I’m still jet-lagged from a week-long family vacation in Maui (yeah, I know: cue the violins). My highlight there was a twilight scuba-diving trip to an underwater boat wreck that was accompanied by the beautiful and eerie sound of whales singing in the background (it’s mating season, so whales could be seen everywhere on the ocean’s horizon as they breached and played along the surface). The Carthaginian II is a 97-foot-long double-masted brig that once sat at the Lahaina harbor as part of the whaling museum and was used as a replacement of an 1840’s brig that sunk in 1972 and that was used in the film Hawaii (directed by George Roy Hill, based on a novel by James Michener, script co-written by Dalton Trumbo and Daniel Taradash, 1966). As maintenance costs climbed on the Carthaginian II, it was sunk in 2005 to a depth underwater of about 80-feet as a tourist attraction for Atlantis Submarines. It also does double-duty as an artificial reef and is now home to various forms of aquatic life. Thanks to the wonders of youtube, you, too, can get vicarious visuals thanks to somebody else’s downloaded contribution (minus the whale song, sorry – but that’s what you get when you crib things off the internet).

As I was thinking about George Roy Hill my memories of watching his films all came back to me. The first film of his that I saw was The Great Waldo Pepper (1975) during its theatrical run at the Boulder Theater (back when it was a movie-house – now it’s mainly a live concert-venue). Then came a retread, with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) at the drive-in cinema – and I saw this one in a sleeping bag atop a friend’s station wagon where it was double-billed with Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971).

Of course, there was no avoiding The Sting (1973), which preceded it theatrically, but I saw that one a bit later (and several times over) during repertory runs at the Chautauqua Film Series (the Chautauqua auditorium has been around for over a hundred years and still hosts a well-attended silent film series in the summer). Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) was one I also caught on the repertory circuit, but this time on the C.U. Boulder campus, where 16mm screenings of the film were popular enough to merit repeat performances through the 1980’s and early 1990’s. Speaking of the eighties, I did catch both The World According to Garp (1982) and Funny Farm (1988) theatrically, but I’ll admit to losing some of my romance with Mr. Hill by this time.

So here’s the weird thing: until just a few months ago I somehow missed ever seeing Slap Shot (1977). And the only reason I saw it at all was because when I brought out director Mark Brecke to screen his documentary on Darfur at my film series, They Turned Our Desert Into Fire (2007). When we talked about movies the one thing he couldn’t recommend highly enough was… Slap Shot. Here is a photographer who has made fake press passes to get into war zones and has seen some pretty horrible stuff and is working on several films and a book project and much more – a list of experiences that you’d think would turn him into an overbearing goody-two-shoes quick to decry all representations of violence in cinema – but, NO. Quite the opposite. In fact, before his current adventures, Brecke taught a film course in ‘70’s exploitation cinema, and he clearly knows his stuff. He can separate his The Last House on the Left (1972) from his The Last House on Dead End Street (1977).

Which brings us back to Slap Shot, starring Paul Newman. Old Blue Eyes. National heart-throb and hero. And, here, in Slap Shot, playing an amoral, alcoholic, womanizing, foul-mouthed, hockey-coach who will do anything to win. Mark couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it yet because the things coming out of Paul Newman’s mouth somehow amounted to a form of revolution for every John, Dick, and Harry that wasn’t usually given an A-List cast to represent them. It also took me a while to place Michael Ontkean, only later realizing I knew him as Sheriff Harry S. Truman from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks TV series.

Watching Slap Shot now it’s easy to realize how much things have changed since the ‘70’s. Nowadays I guess you could point to something like Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa (2003) as an example of a mainstream film that dares to rub itself against all conventions with a misanthropic attitude that gleefully rolls around in all that is politically-incorrect with no care in the world as it verges on the blasphemous. But with Bad Santa there’s a sense of a marketing shtick that targets a key demographic. Back in the 1970’s, using an economically depressed setting as your background along with a cast of has-been characters living out unglamorous lives in a dog-eat-dog world full of foul-language where no cows were sacred, well… that wasn’t a marketing shtick, it was simply mirroring a time when a movie could still be made, not for a niche market, but for a mainstream market, one that dealt with a working man who would do anything, and everything, to survive.