My Favorite College Football Games: Game 5 redux

October 21, 1989: Alabama - 47 Tennessee - 30

In early 2011, someone professing to be Al from Dadeville called the long-running college football radio show of Paul Finebaum and claimed to have poisoned the historic oak trees at the intersection known as Toomer’s Corner on the campus of Auburn University. It did not take long for police to connect the caller’s nom-de-guerre to that of an Alabama football superfan named Harvey Updyke, arresting him on a charge of first-degree criminal mischief. He would eventually plead guilty, serving 180 days in jail and ordered to pay $796,731 in restitution, though he never came close to fulfilling that obligation prior to his death at the age of 71 in 2020. In the immediate aftermath of his arrest, Updyke provided various hedges, even fabrications, like claiming someone else had told him about poisoning the trees and he merely appropriated the story as his own. Whatever his shifting narratives, the phone call to Finebaum always made it clear to me that Updyke grasped from the outset the gravity of his deed. Because if we accept that Finebaum is something akin to the supreme pontiff of southern college football then, in effect, Updyke’s calling him was a confession in a religious sense as much as a criminal one. And though he would say he did it because of how much he hated Auburn, his beloved Crimson Tide’s archrival, in his 2011 ESPN profile of Updyke, Wright Thompson knew better when he wrote, “He loved a football team so much he ruined his life.”

Almost from the beginning, college football has been compared to religion. John Tunis made the comparison in 1928 writing in Harper’s that college football seemed poised to become America’s national religion. He was criticizing, not praising, but in his negative assessment, he was, nevertheless, concurring that in its customs, fellowship, and belief in something akin to an unseen order, to paraphrase Columbia University Professor Emeritus of Religion Wayne Proudfoot, the sport did, in fact, function as a religion. If it was a problem to Tunis in the 1920s, it has only grown worse, and I wonder what he would make not only of declining church attendance and football’s increasing popularity but modern coaches like Dabo Swinney and the late Bill McCartney seeking to blur the lines between church and state. Yet, if the whole sport might be deemed a religion, no place in America remains more religious than the Bible Belt, and the Bible Belt loves college football more than anyone. There was a reason that the late Alcorn State coach Marino Kasem’s famous regional classification of college football saw fit to ascribe a holy purpose to one sector only: “in the South, football is a religion,” he said, “and Saturday is the holy day.” That’s merely a more lyrical version of the Southeastern college athletic conference’s highfalutin present-day slogan, It Just Means More, just as Wright Thompson’s poetic love letter to southern football, Pulled Pork & Pigskin, innately demonstrates how every southern football fan is but one more bourbon and cola solo cup away from metamorphosing into Harvey Updyke whether they know it or not. I am from, and live in, and root for a team affiliated with Big Ten country but I know it means more down there.

19th century anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor argued that “a minimum definition of religion” could be defined as “belief in Spiritual Beings.” The title of his treatise, Primitive Culture, mirrors the primitive cultures that Emile Durkheim examined in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life in which a belief in a god manifested itself in the form of a totem, symbolizing the deity, to paraphrase Michael Serazio, associate professor of communication at Boston College, writing for The Atlantic in 2013, while “also implicitly offer(ing) vessels for fellowship.” Ida Mae Kilgore Bryant, mother of Paul Bryant, nicknamed Bear, wanted her son to go into the ministry, though he opted for coaching college football instead, reasoning that they were virtually the same. Indeed, in coaching his alma mater the University of Alabama from 1958 to 1982, he resurrected it into the premier program of the sport, so worshiped in the Magnolia State that all kinds of unsanctioned art, from decals to postcards, proliferated in the 1960s of the ceremonial Bear walking on water while his signature houndstooth hat turned that two-tone pattern into a totem of team as much as its own school colors. In saving the football program, he also redeemed the Old South, the antebellum mystic referenced in the title card of “Gone with the Wind,” an eyebrow-raising idea advanced by both Warren St. John in his 2004 book about Alabama football fandom “Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer” and Frank Deford in his seminal profile of the coach for Sports Illustrated in 1981. Deford also noted that the Bear scoffed at such water-walking allusions, though that did not mean their prevalence was any less telling. When Deford dared humanize the Bear in that very same profile, he was besieged by letters from angry Alabama fans. Of course, Deford himself was not above religious allegory, deeming Bryant “football incarnate” in the state and noting how hard it would be for whomever was eventually tasked to succeed him.

