Number One

With this being football season, I recently had the chance to watch a new-to-me movie about football: Number One.

Charlton Heston plays Ron Catlan, quarterback for the New Orleans Saints. As the movie opens, it's the week of the final preseason game, and Catlan isn't doing very well. He's pushing 40, and although he led the team to a championship in the past, there's a young gun looking to take his place, and all the hits have been taking their toll. However, Catlan insists he can still lead the team to another championship.

Ron's long-suffering wife Julie (Jessica Walter), a successful fashion designer, wants to pick him up right after the game because they're supposed to be hosting a party, but Ron would rather drown his sorrows at a local restaurant. He does get picked up, however, by Ann (Diana Muldaur), a guest at a party being held by one of Ron's old, now-retired teammates, Richie Fowler (Bruce Dern).

Richie, having retired, has made the brilliant decision of going into business with a car dealership, leasing luxury cars to well-heeled clients. He suggests to Ron that perhaps Ron should hang it up and join him hawking cars. Later on, an executive at a computer company (these being the days of room-sized mainframes) offers Catlan a job, but he's going to have to take it now; it might not be there in even just a few months.

Ron, for his part, decides to sleep with Ann, something that's going to piss of Julie when she finds out, except that she's seen it before. In some ways she's to the point that she just doesn't care. Eventually, we get to opening week, at home against the Cowboys....

Number One is a movie that in theory has a lot going for it, but ultimately winds up falling well short of anything that it sets out to do. Probably the best thing is the vintage look at late 1960s football. The movie was released in 1969, and was made with the full cooperation of the New Orleans Saints (and presumably the NFL). Real Saints players and coaches of the time appear, although I don't think any of them are major characters. We also see the old Sugar Bowl stadium, since the Superdome wouldn't start construction until 1971.

As a narrative movie, however, the film is a mess. I suppose it's supposed to be more of a character study of Catlan, and anybody who's reached the end of the line should probably be able to identify with the character. But there's not much narrative here, and not much character in Catlan either. The structure of the movie isn't helped out much by an overuse of flashbacks. It ultimately feels more like a series of disconnected scenes rather than a coherent whole.

Still, I think anybody who's interested in vintage football when the sport was really beginning to take off thanks to color TV will probably be interested by the internal look at the Saints, as well as what the movie gets wrong because Heston was decidedly not a football player. Heston was 45 at the time and looks it. Also, although Heston had the size to be a football player, the Saints involved in the making of the movie said that he didn't look like a football player at all and certainly didn't have the ability.

Number One finally got a DVD release a few years back.