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Part of it is undoubtedly the era in which “Slap Shot” was filmed, but there is a distinct grainy tinge to the cinematography that both embodies the harsh nature of an American northeast winter and captures the mood of the fictional rust belt city of Charlestown, Pennsylvania where both its steel mill and beloved minor league hockey team the Chiefs are on the verge of folding. The fur coat that Paul Newman’s character sports might be a relic of the era, but it also might be necessary given the weather, and in his way, the actor manages to pull the look off while also looking like he might have just grabbed it out of a lost and found for warmth. Improbably, that coat speaks to the impressive dual tones of comedy and commentary in director George Roy Hill’s cult classic. Indeed, through the prism of time, “Slap Shot” has the feel of something like a revisionist sports movie, taking the piss out of so many sentimentalized underdog stories in the way so many later-era westerns critiqued their predecessors. Except, “Slap Shot” came before almost all of them, suggesting the reverse, that after seeing such a bare-knuckle black comedy, so many sports movies were prompted to shine it on. 1989’s “Major League” was not without its own ribald comedy, but if you compare them side-by-side, it is as polished and slick as “Slap Shot” is unvarnished and blunt.
Newman stars as Reggie Dunlop, player and coach of the Chiefs, who given their precarious state, spurs ticket sales by encouraging his players to focus on dropping their gloves and throwing down as much as putting the puck in the goal. If it bleeds, etc. “Slap Shot” does not satirize the sport’s violence so much as lay it wide open for all to see, its rough and tumble aesthetic and raggedy narrative making it feel as if the movie itself is a half-second away from flying off the rails as much as its out-of-control on-ice fights. Its collection of what might discreetly be deemed colorful characters, like The Hanson Brothers triumvirate based on the real-life Carlson Brothers, do not so much separate the men from the boys as they do demonstrate how the line between men and boys is virtually non-existent. Newman has said that Dunlop was his favorite character he ever played, and it feels that way, free, loose, gleeful, giving a performance approximating leaving the toilet seat up or peeing outdoors.
That freedom, it turns out, correlated to exacting research. Writer Nancy Dowd’s brother, Ned, played minor league hockey, tape recorded conversations of his teammates and then gave those tapes to his sister who wrote the coarse attitudes and severe language right into her screenplay, fashioning nothing less than an x-ray of boys will be boys hockey culture. That came to mind in the wake of the post-USA Men’s Hockey Gold Medal locker room brou-ha-ha. Before the recent Winter Olympics began, I rewatched “Miracle,” Disney’s 2004 retelling of Team USA’s so-called Miracle on Ice upset of the Soviet Union at the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid. 1980 was three years after 1977, of course, which would suggest that its real-life hockey playing characters would have not been too far off from the hockey-playing characters of “Slap Shot,” though instead, every rough edge is smoothed out if not entirely glossed over. I do not mean to besmirch “Miracle,” a movie I quite like and that is good at what it does, but simply to point out how it takes immense care to ensure that everything you see in “Slap Shot” stays, well, in a manner of speaking, in the locker room.