That happened two years later in 1983 when Bryant retired and subsequently died at the age of 69 from a massive heart attack. Ray Perkins was first into the breach, getting so much flack for decent-enough success that still paled relative to the Bear, he jumped ship of his own volition by going to coach what was then the nadir NFL franchise, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. If Perkins was an alum of Alabama, at least, his successor Bill Curry was not, and if Bryant’s houndstooth hat was the totem of Crimson Tide football, then the brick that was thrown through Curry’s office window early on the morning of October 9, 1988, might have been its most cursed object. It was the day after Curry’s second Alabama team not only lost to the University of Mississippi for the first time at home but lost to them for the first time at home on homecoming. Appropriately, the brick comes with its own conspiracy theory intimating that Curry threw it through his own window in the manner of the speculation that tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand might have put a bullet in his own mailbox, which is just the crimson icing on the white cake, blaming the victim to try and mask the setting of unattainable standards. And yet, the next season in 1989, Curry seemed positioned to, if you will permit me, turn the tide by starting the season 5-0, including a revenge game against Mississippi in which his squad overcame a 21-point deficit by detonating for 62 unanswered points, and ascending to #10 in the country ahead of meeting 6th-ranked and also undefeated Tennessee on, as tradition once dictated, the third Saturday in October.

Growing up in Big Eight and Big Ten country meant those were the games I usually watched, but the Alabama versus Tennessee showdown was nationally televised by CBS, and I happened to be watching, praise be. It was not a dramatic contest, per se, but a fun, high-scoring one with Alabama forging a big lead and Tennessee futilely trying to play comeback. The Crimson Tide asserted itself with one big play early in the second quarter. Leading 10-7 and lined up 75 yards from pay dirt in the shotgun formation, string bean Tide quarterback Gary Hollingsworth received the snap and drifted back a couple steps to intentionally invite the Volunteer defensive line toward him before flipping the ball forward to running back Siran Stacy, previously lined up to his QB’s right. Stacy sliced through a hole opened by that little bit of misdirection and his offensive line, angling at first toward the left sideline before reading a block out wide by a receiver and gently slaloming back to the right. As he approached midfield with one Tennessee defender hurrying to try and catch him from behind and two converging on him from both the right and the left, Stacy accelerated, not so much shedding or even slipping the last desperate attempt at a tackle but surging beyond it, making it look for all the world like Tennessee was trying to catch the wind. He coasted alone into the sun-filled end zone, a 75-yard-touchdown as exultation, echoed in the overwhelming roar of the crowd and CBS announcer Brent Musburger, who no one would accuse of being a man of few words, tingling the spine by shutting up and laying out after just three of them: “Siran Stacy explodes!” By modern-day standards, this touchdown might appear prosaic, nothing more than a little shovel pass. Yet, that underlines its timelessness, living the apotheosis of football since the beginning by transforming the muddle of so much helmeted humanity into the divine.

I had never thought much about Alabama football, or the SEC, until this game, or until this play, really, though in the new century of the sport, I had to think about them a lot as Nick Saban fashioned an evil empire out of his cherished process. If you’re not from Alabama, or maybe just not from the south, you’re not supposed to like them, and I suppose I don’t, though I must confess that this Siran Stacy touchdown caused me to see the light. I have often wondered if in its aftermath, if Curry thought that Alabama fans had seen the light, if he had been redeemed. This victory would spur them toward winning the conference, after all, going to the Sugar Bowl, and inching as high as #2 in the national rankings. But they would lose the Sugar Bowl to Miami and worse than that, they would lose their last game of the season to archrival Auburn, unforgivable, conference title or not, evincing that strange college football version of math where a 10-2 season equals 0-2. In the offseason, like Perkins before him, Curry ditched, taking the Kentucky job and his career never recovered, though maybe it was unrecoverable the moment that brick went through his window.

