Based on a novel by actual Dallas Cowboys player Peter Gent, North Dallas Forty is ostensibly a comedy, with Nick Nolte as Gent’s stand-in Phil Elliott, an aging football player with mounting injuries, an irreverent attitude, and an omnipresent cigarette hanging from his lips. But it’s less laugh-out-loud funny than a fascinating time capsule of an earlier-years NFL where the corruption, cynicism, and overall bad vibes don’t feel quite so slickly corporate but still manage to bust up players’ lives pretty good. “They’re the team,” Elliott says later in the film, gesturing at the suits as he rejects an entreaty toward team togetherness. “We’re the equipment!” Twenty years later, another movie on this list would provide a wider-ranging look at similar issues—players downing painkillers, greedy owners, massive pressure to succeed at any cost—but there’s a lived-in sweatiness to North Dallas Forty (seriously, you’ve never seen so many beers and cigarettes in a weight room), thanks especially to Nolte in early movie-star mode, plus some great character-actor support from the likes of Charles Durning and Dabney Coleman.
All the Right Moves (1983)
Everett Collection
If there’s any question about why Varsity Blues isn’t on this list (and really, there shouldn’t be), it’s in part because it’s essentially the same movie as this one—except this one has a young Tom Cruise. He plays a greater-Pittsburgh high school quarterback who’s desperate to get out of his dying steel-mill town but also knows that football can do a lot more for his college prospects than a B average. His coach (Craig T. Nelson) has similar designs on escape, which winds up setting them on a collision course. Directed by longtime cinematographer Michael Chapman (who shot Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Detail, and The Lost Boys, among others; his cinematographer here, Jan De Bont, went on to direct Speed), All the Right Moves is a great-looking movie, on and off the football field. So many contemporary movies are digitally muted to look like they’ve been shot in overcast weather; Chapman and De Bont make Pennsylvanian dreariness feel more lived-in and melancholically beautiful, and the one pivotal game portrayed at length is suspenseful and tactile. The film is also upfront about the sadness and transactional nature of high school football in a small town—it’s gratifyingly clear that these jocks are both human beings and dipshit teenage boys—and only really falters at the end, where it can’t quite figure out a satisfyingly realistic ending that wouldn’t be pure misery. What it lands on instead feels a little too easy, but until that point, the title fits.
Jerry Maguire (1996)
TriStar Pictures/Everett Collection
