Tag Archives: Strother Martin

UNIVERSAL IN THE ’70s — PART ONE: SLAP SHOT

The Hanson Brothers revel in some old-time hockey in SLAP SHOT

The Hanson Brothers revel in some good old-time hockey fun in SLAP SHOT

SLAP SHOT (George Roy Hill, 1977)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Friday, February 3, 1:30 & 7:30
212-660-0312
metrograph.com
www.hansonbrothers.net

One of the best sports films ever made, Slap Shot is a riotously bloody look at minor-league hockey. Paul Newman — who declared this one of his favorite pictures — stars as Reggie Dunlop, an aging loser serving as player-coach of the Charlestown Chiefs and trying to keep his marriage going with Francine (Jennifer Warren). When the general manager (Strother Martin) tells him that the team is being shut down at the end of the season, Dunlop decides to send it off with a bang. Lying to his team that if the Chiefs fill the seats and start winning they will move to Florida, he incorporates a different style of play into their game, led by the brutal, vicious, and utterly hilarious Hanson brothers (real-life brothers Jeff and Steve Carlson and their Johnstown Jets teammate Dave Hanson), who never met an opponent they wouldn’t punch, trip, slash, spear, or slam face-first into the boards well after the whistle. Even Dunlop gets in on the fun, throwing his share of right hands. The only player not participating in the hijinks is Ned Braden (Michael Ontkean), who believes in sportsmanship and a more gentlemanly game of skill and beauty, not exactly what men like Ogie Oglethorpe (minor-league player Ned Dowd, whose sister, Nancy, wrote the book that the movie is based on, inspired by the real-life antics of the Johnstown Jets) and Tim “Dr. Hook” McCracken (Paul D’Amato) have in mind. You don’t have to be a hockey fan to love Slap Shot, which is really, when it comes right down to it, just a little film about the trials and tribulations of everyday life. Look for cameos by Paul Dooley, M. Emmett Walsh, Melinda Dillon, Nancy Dowd as Andrea, and actual hockey players Bruce Boudreau, Jean Tétreault, Connie Madigan, Cliff Thompson, and Joe Nolan, among others. Slap Shot is screening February 3 in the Metrograph series “Universal in the 70’s: Part One,” a tribute to the decade when the studio took advantage of the growing independent-cinema movement; the two-week, eighteen-film festival continues through February 7 with such other gems as Clint Eastwood’s awesome High Plains Drifter, Alfred Hitchcock’s Family Plot, Jeremy Kagan’s The Big Fix, and Don Siegel’s underseen Charley Varrick.

BRING ME THE HEAD OF SAM PECKINPAH: THE WILD BUNCH

Ben Johnson, Warren Oates, William Holden, and Ernest Borgnine play friends to the bloody end in THE WILD BUNCH

THE WILD BUNCH (Sam Peckinpah, 1969)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Thursday, March 31, 8:30, and Friday, April 1, 1:30
Series runs March 31 – April 7
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org

Sam Peckinpah cemented his reputation for graphic violence and eclectic storytelling with the genre-redefining 1969 Western The Wild Bunch. When a robbery goes seriously wrong, Pike Bishop (William Holden), Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine), Freddie Sykes (Edmond O’Brien), Angel (Jaime Sánchez), and brothers Lyle (Warren Oates) and Tector Gorth (Ben Johnson) set out to get even, planning an even bigger score by going after a U.S. Army weapons shipment on a railroad protected by detective Pat Harrigan (Albert Dekker) and his hired gun, Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), who is given nothing but “egg-suckin’, chicken-stealing gutter trash” to work with, including the hapless Coffer (Strother Martin) and T.C. (L. Q. Jones). The aging Pike, who sees this as his last score, is worried about being in cahoots with the unpredictable General Mapache (Emilio Fernández), a local warlord battling Pancho Villa’s freedom forces. But at the center of the film is the cat-and-mouse game between Pike and Thornton, the latter determined to capture his former partner, who left him to rot in jail years earlier. It all comes to a head in Agua Verde, which might translate to “Green Water” but will soon be bathed in red blood in one of the most violent shoot-outs ever depicted on celluloid.

