- As a sidenote that I remember only because of the “the first African-American to win…” part of the synopsis, on Friday we were playing the 1979 edition of Trivial Pursuit and one of the questions was “Who was the first black to win…” My sister had a hard time reading it because grammatically it felt really problematic to us; we kept thinking there should be another word after “black” because in and of itself “black” did not sound right at all in that sentence. “The first black”… the first black what? I can’t remember what the rest of the question was, but you can bet that you wouldn’t find this kind of phrasing on a question in current editions of the game.
- Inspirational sports film, yay!
- The training montage in this movie was pretty good as far as training montages go, and I think it was in part because the football drills they showed weren’t ones you normally see in movies like this. There was this awesome one where the whole team lies on the ground in an almost-circle (there’s a gap left in one part), heads toward the middle, and then one guy runs around the circle stepping between all their legs and when he gets to the end of the circle, he lies down and the next guy gets up and starts running. I suspect this is before football coaches decided to use tires for this kind of thing. Still. It was great.
- The music was also pretty good. We didn’t get any heaving string arrangements to help convey the immensity and intensity of whatever was going on in the game; instead, we got drumlines! Why do I feel like football films never use drumlines when it’s clearly the most obvious thing to do? Hmm.
- I didn’t actually know anything about Ernie Davis before seeing this movie, so it felt a little soon to win the Heisman at the point in the movie when he did. Turns out he also died really young from leukemia and the rest of the movie focused on that. Oops.
- I hear Michael Scott’s voice in my head yelling “HEISMAN!” every time someone says the word.
- Dennis Quaid was pretty terrible in this. Does he only play cranky old bastards now?
- I don’t really understand the mentality of rowdy sports fans, but I don’t feel that throwing glass bottles at the opposing team is ever an okay reaction. Especially when the game hasn’t started and they’re simply coming onto the field so that the game can start.
- The little KKK member-in-training who led the gang of young white racists at the start of the movie looked disturbingly like a young Paul McCartney, age twelve.
The Express
“Inspirational sports stories” is one genre I never pass up.
IMDB Plot Synopsis A drama based on the life of college football hero Ernie Davis, the first African-American to win the Heisman Trophy.