I actually watched a couple of sports films recently because they were both about to leave the Watch TCM app. One of them I'll save for later because I just did another movie with the same actor, so of the two, we'll start off by mentioning Hoosiers.
Of course, Hoosiers is probably the sort of movie you all know about not just because of the sports-film tropes about underdogs, but because of its reputation as a pretty darn good movie. Into the town of Hickory, IN, circa the fall of 1951 comes Norman Dale (Gene Hackman). He's a basketball coach who even used to coach in college, but has been in the service for the past 10 years. Now, that ought to put his leaving basketball as being at the same time as Pearl Harbor, but that of course is not the way it's presented in the movie. Instead, Dale had some ignominous exit from the college game, and is now trying to rebuild his career in a small town because presumably nobody else will have him except his old friend the high school principal Cletus Summers (Sheb Wooley).
Not only that, but nobody is sure of the new coach, with rumors about his past flying around. And this is one of those small towns that lives for its basketball the way the Texas town in The Last Picture Show lived for football. So they're not so certain about this new head coach who, after all, must have left the bigger college game for a reason. Dale doesn't make his life any easier by being a different sort of coach than the previous one, who was beloved by the small town before his untimely death. Indeed, the star of the team, Jimmy Chitwood, decided to quit basketball when the old coach died.
Frankly, however, that suits one teacher, Myra Fleener (Barbara Hershey) just fine. She's been a sort of foster mother to Jimmy who has had a fairly unstable family situation. Myra even warns Dale not to try to recruit Jimmy, becaue she hopes Jimmy can be successful enough to get a college education and get out of a dead-end town like Hickory. She in fact only came back because she had aging parents to take care of. Of course, you know that despite the inauspicious introduction Fleener and Dale have, they're going to wind up a lot lcoser by the end of the movie.
You also know that there's going to be a moment where Jimmy has to decide what he's going to do, which comes at a town meeting where the townsfolk are willing to tear up Dale's contract and fire him, contract law be damned. Somehow I doubt they could afford to buy out his contract. They don't like the unorthodox coach who drove away some of his few players at the beginning of the season although they return hat in hand, and because it's going to take a little while before he has success.
But because of the sort of film Hoosiers is, you know that Dale is ultimately going to have success, and that the town is ultimately going to line up behind him. In fact, the story is inspired by the real Indiana town of Milan, and their run to the state championships, although apparently a lot of liberties are taken with that story. Oh, and did I mention Dennis Hopper as the alcoholic father of one of the players who gets tapped to be an assistant coach as long as he can stop drinking?
As I said, there are a lot of tropes in Hoosiers. But despite all those tropes, it is a pretty darn good movie, in no small part thanks to the acting performances of Gene Hackman and Dennis Hopper, the latter picking up an Oscar nomination. It was also filmed on location in Indiana, although there's no actual town of Hickory as far as I'm aware. In any case, the location shooting makes for a pretty darn good atmosphere. It's no wonder the movie gained a high reputation.
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