On a shelf in my smoke free and pet free home unread for too long now.

I pack like I care and ship F-A-S-T-!

"Slap Shot" (1977) has long since achieved cult status among hockey fans -- something I was reminded of the last time I was in Quebec City, when I entered a hockey memorabilia store and saw T-shirts for all the fictional teams presented in the film -- the Broom County Blades, the Hyannisport Presidents, the Long Island Ducks, et al. Director George Roy Hill, who had worked so productively with Paul Newman in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (1969) and "The Sting" (1973), resumed his collaboration with Newman for this grim but energetic comedy that chronicles the misadventures of a minor-league hockey team.

"Slap Shot" tells the story of Reggie Dunlop (played by Paul Newman), a player-coach for the Charlestown Chiefs of the fictional Federal League. The team trudges from one Northeastern mill town to another with a marked lack of success, both on the ice and at the gate. The steel-making city of Charlestown faces the closing of the local steel mill, and seems to be on the same path to oblivion as its hockey team. Dunlop's most reliable teammate, Ned Braden (played by Michael Ontkean), is an educated man who could seek other career paths, but wants to hang on to his hockey career; his wife Lily (played by Lindsay Crouse) is bitter at being stuck in Charlestown, and seems to be on a long slow slide into alcoholism. The team's director, Joe McGrath (played by Strother Martin), is quietly selling off the team's assets, and Dunlop's ex-wife warns him that there won't long be a hockey team in a town where people can't afford to go to the games.

Dunlop, who has no intention of skating gently into that good night, takes action to try to preserve his own hockey future and that of his team. First, he floats to journalist friend Dickie Dunn (played by M. Emmet Walsh) a rumor that the Chiefs are to be bought and relocated to Florida; and quicker than you can say "Saint Petersburg Chiefs," the rumor takes off. Second, and more importantly, Dunlop hires goon players with a reputation for exceptionally rough physical play -- most notably, the Hanson Brothers, three look-alike young men whose seemingly childlike ways (their favorite hobby while on the road is playing with electric train sets) stand at variance with the over-the-top violence that they perpetrate during games. And as the Chiefs begin brutalizing their opponents on the ice, the team begins doing better at the gate.

The film is popular among hockey fans in large part because of the authenticity of its hockey sequences. Director Hill is said to have remarked that it would be easier to teach skaters to act, rather than trying to teach actors to skate; accordingly, the hockey sequences move with the sport's unique combination of speed and toughness. Newman and Ontkean look just as confident on the ice as NHL/WHA veterans Jeff Carlson, Steve Carlson, and David Hanson, who play the Hanson Brothers. I have a hunch that the popularity of "Slap Shot" may also stem from its winking attitude toward hockey violence. The film was made at a time when hockey teams with a physical, violent style of play were achieving great success -- most notably, the mid-1970's Philadelphia Flyers, the "Broad Street Bullies" who pummeled more skill-oriented teams on their way to the 1974 and 1975 Stanley Cup championships. Fighting in hockey is, theoretically, illegal and punishable by penalties; but there are still plenty of fans who go to a hockey game in hopes of seeing a fight, and such was even more the case in 1977. "Slap Shot" captures well the hockey community's paradoxical attitudes regarding the sport's violence.

Another of the strengths of "Slap Shot" is the manner in which it utilizes on-location filming. Johnstown, Pennsylvania, has been a hard-luck city, in many ways, ever since the catastrophic 1889 flood; and Hill skillfully situates his hockey players within a failing industrial setting. The city looks like a grim and hopeless landscape of despair, reinforcing the film's tone and theme; and viewers who know Johnstown will note how Hill includes many real-life Johnstown landmarks such as the "Morley's Dog" statue at Market and Main. 

It would be understandable if Johnstown's civic leaders were not pleased with the way their city was presented in "Slap Shot"; but the city had other things to worry about in 1977, as the city endured still another terrible flood that killed 85 people and caused $300 million worth of damage. I suppose the makers of "Slap Shot" were lucky that they wrapped up their work on the film and got out when they did.

