From Pigskin to Pigsty

We glean a number of startling insights from North Dallas Forty. Professional football, it seems, is a rough and dirty game; the players are mostly stupid, lecherous louts, and the club owners, venal, hypocritical, utterly ruthless exploiters. A pro football player is in almost continuous pain from injuries, and pops pain-killers when not boozing or smoking pot; the management and the coaches treat the players as something midway between pieces of equipment and indentured serfs, and, while trying to induce in them greater maturity and team spirit, also see to it that they remain infantile, cowed, and easily manipulable. There is no real camaraderie, only fear of being benched, suspended, sacked; horseplay and orgies do not foster real comradeship. The life of a pro football player is nasty, brutish, and short.

This, alas, does not come as news even to me, though I know little about football and care less. The exploitation of these players would move me only if I could be shown that they are anything other than nasty, brutish, and tall, and that something fine in them was being subverted. And although the film makes a few feeble efforts to suggest such finer things in some of them, it does not convince me that most of them could be anything but lugs or thugs, or that the money, fame, adulation, and easy sex they get for their bone-breaking work is not the utmost they could conceive of and more than they expected. If one or two of them begin to think and question the system, as Phil Elliot (Nick Nolte) does, that impresses me no more than if a college student announces (as happens nowadays) that he has just discovered something called books.

JS

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John Simon

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We glean a number of startling insights from North Dallas Forty. Professional football, it seems, is a rough and dirty game; the players are mostly stupid, lecherous louts, and the club owners, venal, hypocritical, utterly ruthless exploiters. A pro football player is in almost continuous pain from injuries, and pops pain-killers when not boozing or smoking pot; the management and the coaches treat the players as something midway between pieces of equipment and indentured serfs, and, while trying to induce in them greater maturity and team spirit, also see to it that they remain infantile, cowed, and easily manipulable. There is no real camaraderie, only fear of being benched, suspended, sacked; horseplay and orgies do not foster real comradeship. The life of a pro football player is nasty, brutish, and short.

This, alas, does not come as news even to me, though I know little about football and care less. The exploitation of these players would move me only if I could be shown that they are anything other than nasty, brutish, and tall, and that something fine in them was being subverted. And although the film makes a few feeble efforts to suggest such finer things in some of them, it does not convince me that most of them could be anything but lugs or thugs, or that the money, fame, adulation, and easy sex they get for their bone-breaking work is not the utmost they could conceive of and more than they expected. If one or two of them begin to think and question the system, as Phil Elliot (Nick Nolte) does, that impresses me no more than if a college student announces (as happens nowadays) that he has just discovered something called books.