First things first: My dad excelled at basketball.  He played in high school and briefly in city college (he had to leave after one year to go to work after his father died) and, eventually, it kept him from combat in Korea.   My dad never tires of telling that story.  When he was drafted into the army and sent to Korea, the Commanding Officer of the base called him into his office.  He had heard of my dad’s basketball skills and told him that he wouldn’t be fighting because they needed him on the Army basketball team in Asia.   He spent his two years in the army playing basketball all over Asia and never once had to fire a gun in combat or feel the fear of being behind enemy lines.  I assure you, this is something not lost on him.  His brother, Joe, joined the Marines after Pearl Harbor and fought through the entire war, engaging in every important Pacific battle there was only to be shot and killed in what would have been his last battle before it was all over, Iwo Jima.  My dad knew all too well how lucky he was.

And my dad’s friends never tired of telling us stories about him either.  One friend, a man who later taught history at my high school and who was on the team with my dad when they were in high school, told me that when the team was behind by a point going into the last few seconds the coach always had the same plan:  ”Get the ball to Ferrara.”    Later, when I asked my dad why he never pursued professional basketball, he told me it just wasn’t an option anyone thought about in 1953.  He was good but not terribly tall (6’3″) and it probably wouldn’t have led to making more money than he did as an electrician at the ship yard anyway.  But still, even today, when he proudly pulls out the pictures of his glory days, I can tell, he wishes it would’ve happened, somehow.

Sports movies – basketball, football or otherwise – don’t do a lot for me.   Something about the templates available that just doesn’t work for me.  The templates come in two basic sizes.  Either an athlete or team is going for the big personal victory (Rocky, Breaking Away) or the sport is but a backdrop to view the damaged goods within (Raging Bull, North Dallas Forty).     Scenario number two offers the most compelling stories and they are the sports movies I prefer, the ones where the sport is barely involved because it’s really about the characters and their lives.    Biopics usually fall somewhere in between and offer deeper looks into the characters as well from Pride of the Yankees and Fear Strikes Out to Raging Bull and The Fighter.    Basketball has only a handful of decent films and for most people, Hoosiers is the stand out (speaking here solely of narrative films, thus excluding for the purposes of this post the extraordinary Hoop Dreams).    I like Hoosiers, certainly, but for me, the basketball film that hits home the most, the one that brings me closer to my feelings about my dad and his journey through life, is Inside Moves.

Inside Moves is a movie I saw plenty of times back in the early eighties.  It ran on cable a lot and whenever I flipped through the channels and came across it, I’d watch it.  It was the first time I’d ever seen David Morse in a movie and I immediately liked him.   It was the first time I had seen Diana Scarwid as well and she too seemed immediately likeable.  John Savage, on the other hand, I was more than familiar with.  I had already seen The Deer Hunter, Hair and The Onion Field by the time I saw Inside Moves and was once again impressed with how deep inside the character Savage went.  To this day,  I think it’s shameful that he didn’t get Oscar nominations for The Deer Hunter and Inside Moves.

Watching it again recently, I was able to see the flaws I either didn’t see the first several times around or willfully ignored.  Former husband and wife writing team Valerie Curtin and Barry Levinson do a good job of painting the broad strokes of the story with their adapted screenplay from Oscar winner Brian Helgeland’s novel but the details get a little sketchy.    Or should I say, the details get underlined a bit too much.  Let’s start at the beginning.

Inside Moves is the story of Roary (John Savage), a man who attempts suicide by jumping off a ten story building and fails, which leaves him handicapped but mobile (in the film, all the disabled characters refer to themselves and each other as “cripples”).  After a several-months-long stay at the hospital he finds himself on his own and hanging out at Max’s, a local low-rent bar inhabited by several other “cripples,”  including a blind man (“Stinky” played by Bert Remson), a paralyzed man (“Blue Lewis” played by Bill Henderson) and a man with no hands (“Wings” played by Harold Russell, real life amputee from World War II and Oscar winner for The Best Years of Our Lives).  And there’s the bartender, Jerry (David Morse), young and tall and talented, passionate about basketball but with a bum leg that he doesn’t have the money to fix (it’s never explained what is wrong with his leg but on the enjoyable DVD commentary between director Richard Donner and novelist Helgeland, it is said, half-jokingly by Helgeland, that it was a motorcycle accident).

Roary and Jerry become good friends and Roary wants to help Jerry get that operation but Jerry has a reckless side of him that has to be dealt with first.  He loves a girl, Ann, strung out on drugs and prostituting herself for cash, and consistently falls back into the same self-destructive loops whenever she’s around.  When she’s finally gone and Jerry does get that operation via a loan from an unlikely source, he abandons his friends and focuses on his newly found semi-pro career in basketball.  If Jerry isn’t hobbling himself with self-destructive relationships, he’s hobbling himself by abandoning the good ones.  And that’s where the aforementioned underlining comes in.  Near the climax, when Jerry finally shows his face again, he says all of that, literally (“I’m the only real cripple here” etc) even though it’s been beautifully expressed by the actors and plot up to that point.  Jerry’s act of contrition makes Simon Oakland’s explanation at the end of Psycho look positively ambiguous.   Fortunately, the temptation was resisted to insert a title card before Jerry’s scene that read, “And Now, Here’s What the Characters Symbolize,” although, implicitly, the title card is there anyway.

But that underlining aside, this movie has a lot to recommend it, not the least of which is John Savage’s amazing central performance.   As Roary, John Savage takes the character through a growth process both emotionally and physically that the audience can see in the character.    After his failed suicide attempt, his body is left deformed and brutalized and Savage does an extraordinary job of, as Richard Donner notes in the commentary, “using his hands almost as a second character.”  They wave around and make fists and seem to provide, again from Donner, a “balance for him, both physically and emotionally.”

Also providing balance to the film is the terrific sense of friendship and comradery among Remson, Henderson and Russell, a kind of poor man’s Greek chorus, commenting on the action and gently nudging our protagonists in the right direction.   But mainly, for me, it’s that sense of having a dream that seems impossible come true.  Although the story of Jerry’s operation, recovery and swift ascendance through the semi-pros to the pros is unlikely, it feels right.  When I watch it, I can’t help but think of my dad and what he could have done had he been given the chance.

One last story:  When we were kids, my brother and our friends played basketball a lot in our driveway.  Our dad had, of course, installed a basketball pole, regulation height and size (this was before the days of going to Target and buying a handy, portable, water-ballasted pole that you could easily set up.  Back then, you had to bore a hole, fill it with cement, erect the pole, attach the backboard, etc.  You get the idea: It took dedication).  Every now and then, when dad would walk by to the car, we’d ask him to take a shot, usually one we felt was impossible.   Usually he’d decline, never wanting to draw attention to himself.  But sometimes he’d oblige us.  He’d grab a hold of the ball, dribble a couple of times (remember, no warm up, no regular playing) and put it up.   I can’t remember a time when it didn’t go in.   And more often than not, it was nothing but net.