with no longer playing football...

...THE PROBLEM for Elliott comes when he has to move beyond his private life and tries to use the same kind of distancing to deal with a coach and team owner who both are obsessed with winning and see the players as mere equipment...

...Although structured around eight days in the life of Phil Elliott (like Gent, a wide leceiver), North Dallas Forty is really a survey of the 1960s from the point of view of a football player whose lifestyle—particularly his opposition to the Vietnam War and his fondness for grass—has put him in conflict with the team he plays for...

...THE IRONY is that by the middle of North Dallas Forty it is clear that, although Elliott knows the bind he is in, he lacks the will to get out of it...

...Clearly he is two men, and not about to let the man in pain interfere with the man who takes pleasure in football...

...As the camera closes in on him, there is nothing he can do naturally...

...It is a division we see even more fully illustrated the next day in a love scene between Elliott and Joanne, the fiancee of the team owner's brother...

...For Elliott, the outburst is a turning point—he is now on his way to a new life...

...We let you score those touchdowns," he is told by an enraged coach, who insists, "None of you is as good as the computer...

...It is, in an obvious sense, a gesture that reflects his final break with football, but as the film ends with a freezeframe shot of the ball dropping to the ground, we are left with the feeling that things are going to be much rougher than Elliott imagines...