Maybe the most surprising thing about North Dallas Forty, which is
still the best football movie ever made, is that Mac Davis was so
perfect playing Seth Maxwell, the glamorous quarterback of the North
Dallas Bulls. Davis was a singer/songwriter from Nashville, whose
only acting experience had been doing sketches on his own variety
show (which also featured Gabe ‘Kotter’ Kaplan and Loretta ‘MASH’
Swit) a few years earlier. But he fitted the role of an easy-going
good ol’ boy with a fierce will to win—a part patterned on Dandy
Don Meredith, who reportedly was offered the role himself, just as
the Bulls were the Dallas Cowboys and coach BA Strothers was at least
in part Tom Landry (Strothers was played by GD Spradlin, who made a
career playing inflexible authoritarian figures; two years earlier he
had played a basketball coach somewhere between John Wooden and Bobby
Knight in One On One, a good movie spoiled by casting Robby Benson as
the basketball star; you’ll remember him as Senator Geary in The
Godfather).
The recognisable figures in North Dallas 40 made sense because the novel upon which the film was based was written by Pete Gent, a wide-out cum tight end for the Cowboys. The book is darker than the film, which is simpler in its battle against authority—the Gent character is called Phil Elliott, played by Nick Nolte, who loves the game but dislikes the regimented bullshit around it (boy did that ring a familiar bell with me) and it’s the relationship with Seth which is the cornerstone of the film: Davis is his best friend, but he gets along with everybody, and he is also canny enough to realise his value to the team and he will not let anyone get in the way of that. Kind of like Cap Rooney in Any Given Sunday, there’s a youngster waiting in the wings; though in this case it is a Born-Again Christian QB who fits the God America and Cheerleaders in Hot Pants image of “America’s Team”.
Davis was from Lubbock, Texas, so he knew his football, and he knew how the hometown hero thing would play. It’s a winning performance that should have led to a better career, but he had to wait four years for his next movie, which was the execrable Sting 2, and his later roles were in TV vehicles. Part of the problem was that easy-going aura, which made him excellent as a variety and game show host, but which in ND40 hinted at some depth—I always thought he would be perfect for roles as likeable-on-the-surface villains, but whosever lack of vision couldn’t see that probably did him a disservice.
But
acting was really a sidelight. Davis is best known for writing a
number of songs which became hits for Elvis Presley, the most famous
of which is “In The Ghetto”. He looked a bit like Tony Joe
White, who was in many ways the last and best of the ‘next Elvis’
contenders, but he was a cleaner version, which is why he had that
variety show in the mid-Seventies. As a performer, he was a bit too
pop-country, but as a song-writer he reminded me of Tom T Hall or
Hoyt Axton, or at least he did once I heard “In The Ghetto”. This
is an unusual song for country music at the time, and really in
general, because it tells a story that’s specifically out of the
country universe, and it is unapologetic in its empathy, in its
implicit blame, and in its sense, perhaps a little to resigned, to
the cycle of pain and violence that the ghetto creates and
perpetuates. Davis wrote a number of other excellent ballads, and he
sang them well, but I haven’t heard any which match the sadness of
“In The Ghetto”, and in many ways I like his own, more folky
version, at least as much as Elvis’ more powerful, orchestrated
take.
Take a listen. And take a look at North Dallas Forty. In many ways Any Given Sunday is just a jazzed up version of that original, but most of the same themes are there. It was directed by Ted Kotcheff, a Canadian who had made The Apprenticeship Of Duddy Kravitz but who basically fell into journeyman work after this, and though he, Gent and producer Frank Yablans are credited with the screenplay, Nancy Dowd, who wrote Slapshot, contributed uncredited script-doctoring which I think is pretty visible. Like her film, this one is about more than football. And watch Steve Forrest as the owner, Charles Durning as the assistant coach, and most of all Bo Swenson and ex-Raider John Matuszak as the linemen O.W. and Joe Bob. Matuszak has the greatest line in any football movie, screamed at Durning when, after a loss, the assistant coach is berating them for not studying ‘tendencies’ closely enough. “Every time I call it a business, you call it a game! And every time I call it a game, you call it a business!”
But let’s leave the last words to Seth Maxwell, as played by Mac Davis, trying to instruct Phil Elliott: “You had better learn how to play the game, and I don't mean just the game of football.”
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