It is interesting to return to this film now that 35 years have passed, in part because cultural norms have changed so much over time. Back in 1977, there was a great deal of hand-wringing over the amount of foul language in the film --perhaps in part because the film was written by a woman, Nancy Dowd, whose brother had played for the real-life Johnstown Jets of the North American Hockey League. To be sure, there is plenty of bad language in the film; but in the early 21st century, when a single sequence from a Quentin Tarantino film can contain more bad words than all of "Slap Shot," concerns about the bad language in this film seem downright quaint.

My chief reservation with regard to this film relates to the ending. As is so often the case with sports movies, the dramatic climax is a championship game; the Chiefs are pitted against their arch-rivals, the Syracuse Bulldogs, who have stocked the team with every enforcer and goon they can find. Dunlop, meanwhile, has exhorted his players to play clean for this game, to play "old-time hockey." What happens then? Suffice it to say that a disillusioned Ned Braden takes his own independent action that brings the film to an abrupt and unexpected conclusion. Whatever Dowd may have meant for the film's resolution to do in terms of satire or comedy, it comes out of nowhere, and it simply doesn't work.

Nonetheless, "Slap Shot" gets in plenty of perfectly good shots on goal, and it hits its targets more often than it goes wide of the pipes. In some ways, the film seemed downright prophetic; life imitated art in 2010, when the Johnstown Chiefs of the East Coast Hockey League ended their 22-year run in Johnstown. Unlike the movie's Charlestown Chiefs, whose rumors of a southern relocation were only a pie-in-the-sky hope, the real-life Chiefs really did move south -- to Greenville, South Carolina, where they now play as the Greenville Road Warriors. Local newspapers here in Central Pennsylvania made much of the parallel between the dramatic action of "Slap Shot" back in 1977 and the fate of a real-life Johnstown hockey team in 2010.

If you are a hockey fan, chances are you have already seen "Slap Shot," and enjoyed it. If you are a hockey fan and have not seen "Slap Shot," then you should.

The young athlete's father takes him up a hill to dispense a piece of advice as stark as the view of Fort St. James, their desolate logging community in northern British Columbia. "Life at the Fort - you can live here and be buried here,'' says the father. "Or you can play hockey.'' That early scene sets the dark, anguished tone for the new CBC movie Gross Misconduct, about the life of Canadian hockey star Brian (Spinner) Spencer. The drama traces the stormy career of one of the most notorious players in the history of Canadian hockey, a man who lived and died violently. Based on a 1988 biography by Toronto journalist Martin O'Malley and directed by celebrated Canadian film-maker Atom Egoyan, Gross Misconduct is much more than a chronicle of one man's rise and fall - it delves into the forces that moved his heart and soul.

The facts alone of Spencer's roller-coaster life would have made for an entertaining TV movie. He was born in 1949 to Irene Spencer, a teacher, and her husband, Roy, a highly skilled mechanic who pushed Brian and his twin brother, Byron, to perfect their strength and endurance on the ice. Both sons became fond of alcohol as children, and Brian was sent to reform school, and then a foster home, in his mid-teens. A star of the Toronto Maple Leafs at 21, he played 10 seasons with four different teams, earning the nickname Spinner for his aggressive skating style. By 29, his hockey career was over and he moved to Florida, where he became a part-time auto mechanic. He was twice-divorced and almost penniless when, at 38, he beat a murder charge. Three months later, a thief shot him dead.

But Gross Misconduct is also a deftly drawn morality tale about the things that made Spencer tick: hockey and violence. The indignation of writer Paul Gross and director Egoyan is almost palpable in a scene that depicts Spencer's father forcing the boy to skate full force into his brother as part of their daily hockey lessons. In later years, as Spencer (portrayed as an adult by Daniel Kash) played for millions of cheering fans, the movie makes it clear that beating up other players was a higher priority than scoring goals. The producers have punctuated the dramatic sequences with documentary footage of frenzied crowds lustily cheering the athlete's violent outbursts.

In an interview with Maclean's, Gross maintained that the violence in Spencer's professional life moulded the hockey star's personality - and left him with a hot-tempered, visceral approach to life off the rink. "When he left hockey, Spinner was baffled that something that was celebrated on the ice could only spell trouble in the outside world,'' said Gross. "It was that confusion that I wanted to get across.'' Gross Misconduct draws that out with convincing seediness in scenes depicting the former star's down-and-out life in the trailer parks and bars of Florida, and his volatile relationship with a prostitute named Diane Delana (Lenore Zann), the woman who eventually accused Spencer of killing one of her former clients.

