by Moe Zilla

Created on: February 01, 2008

"Slap Shot" demolishes professional hockey. Paul Newman plays a coach trapped in the final season of a losing team - until he realizes that violent fights excite the crowd.

The movie cynically satirizes both the owners and the fans, as well as the players, with Newman's character navigating the off-ice politics necessary to maintain his job. The team's owner is actually disinterested in their survival, anticipating a hefty tax write-off when she folds the team. The unemployed mill workers in the town secretly crave the vicarious violence of a fight on the ice. And Newman's coach character quickly realizes he can channel that to motivate his players. (He taunts one player by saying "They don't want you to score goals," and then points to the audiences reaction. "They're booing you!") This movie humorously picks apart the harsh reality it sees behind the sport of hockey

Making this point is the three crazy brothers who ultimately revitalize the team - and lend the movie a special charm. The notorious Hanson Brothers are young, violent, and mentally unstable (even traveling on the team's road trips with toy racing cars to play with.) They like fighting, and at one point in the film even attack someone in the crowd. For authenticity, they were played in the movie by real-life hockey player David Hanson, joined by two brothers who'd played on a team in Michigan. Their characters steal the show, and after the film found a high demand for personal appearances at real-life hockey games. McFarlane toys even released action figures of the characters, and one indie punk band later named themselves "The Hanson Brothers."

Director George Roy Hill was riding high. He'd just won an Oscar three years earlier for "The Sting," which also won the Best Picture Oscar. Four years before that he'd directed the classic western "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" which also starred Paul Newman. Its popularity has grown over the years. Before his death, Gene Siskel called the film one of the greatest American comedies of all time, and Maxim magazine declared it "The Best Guy Movie of All Time." Hill brought real talent to the project, but set out to create a hockey movie that with real authenticity. In an ironic twist, two real-life hockey teams were inspired to name themselves "the Chiefs," after the name of the team in the movie.

Filmed in grey towns in Pennsylvania and upstate New York, the movie seems to exist in a real-world hockey town. The film follows a book by the sister of an actual minor league hockey player, and he even appears in the film's final scene (playing the notoriously violent player Ogie Oglethorpe, sent to wreak vengeance on the violent players). But the movie's real goal is satire, and doing for the game of hockey what M*A*S*H did for army surgeons - showing some wild characters who someone survive in a harsh and crazy world.

"It's wild, it's outrageous - it's outrageously funny," the trailers promised. At one point a fight breaks out involving both teams before they've even completed the pre-game warm-up, leaving the Hanson brothers are bloodied before "The Star-Spangled Banner" is sung. The movie builds to a climactic final game where the players decide between clean hockey or "smash mouth" hockey - and confront the reactions of the opposing team and their fans. Like a lot of movies in the 1970s, it's making a point about mass spectacle and its implicit endorsement of real violence.

But most of all, the movie is just a lot of fun.

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