the wild bunch

Peckinpah fills the film with plenty of drinking and whoring, and even torture, while exploring friendship and loyalty, embodied by Dutch’s selfless dedication to Pike. The Wild Bunch might be famous for its intense violence, much of it shot in slow motion, but it also has a lot more going for it, from its Oscar-nominated score by Jerry Fielding to its terrific cast and suspenseful twists and turns. (Western fans might get a kick out of knowing that Mapache’s right-hand man, Lt. Herrera, is portrayed by Mexican actor and director Alfonso Arau, who later played El Guapo in John Landis’s comic Western The Three Amigos.) The Wild Bunch is screening March 31 (introduced by Garner Simmons, author of Peckinpah: A Portrait in Montage) and April 1 in the fabulously titled Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Bring Me the Head of Sam Peckinpah,” which includes all of the major movies made by the iconoclastic director, who died in 1984 at the age of fifty-nine. Also in the series, which continues through April 7, are The Ballad of Cable Hogue, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Cross of Iron, The Deadly Companion, The Getaway, Junior Bonner, The Killer Elite, Convoy, Major Dundee, The Osterman Weekend, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Ride the High Country, and the unforgettable Straw Dogs, works that feature performances by such stars as Steve McQueen, Maureen O’Hara, Dustin Hoffman, Charlton Heston, Ali McGraw, Joel McCrea, Randolph Scott, Bob Dylan, James Coburn, Robert Preston, Ida Lupino, Kris Kristofferson, Warren Oates, Jason Robards, Susan George, James Caan, and Robert Duvall.

WAVERLY MIDNIGHTS — LONE STAR CINEMA: TEXAS ON SCREEN — THE WILD BUNCH

Ben Johnson, Warren Oates, William Holden, and Ernest Borgnine play friends to the bloody end in THE WILD BUNCH

THE WILD BUNCH (Sam Peckinpah, 1969)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
August 9-29
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

Sam Peckinpah cemented his reputation for graphic violence and eclectic storytelling with the genre-redefining 1969 Western The Wild Bunch. When a robbery goes seriously wrong, Pike Bishop (William Holden), Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine), Freddie Sykes (Edmond O’Brien), Angel (Jaime Sánchez), and brothers Lyle (Warren Oates) and Tector Gorth (Ben Johnson) set out to get even, planning an even bigger score by going after a U.S. Army weapons shipment on a railroad protected by detective Pat Harrigan (Albert Dekker) and his hired gun, Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), who is given nothing but “egg-suckin’, chicken-stealing gutter trash” to work with, including the hapless Coffer (Strother Martin) and T.C. (L. Q. Jones). The aging Pike, who sees this as his last score, is worried about being in cahoots with the unpredictable General Mapache (Emilio Fernández), a local warlord battling Pancho Villa’s freedom forces. But at the center of the film is the cat-and-mouse game between Pike and Thornton, the latter determined to capture his former partner, who left him to rot in jail years earlier. It all comes to a head in Agua Verde, which might translate to “Green Water” but will soon be bathed in red blood in one of the most violent shoot-outs ever depicted on celluloid. Peckinpah fills the film with plenty of drinking and whoring, and even torture, while exploring friendship and loyalty, embodied by Dutch’s selfless dedication to Pike. The Wild Bunch might be famous for its intense violence, much of it shot in slow motion, but it also has a lot more going for it, from its Oscar-nominated score by Jerry Fielding to its terrific cast and suspenseful twists and turns. (Western fans might get a kick out of knowing that Mapache’s right-hand man, Lt. Herrera, is portrayed by Mexican actor and director Alfonso Arau, who later played El Guapo in John Landis’s comic Western The Three Amigos.) The Wild Bunch is screening August 30-31 and September 1 as part of the IFC Center Waverly Midnights series “Lone Star Cinema: Texas On Screen,” which continues through October 26 with such other Texas-set movies as Reality Bites, Blood Simple, The Getaway, Bottle Rocket, and the original and still champion Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

SEE IT BIG! THE WILD BUNCH

Ben Johnson, Warren Oates, William Holden, and Ernest Borgnine play friends to the bloody end in THE WILD BUNCH

