North Dallas Forty (1979) v. Any Given Sunday (1999)

I really like North Dallas Forty... I just wish it gave a little bit more. North Dallas Forty is one of those honest 1970s exposes that introduced the world to the things the media covered up for years. It has a cynical veneer, but a genuine heart. It is also the best movie it could have been given the time period it was made. To talk about where it works and where it doesn’t, let me compare it to Any Given Sunday, which is a cynical disappointment.

Written by Peter Gent, who played for the Dallas Cowboys from 1964 until 1969, North Dallas Forty is widely considered an expose on the well-covered-up party-hard lifestyle of the Dallas Cowboys of the late 1960s as well as the NFL’s use of drugs to keep players playing through injuries.

The story centers around talented but aging wide receiver Phil Elliott (Nick Nolte), who functions as our eyes into the secret world of the team. Through his eyes, we meet manipulative quarterback Seth Maxwell (Mac Davis), who is modeled after Don Meredith, cold-as-a-fish fundamentalist Christian Coach B.A. Strother (G.D. Spradlin), who is supposedly fairly close Tom Landry, assistant Coach Johnson (Charles Durning) who does Coach Strother’s dirty work, and an assortment of other characters. The team presented here mimics the Cowboys in many ways, like their obsession with computerizing their coaching and recruiting, their penchant for stunningly debauched parties that never made it into the news, drug use, some abusive practices, and tolerance for anything so long as the player has talent.

Along the way, the film exposes the cruel nature of the game as players find themselves ruthlessly discarded the moment they lose their value to the team, and on the issue of pain killers. Indeed, this film really acts as an expose on the widespread use of pain killers to keep these guys playing through career and body threatening injuries. Today, you probably already know about the pain killers, but when this film came out, this was a well-kept dirty little secret and people were shocked.

As the film progresses, we see the coaches abuse the players, the players rebel in their way, and the destructive culture of these teams which made these men both predators and victims at the same time. It was an eye opening film because of this, and nothing that has come since has been anywhere near as damning.

Indeed, consider Any Given Sunday. Any Given Sunday is Oliver Stone’s expose on the NFL. But nothing he presents in that film is even close to being as damning as what you see in North Dallas Forty. The reason is that everything Stone purports to tell you is already widely known. Moreover, rather than focus on something specific, Stone tosses every cliché he can find at you and then builds his entire film around the not-shocking idea that everyone uses everyone else... an idea he does to such excess that it’s just not believable. Indeed, in Any Given Sunday, the characters are openly evil. No one is innocent. They hate each other. They spew anger. They talk about taking each other’s jobs, they plot against each other, and they interfere with each other’s careers. The conflicts are cartoonish. The abuses excessive. And yet, there seem to be no genuine stakes; when its all over, everyone is better off than they were when they started.

In fact, subtlety is a key difference between these two films. North Dallas Forty is an amazingly subtle film. Take Coach BA: it’s never clear if BA is bad guy, is a dupe, or just turns a blind eye to bad things. There are several times where you get the sense that BA has told someone to do something rotten, but you never see it. Does he really use Nolte to get Delma to shoot up? Or does he just turn a blind eye? Does he support the owner ridding himself of Nolte and his contract? Is there some other reason he supports getting rid of Nolte? What is he really thinking? You never know because Spradlin turns in an amazingly subtle performance that at once seems to suggest a man taking a firm course of action, but at the same time, a man deeply conflicted about what is being done and who seems to want to stop what is happening but who may see himself as helpless... or not. It makes BA a compelling villain and you want... nay, you need to know what he really believes because your lack of understanding of his true movies pulls at you... it frustrates you.

Compare this to any character in Any Given Sunday. Each of those people does the rottenest thing they can do and then they turn to some nearby character and give soliloquies reveling in what they’ve done. There is zero subtlety. Did Coach D’Amato (Al Pacino) try to undermine mobile black quarterback Willie Beamen (Jamie Foxx) or betray his owner Christina Pagniacci (Cameron Diaz)? Of course he did and, in case you aren’t sure, he gives you a five minute gloating speech about how he got away with it. In Any Given Sunday, everyone admits to being evil and revels in it. That is not true in North Dallas Forty at all.

In North Dallas Forty, there is one moment that confirms that Quarterback Maxwell is actually a villain. After Nolte quits the team, Maxwell is only concerned that his name was kept out of the investigation (an investigation Nolte didn’t even know about until moments before... so how does Maxwell know?). Nolte looks at his supposed best friend and says, “You know everything, don’t you Max?” Maxwell responds, “That I do.” This is it, but this moment speaks volumes. It tells you that all the manipulations, all the decisions Nolte fought throughout were all known to and support by Maxwell, who was never his friend but used him the same way he used every other player on the team. Any Given Sunday couldn’t do this level of subtlety, and because of that, North Dallas Forty feels like a film which unfolds deliberately and smacks you at the appropriate times, whereas Any Given Sunday clubs you over the head scene by scene so you never need to use your brain to follow the film.

Indeed, there are a great many moments in North Dallas Forty that you just couldn’t see in Any Given Sunday. No one ever talks about getting cut, but it hangs in the air throughout. Moreover, when Stallings is cut, you get this chilling exchange: Nolte says, “Can you believe they cut Stallings?” and Maxwell responds, “Who’s Stallings?” There is no over-the-top speech, but the message is clear: get cut and you are no longer part of the family. Take the issue of race. Jo Bob spews racist anger at a black player during the week, but before an important game he comes and wishes him a good game. There is no speech about unity or what matters, but this simple line ("Good game") says it all. Delma is told to know the difference between injury and pain to help the team, which is a subtle way to say he needs to learn to play when injured.

The characters in North Dallas Forty are amazingly well drawn too. First, they are still real people who look like you and me – the NFL was still populated by players like that in the 1970s. And they have different personalities and outside lives. You’ve got the guys who seem like retards, but then John Matuszak delivers an amazingly insightful speech (“Every time I call it a game, you call it a business. And every time I call it a business, you call it a game!”). You’ve got macho party animals, who you are told fear “falling on their asses in Chicago.” You have a deeply religious quarterback, drug addicts, a cynic, brownnosers, etc. Each character has his own story within the story. You learn that many don’t even know why they play. You see how easily they are cowed by their coaches. You get philosophy:

Elliot: “He’s here to remind us that the meanest and the biggest get to make all the rules.”
Charlotte: “I don’t agree with that.”
Elliot: “Agreement doesn’t enter into it.”

By comparison, Any Given Sunday is packed with prima-donna athlete stereotypes: narcissists who work out 24/7, who are incapable of uttering a non-football thought, and for whom the violence of the game has bled into their lives. And they do nothing but exist against this backdrop.

There isn’t a likable or interesting character in Any Given Sunday. They are all deeply cynical. They are rotten to the core. They are out to screw each other and they see other people as obstacles they must crush beneath them. Are there really such people in the world? Sure, but few make it to adulthood without being permanently relocated to prison.

Where North Dallas Forty does fail in my opinion is that its punch isn’t strong enough. Unfortunately, this is part of the era from which it was made. The 1970s just weren’t a time when films could get as cynical and dark as they can today, so their punch was limited. So what happens here is about as strong as the film could be made. But it would have been better to see a greater impact on Nolte. Nolte should have been shown losing something more dear to him. As it is, he is essentially fired from a game he can no longer play and which he isn’t even sure he wants to play anymore. It would have been better perhaps to make Nolte desperate to win a championship, only to have that stripped from him for getting a conscience. It would have been a darker ending, but a stronger one.

Thoughts?