Writing in 2021 for the most southern-coded magazine ever, Garden & Gun, Tommy Tomlinson surmised that college football in the south was not so much religion as it was spiritual, “the hunger for that rare and precious moment of transcendence.” I think Tomlinson is underselling how the religious-like structure of the sport can help stoke that transcendence, even as he hints at that idea throughout, but I take him at his larger point, ending on a note that might as well be describing Siran Stacy’s touchdown: “(O)ne Saturday night, late in the game, your man breaks into the clear. You rise and shout. Rapture.” Up until then, college football had hinged for me on victory and defeat for my chosen team, whether it was my beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers, or my native state Iowa Hawkeyes before that. Stacy’s touchdown, however, made me realize that gridiron transcendence could exist independently of rooting interests, and that the momentary rapture could matter as much if not more than the result. College football has always been based on results, of course, though that sense of the bottom line has only been amplified in the new-fangled 12-team playoff era as athletic directors, commentators, and fans have taken What Have You Done for Me Lately to unprecedented extremes. It’s as if every college football team is fast becoming like 1989 Alabama, destined to suffer spiritually winless seasons no matter how many games they technically win if they don’t make the playoffs. It’s only natural. In sports we tend to overrate the outcome and undervalue the experience. It’s times like those when I want to sit down, bring up YouTube, find Siran Stacy’s touchdown run from that sunny day in October 1989, and get some of that good old-time religion.

 

Song of the Summer

Unlike last year, in which no clear-cut song of the summer emerged, the 2026 song of the summer appears cut and dried. As of me writing this, Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” has tied the record as the second-longest number one song on the Billboard Hot 100 at 19 weeks, a distinction of which it is more than worthy. Its indelible but easygoing hook rewards repeated listens and would sound as appropriate wafting out of a car window, drifting across a beach, or floating above a backyard deck on a warm night at dusk as it would leading a legion of two-steppers at a Lone Star honkytonk. Its lyrics exploit the innate infectiousness in getting to sing the names of places – Tennessee, Abilene, the Smoky Mountains, Memphis, Amarillo, and, of course, the titular capper that is accentuated with the preceding word that honors the regional dialect by dispensing with the g and flattening it. It’s a neat songwriting trick that Langley pulls because, in effect, “Choosin’ Texas” is a sad song, saying goodbye to a cowboy who is choosin’ Texas by choosin’ another gal even as you can sense 80,000 people in Cowboys Stadium singing along at a Langley show ratifying that choice. Who wouldn’t choose Texas? Even Langley’s wistful vocal is fessing up to that fact. It’s a helluva song, maybe even the song of the year, but it’s not the song of the summer.

I mean, the song of this summer, the summer of 2026? Hello, earth to human inhabitant. 2026 has been the summer of apocalyptic skies and smoky air, of torrential rain, melting glaciers, flash floods, insane heat waves, and the hottest month in U.S. history for the contiguous lower 48 states. It has been the summer of ICE and of VAR, of poisoned lettuce and Lake America. It has been the summer of the first-ever Forever War that has Already Been Won and of a reflecting pool as the improbable, indelible emblem of the shape of the United States on its 250th anniversary. Through that lens, I can understand why people would covet a timeless song of the summer more than a timely one, a song into which they can escape four minutes at a time. But then, looking reality in the eye and denying it is becoming America’s métier. “I don’t wanna know,” Wild Pink wryly sings in another song from this summer, “I keep my head down.” And though Charli XCX is a British citizen, not an American one, she does maintain a home in Los Angeles, and anyway, by this point, the pop star is nothing less than a true Global Citizen. And though the cover of her new album might feature Martin Scorsese, and though David Cronenberg might have a crucial cameo on the record’s closer, her song SS26 makes me think of John Carpenter’s “They Live”: it’s summer 2026 and Charli XCX is making us put on the sunglasses. 

More than any other season, the sensation associated with summer is a fleeting one, which Shakespeare wrote about in Sonnet 18, shall I compare thee to a summer’s day and all that, and in SS26, XCX twists that fleetingness into something else. The title is short for Spring Summer 2026, establishing the context as utterly present tense, a pop song as IMF message from “Mission: Impossible” designed to self-destruct once we reach late September. Her verses and pre-chorus are a patchwork of familiar denials, deflections, and excuses that evoke a modern propensity for saying whatever one must to make it through whatever moment they are in and once they have, wiping their hands clean of it: “No, it’s not my fault / I wasn’t there.” And though Sonnet 18 argued that art is the only way to make something last, XCX is dubious of what that might mean to the people experiencing that art in the moment. SS26 itself is a testament to the value and pleasure of art even as it simultaneously ridicules music, fashion, and film as being unable to save us.

Indeed, in her video for 1999, she recreated the movie “Titanic,” but in the video for SS26, she virtually turns a fashion runway into the Titanic, dressed in her best and prepared to go down blinkered and beautiful. It might suggest a kind of release, yet in the song’s minimalist production and the way it repeatedly teases at shifting into a higher gear only to decline at the last minute, tapering out at the end, XCX impudently denies us the very catharsis we crave. Summer’s over! Now what?

