Slap Shot is one of those ubiquitous classics I’d always known about but never took the time to watch. But I had off on Emancipation Day, and I’d been out and about the whole day. Lacking motivation, I felt the need for a light comedy.
My overall review: the hockey sequences are amazing and hilarious, and I love those Hanson Brothers. The rest of the story, meh. But I’d be doing a disservice if I didn’t inform you, the reader, that they generally serve a pro-single narrative.
Paul Newman plays Reggie Donlap, the long-suffering coach of the Charlestown Chiefs, a minor league ice hockey team. Since the team is playing badly, the owners want to sell them and move them to Florida (which possibly inspired the central conflict in Major League). The town is also suffering economically thanks to the closing of the steel mill, the town’s primary source of income. Donlap hires The Hanson Brothers in the hopes they’ll attract an audience and perhaps inspire the owners to keep the team in Charlestown?
Off the ice, there’s a lot of drama involving the romantic partners of the players and coach. First, Donlap is (amicably) divorced from this wife, Francine, whom he still has feelings for. They flirt throughout the movie, but at the end, he goes off to Minnesota to coach another term, and she moves to New York for a job opportunity. He tries to convince her to move up north with him. At the end, he tells his star player, Ned and his wife, “She’s coming with me!” His eyes tell another story as he looks longingly in her direction.
Then there’s the plot thread of the wives of the players having sex with each other. Today, this “lesbian thread” would be seen as standard. In 1977, it was provocative. In one scene, a few of them lament being “hockey wives,” as their husbands are constantly traveling, tearing it up with the boys, and likely sleeping with groupies.
There’s a subplot involving Ned, the team’s Harvard-educated leading scorer and his unhappy marriage with the wife, Lily, who thinks Ned can do so much better. At one point, Lily even moves in with Reggie while separated from the hubby. At the end, Ned performs a striptease on the ice, which wins Lily back. I thought this scene wasted time (the movie was already about twenty minutes too long), and in my view, I just see their marriage going back to its former dilapidated state.
My hunch is that the writer, Nancy Dowd, sees it that way. Her screenplay is inspired by her childhood spent in the blue-collar Framingham, Massachusetts, and she’s a self-described feminist. At the time she wrote it, she was thirty-one and single, pretty much unheard off in the late 1970s. So while I thought the scenes off the ice dragged the movie down, I can appreciate the pro-single message.