For his part, Egoyan says that he was especially intrigued by the prospect of using television to tell the life story of someone who achieved fame on the small screen. "I wanted to make viewers aware that they are engaged in the very medium that somehow set in motion the whole story they are watching,'' said Egoyan. Television was central to Spencer's existence not only because Hockey Night in Canada made him a national figure. It also played an important role in one of the most painful events of Spencer's life: the death of his father. Angered that the CBC aired his son's second Maple Leafs game to viewers everywhere except in British Columbia, the elder Spencer held hostage several staff members of the local network affiliate - until RCMP officers shot and killed him.

The film-makers drive home the importance of that event to Spinner Spencer's life by interjecting tiny reminders of it - each only several seconds long, and with its own title flashed on the screen - throughout the central story. One of those scenes is preceded by the printed words, "The day Roy Spencer was shot dead he installed a new television antenna,'' and shows the proud father fussing with wires on the top of the house. A later scene, which appears after Spencer's parents learned of the CBC decision, shows the man heading to his truck with several guns and a bottle of whiskey, and is titled, "The day Roy Spencer was shot dead he walked through virgin snow.'' The result is a blend of breathtaking tension and heartbreaking pathos. "What I wanted to get across,'' said Egoyan, "was a father's mania when he realizes he cannot share in this golden evening he has worked all his life to build.''

Despite the show's depth and complexity, Gross Misconduct at times descends into caricature. The several scenes tracing Spencer's two marriages depict him as little more than a one-dimensional oaf on the home front. But on the whole, the movie offers a glimpse of the inner life of a man who was both a Canadian hero - and, the film clearly argues, a national tragedy. "Brian,'' said Gross, "was the raw edge of the Canadian soul.'' Imaginative and unflinching, Gross Misconduct offers insight into what gave that edge its cutting force.

From the studio that brought you THE ROOKIE and REMEMBER THE TITANS comes the movie everybody loves -- MIRACLE. Filled with exhilarating nonstop hockey action and heart-racing suspense, it's the inspiring true story behind one of the greatest moments in sports history — the 1980 United States ice hockey team's triumphant Olympic victory against the Soviet Union. Kurt Russell gives a brilliant performance as the dynamic and determined coach Herb Brooks, who had an impossible dream -- beat the seemingly unbeatable Soviets at their own game. Starting with a handpicked group of twenty-six undisciplined kids, Brooks coached them to play like they never played before, and turned twenty of them into a team that believed they could achieve the unachievable -- and in the process, united a nation with a new feeling of hope.

Reviews

"HOT! Kurt Russell has never been better...this film is irresistible." -- Leonard Maltin - Hot Ticket

"Kurt Russell is perfect as Herb Brooks, and the hockey scenes are nothing short of spectacular." -- E.M. Swift - Sports Illustrated

"Miracle gives audiences something to cheer for..." -- Peter Travers - Rolling Stone

"Riveting. An emotional shot in the dark. Kurt Russell at his best." -- Jeffrey Lyons - NBC-TV

"The game scenes constitute some of the best sports footage created for the movies." -- Sean Axmaker - Imdb.com

The Rocket [DVD] (2005) DVD

Sports biodrama tells the uplifting saga of Montreal Canadiens legend Maurice "the Rocket" Richard (Roy Dupuis), who overcame daunting odds and a blue-collar Quebec upbringing to make the NHL in the 1950s. Facing discrimination because he couldn't speak English, Richard became a force to be reckoned with on the ice. Philip Craig co-stars. AKA: "Maurice Richard." 124 min. Widescreen (Enhanced); Soundtracks: French and English Dolby Digital 5.1, English Dolby Digital 5.1; Subtitles: English; deleted scenes; featurette. In English and French with English subtitles/Dubbed in English.

This bio-drama centers around Quebec's most famous hockey player, Maurice "The Rocket"

Richard, and focuses on the famous 1955 riot in the Forum.