 

New Adventures in Modern Slang

As a middle-aged movie blogger who eschews Letterboxd and artificially intelligent writing assistants, I do try to maintain contact with elements of pop culture geared toward younger generations. At least where movies are concerned, I feel dutybound on some level to do so. More than that, though, the desire stems from my genuine interest in art and, by extension, a genuine interest in what (some) younger artists are up to and because I have always promised myself that as I age, I will not forget what it was like to be young. I will not fall into the Boomer vs. Millennial and/or Gen Z trap. Still, there are plenty of moments when I must admit to my brewing inner-old fogey. Like the phrase low key for instance. I started hearing the yutes say this all the time a while ago and was pretty sure I understood it to mean something niche. If, say, there was a really good taco place in your neighborhood that only a few people knew about then you’d say, “low-key, they make the best tacos in the city.” Except then Friend of the Blog Christy explained that her children had begun saying high key in addition to low key and that high key and low key appeared to be interchangeable. Wouldn’t this suggest that low key or high key as a modifying adjective is superfluous? Isn’t this just like the President applying excess adverbs to everything?

My notions of modern slang only grew more confused this week when I read Marie Solis’s piece at The New York Times examining the phrase “kinda chic” proliferating on Instagram and TikTok. This phrase, as Solis noted, was essentially in opposition. “Chic,” Solis wrote, “is a high bar,” and dug up an 1877 definition on the Times’ own site to prove it: “What is chic may, in a sense, be fashionable, but what is fashionable cannot be chic.” “(T)he deliberately lowbrow use of ‘kinda,’” Solis explains, “undercuts the less attainable state of ‘chic.’” The BBC spoke to a psychologist from Durham University, Dr. Niklas Ihssen, who summarized utilizing the phrase kinda chic as “allow(ing) you to be special while being normal,” which echoes how the ever helpful Know Your Meme describes it. Chic had always seemed to me an either/or proposition, either you are chic or you are not chic. To be kinda chic sounds like being, I dunno, kinda rock ‘n’ roll. Is being kinda rock ‘n’ roll, in fact, being rock ‘n’ roll in this brave new world? Is everything a half-caf from Starbucks now? 

Yet, in being confronted with such revisions in terminology, I did not simply want to sigh, throw my hands in the air, and theoretically scream, “Get off my lawn!” by logging off. I wanted to know. And so, being a movie blog, after all, I decided to try and contextualize high key, and low key, and chic, and kinda chic on my terms. 

Let me see if I understand this...

High key, Nicole Kidman is our greatest working actor.

Low key, Nicole Kidman is our greatest working actor.

Chic is Audrey Hepburn wearing all black in “Charade.” 

Kinda chic is Jennifer Love Hewitt in “I Still Know What You Did Last Summer” after several introductory fakeout jump scares to communicate that her character is still in the throes of TRAUMA taking a bag of potato chips to bed.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Strange Victory (1948)

In watching the recently reviewed “Pressure” about the D-Day invasion, I was reminded of Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower’s in-advance speech to his troops in which he declared that “nothing less than full victory” would be acceptable. But what, exactly, constituted full victory in WWII? That’s the question director Leo Hurwitz puts forth in his aptly named “Strange Victory,” finished all of three years after the second world war, by demonstrating with blunt style that the United States of America could not claim to honor all the ideals it had ostensibly fought and died for in the name of liberal democracy. Stitching together archival footage and dramatic re-enactments to underscore the various points of the archival footage, “Strange Victory” was deemed a documentary but comes across more akin to a visual essay. That sensation is brought home in the voiceover by co-writer Saul Levitt which is not dispassionate but barely concealed rage at what is being conveyed onscreen. An introductory overview of WWII’s conclusion is constructed out of graphic imagery that cuts the heart right out of any nostalgia and evokes a collective trauma that has been repressed rather than dealt with and fuels the anger and fear in the form of antisemitism, anti-communism, and racism coursing the post-war America, as Levitt asks, again and again, “If we won, what did we win?”