THE WILD BUNCH (Sam Peckinpah, 1969)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, August 4, and Sunday, August 5, free with museum admission, 6:00
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

Sam Peckinpah cemented his reputation for graphic violence and eclectic storytelling with the genre-redefining 1969 Western The Wild Bunch. When a robbery goes seriously wrong, Pike Bishop (William Holden), Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine), Freddie Sykes (Edmond O’Brien), Angel (Jaime Sánchez), and brothers Lyle (Warren Oates) and Tector Gorth (Ben Johnson) set out to get even, planning an even bigger score by going after a U.S. Army weapons shipment on a railroad protected by detective Pat Harrigan (Albert Dekker) and his hired gun, Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), who is given nothing but “egg-suckin’, chicken-stealing gutter trash” to work with, including the hapless Coffer (Strother Martin) and T.C. (L. Q. Jones). The aging Pike, who sees this as his last score, is worried about being in cahoots with the unpredictable General Mapache (Emilio Fernández), a local warlord battling Pancho Villa’s freedom forces. But at the center of the film is the cat-and-mouse game between Pike and Thornton, the latter determined to capture his former partner, who left him to rot in jail years earlier. It all comes to a head in Agua Verde, which might translate to “Green Water” but will soon be bathed in red blood in one of the most violent shoot-outs ever depicted on celluloid. Peckinpah fills the film with plenty of drinking and whoring, and even torture, while exploring friendship and loyalty, embodied by Dutch’s selfless dedication to Pike. The Wild Bunch might be famous for its intense violence, much of it shot in slow motion, but it also has a lot more going for it, from its Oscar-nominated score by Jerry Fielding to its terrific cast and suspenseful twists and turns. (Western fans might get a kick out of knowing that Mapache’s right-hand man, Lt. Herrera, is portrayed by Mexican actor and director Alfonso Arau, who later played El Guapo in John Landis’s comic Western The Three Amigos.) The Wild Bunch is screening August 3 and 4 in a new DCP restoration at the Museum of the Moving Image as part of the institution’s continuing See It Big! series.

PAUL NEWMAN: SLAP SHOT

Paul Newman is ready to do whatever it takes to win in classic hockey flick

SLAP SHOT (George Roy Hill, 1977)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Friday, July 29, $10, 7:00, and Sunday, July 31, free with museum admission, 4:00
Series continues through August 7
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
www.hansonbrothers.net

One of the best sports films ever made, Slap Shot is a riotously bloody look at minor-league hockey. Paul Newman — who declared this one of his favorite pictures — stars as Reggie Dunlop, an aging loser serving as player-coach of the Charlestown Chiefs. When the general manager (Strother Martin) tells him that the team is being shut down at the end of the season, Dunlop decides to send it off with a bang. Lying to his team that if the Chiefs fill the seats and start winning they will move to Florida, he incorporates a different style of play into their game, led by the brutal, vicious, and utterly hilarious Hanson brothers (real-life brothers Jeff and Steve Carlson and their Johnstown Jets teammate Dave Hanson), who never met an opponent they wouldn’t punch, trip, slash, spear, or slam face-first into the boards well after the whistle. Even Dunlop gets in on the fun, throwing his share of right hands. The only player not participating in the hijinks is Ned Braden (Michael Ontkean), who believes in sportsmanship and a more gentlemanly game of skill and beauty, not exactly what men like Ogie Oglethorpe (minor-league player Ned Dowd, whose sister, Nancy, wrote the book that the movie is based on, inspired by the real-life antics of the Johnstown Jets) have in mind. You don’t have to be a hockey fan to love Slap Shot, which is really, when it comes right down to it, just a little film about the trials and tribulations of everyday life. Slap Shot is screening July 29 & 31 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s tribute to Paul Newman, which continues July 30 with Torn Curtain (Alfred Hitchcock, 1966), July 30-31 with Hombre (Martin Ritt, 1967), and August 6-7 with Nobody’s Fool (Robert Benton, 1994) and Twilight (Robert Benton, 1998).