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Last Updated: Nov 12th, 2008 - 13:11:02 |
Of all the movies to more fully explore Black life during the past 20 years, it’s odd that so few focus on the stories of Black sports heroes, especially given the number of Black athletes and their dominance, particularly in the worlds of football and basketball.
Two years ago, the fine film “Glory Road” was groundbreaking in its portrayal of the first college basketball team, at Texas Western College, to start five black players in the NCAA championship, which they won in 1966. Last year, a small-budget but powerful documentary, “Something to Cheer About,’ told the story of Crispus Attucks High School in Indianapolis, which in 1955 led by a young Oscar Robertson, became the first all-Black high school to win a state championship.
This week’s release of “The Express,” about Ernie Davis, the first Black player to win college’s coveted Heisman Trophy, follows in this tradition of moviemaking, erasing some of the rarity of the genre but not all the questions about why Black athletes get little love from Hollywood. We sports fans might reason that athletes get to star in their own footage every week as their seasons progress, and as professional and college sports compete with Hollywood for entertainment dollars and talented Black youth. But, comparing “The Express” with its predecessors, which arguably also include “Ali,” and “The Hurricane,” it is obvious that these films force Hollywood to remind movie-goers about the relatively recent history of overt racism in the United States, the kind that is so overt that it can be publicly demonstrated by players and fans in sports stadiums, by the NCAA, by sports journalists, (or at a political rally for Gov. Sarah Palin in 2008).
The way sports in the United States is inextricably linked to race in the United States is certainly not lost in this film, which is set during the 1950’s when Ernie Davis became a football star at Syracuse University, following in the foot steps of the great Jim Brown. Like “”Glory Road,” This production has the feel of polished rather than gritty re-creation of Syracuse and other portions of the United States, where the team traveled and often received hostile receptions, especially in the South. And, like “Glory Road” and “Remember the Titans,” the attention is split between the story of the black player and the whites who surround him, in this case, legendary Syracuse football coach Ben Schwartzwalder (Dennis Quaid), who was a Southerner himself and had to learn about societal change as much as he was determined to teach about football.
Even though the production by John Davis and direction by Gary Fleder is adequate, the acting by Rob Brown (“Finding Forrester,” “Coach Carter” and “Stop-Loss”) fills the reality gap, carries both the football action and poignant moments of Davis’s life. Omar Benson Miller, who also appears in “Miracle at St. Anna,” and the veteran Charles Dutton round out the cast and add to the flava of a time when the complex racial reality for black athletes, both on and off the field, was simply more obvious and in-your-face than it is today.
This review also appeared on Tom Joyner's BlackAmericaWeb.com,/i>
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