If it’s freedom, “Strange Victory” illustrates, we have a funny way of showing it. In Hurwitz’s most daring conceptualization, he blends a brutal rundown of the effects Jim Crow laws with a montage outlining the insidious rise of the Third Reich and in effect, links our own post-war fearmongering with theirs, providing a different spin on that old standby line of scriptural reassurance: if God is for us, who could be against us? He even mixes and matches images of newborn babies, black and white, and their black and white mothers, with images of whites only signs and colored entrances, living the idea that while all men might be created equal, as the declaration says, the society we have constructed once newborns leave the hospital proves just the opposite. In demonstrating oppression of the era, predictably “Strange Victory” was suppressed itself, with a lack of major distribution making it difficult to see. It calls to mind what is currently transpiring with the suppression of history by the current Presidential administration at the Smithsonian, as if embodying “Strange Victory’s” own conclusion, that there is a war still going on at home, waiting to be won. 

Some Drivel On...Inside Man

Released 20 years ago, Spike Lee’s rare foray into something approximating genre filmmaking suggested Sidney Lumet’s own New York bank robbery classic “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975) played at a different tempo. The latter’s bank robber, Sonny Wortzik, was not only based on a real person but animated, high-strung, and forced to improvise when his plans go awry. The bank robber of “Inside Man,” on the other hand, Dalton Russell (Clive Owen), is a cool cucumber. “Don’t I sound relaxed to you?” he asks the hostage negotiator at one point in the voice of a man who has mapped out every possible contingency. Indeed, the meta structure of Russell Gerwitz’s elaborate screenplay is established with Dalton breaking the fourth wall as the movie begins by explaining directly to the camera who he is and what he plans to do, that is, “execute the perfect bank robbery.” So, he does. The remaining two-hours-and-nine-minutes is showing how he executes it, though without giving away the most crucial elements until the very end, giving “Inside Man” the feel of a deconstructed magic trick, like David Copperfield telling you he is going to make the Statue of Liberty disappear and then showing you exactly how he makes the Statue of Liberty disappear.

Dalton Russell is the perfect role for Clive Owen. The part requires outsized self-confidence, and Owen has always excelled at imbuing outsized self-confidence without appearing to exert any effort at all. His face is hidden behind a mask and sunglasses virtually the entire movie, yet the baritone of his voice and his presence make the person unmistakable even if the screenplay by design is never really infusing a sense of personality to keep him a mystery. Denzel Washington, then, makes for the perfect counterpart as boisterous Detective Keith Frazier who is enlisted as lead hostage negotiator when Russell and his small team take 50 hostages inside the Manhattan Trust Bank and put their exacting plan in motion. Even when Frazier is forced into a bout of introductory exposition, Washington sells it with genuine crackle, just as when he walks, he struts in the manner of his Detroit Red version of Malcolm X. Frazier’s boss is throwing him a bone, so to speak, after a run of bad luck and Washington seizes on that bit of backstory, moving through the movie like his character is seizing the day. Yet, if Frazier is smart enough to know Dalton is frying bigger fish, he is too much a small fry in the pecking order to do something about it. That is reflected in the harsh light of the third key character, Madeleine White (Jodie Foster), a nebulous if high-powered fixer who has to broker the robbery for the bank owner (Christopher Plummer) hiding a crucial secret. Palpably relishing the opportunity to play against type, Foster’s own enthusiasm deliciously melds with the character’s enthusiasm for virtually eating the lunch of everyone in her orbit. And though White is shorter than all the surrounding characters in height, in her tall stilettoes, not to mention Foster’s imposing aura, she seems no less towering, a gargoyle on the edge of a building come to life.

And so, these three characters circle one another as events play out, Dalton seeming to deliberately stall for time, and Frazier sensing that he seems to be deliberately stalling for time. Lee interrupts this straight-forward structure throughout with scenes in the aftermath of the robbery as Frazier and his partner, Bill Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor), interview the hostages, all of whom are suspects given the sly diversionary tactics that Russell employs not only to confuse the police but to throw them off the real scent. It’s an ingenious device that not only heightens the tension but evokes how Lee is deconstructing the nature of the bank robbery movie itself just as a sequence later in which the police prepare to storm the bank, we see imagined scenes of how it might unfold, as if Lee is showing us how such a movie might typically stage its conclusion and then pulling the rug out from under us just as Dalton pulls the rug out from under Frazier and White and everyone else. The ending relies on a striking bit of coincidence, I grant you that, but I also can’t say that I mind. Dalton had already made the Statue of Liberty disappear, after all, so why couldn’t he perform one last miracle?

Normal

The small Minnesota town giving Ben Wheatley’s action-comedy “Normal” its name is reminiscent of the English village Sandford in 2007’s action-comedy “Hot Fuzz” in so much as its idyllic nature belies a bevy of unhinged arms-toting citizens. The latter held that twist for a good chunk of its running time whereas “Normal” gives it away immediately in its Tokyo-set prologue where a Yakuza boss dispatches a pair of underlings who have failed him to the American Midwest. This is one of the more interesting decisions that screenwriter Derek Kolstad (he conceived of the story with star Bob Odenkirk) makes. It means that Normal’s interim Sheriff Ulysses (Odenkirk) is the only one unaware of the town’s nefarious underbelly, including the audience, stressing the feeling of his being an outsider. Gradually, as he gets to know the tiny police force and meets other members of the community, he begins to suspect something is amiss in the death of Normal’s previous Sheriff, setting out to uncover the truth.

It’s a solid-enough set-up, an American western on the frozen tundra, but Kolstad’s script never finesses its ideas. There is something potentially interesting in a small town circa Right Now choosing to go all-in with the Yakuza to survive but “Normal” isn’t sure what to make of it – right, wrong, or in-between – and lets it burn out while Sheriff Ulysses’s backstory is hopelessly wan and means the conclusion lacks additional emotional punch. Indeed, the ever-changing factions of Normal, good helping bad and vice versa, provides some spark that never quite goes anywhere because eventually it’s revealed as mere twisty structure for the sake of twisty structure. And fair enough. Normal, Minnesota might as well be a soundstage, a depressed cop movie giving way to a western giving way to Japanese gun-fu, and so on, as if Normal, Minnesota is really just a “Blazing Saddles”-style series of soundstages, one genre followed by another, an elaborate excuse to shoot some people’s limbs off, proving there is more than way to skin a cat.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Violent Saturday (1955)

The central event of “Violent Saturday” is a bank robbery, but Richard Fleischer’s crime thriller feels more like a disaster movie, really, with the heist serving as the catastrophe in place of an earthquake, hurricane, or volcano. We see the meticulous planning of the three thieves, Harper (Stephen McNally), Dill (Lee Marvin), and Chapman (J. Carrol Naish), but we spend just as much time with the residents of the small Arizona town where the bank is located, from colleagues at the local copper mine to a devout Amish family with the taciturn Stadt (Ernest Borgnine) for its patriarch. The manager of the bank under surveillance, Harry (Tommy Noonan), is a George McFly-ish peeping tom, Boyd (Richard Egan) suffers a philandering wife, likely from his own alcoholism, and Boyd’s associate at the local mine, Shelley (Victor Mature), discovers that his son is being bullied because his old man failed to serve and win honor in WWII. These are all issues of a decided masculine variety, and it is telling that the debt-riddled librarian, Elsie (Sylvia Sidney), has the most superfluous subplot of all.

Befitting “Violent Saturday’s” so-called sunshine noir genre, all these problems will be exposed to the harsh light, in a manner of speaking, when the robbery commences, a lengthy sequence of changing locations that Fleischer recounts in an almost documentary-like fashion. There is no accompanying music, nothing more, really, than some chirping birds on the soundtrack once the three thieves make haste from the bank to the Amish farm where they have tied up the family and Shelley, using the latter’s car in lieu of their own stowed getaway vehicle. This vérité sensation makes the gunshots that are fired sound all the more startling, and the deaths stemming from the bullets feel that much more shocking. If Shelley being able to free himself and the Amish clan from the barn loft where they are being held can feel like a bout of some all-too-convenient screenwriting stupidity courtesy of the character keeping watch, it still allows for him to ante up and be the hero he never got to be.

But that’s also the strange thing about “Violent Saturday.” The cold cruelty of the bank robbers would seem to refute the nature of violence just as the Amish patriarch being forced to kill one of the robbers would too. Whether he was coached, decided on his own, or some combination of the two, however, Borgnine plays the Amish patriarch not just with no inner-life but no life at all, reducing him to a cyborg in a straw hat, meaning the moment has no resonance. What’s more, the capping scene in which Shelley is greeted heroically not only by his son but by virtually every boy in his son’s school, like we are suddenly watching an afterschool special, suggests the exact opposite of his character’s half-hearted protestation that it would be better if such things didn’t happen in the first place. I mean, if not, how could you ever prove you were a real man?