Hut one, hut two, 10 football movies to watch

“The Freshman” (1925)
This 1925 silent classic stars Harold Lloyd as nerdy Harold “Speedy” Lamb, who wants nothing more than to fit in at college and be a big man on campus. Through the wacky devices of the Hollywood dream factory, Lloyd eventually climbs the ladder from human tackling dummy to water boy to benchwarmer to hero at Tate College, described as “a football stadium with a college attached.” This was one of the very first films to bring the game of football to the masses in a fictional — and comedic — context. Lloyd was one of the geniuses of the silent era along with Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, and this is considered the film with which he is most identified.

“Jerry Maguire” (1996)
Tom Cruise was on the marquee, but the real star was writer-director Cameron Crowe. His original screenplay about a sports agent having a crisis of conscience who finds himself down to his last client — a hilariously insecure Cuba Gooding, Jr. as Rod Tidwell — was a lot of fun as well as a stinging commentary on our times. Cruise has rarely been better, Renee Zellweger was splendid in support, and the football sequences were acceptable. But it was the ability of Crowe to capture the world of high-stakes professional football with all its moral ambiguity that raised this above a standard romantic comedy. 

“Knute Rockne All American” (1940)
Corny as all get-out, but it remains as a mainstay for all sports movies. Starring Pat O’Brien as the legendary Notre Dame football coach, it tells the whole story of the man who put the Fighting Irish program on the map. One of the co-stars is Ronald Reagan as George “The Gipper” Gipp, who expires in full tearjerker mode. He was the source of one of the oldest quotes in sports as well as sports movies — “Win just one for the Gipper.” Reagan slipped from public view after this and faded into obscurity, but his character’s football spirit lives on in and around Notre Dame Nation as well as in the hearts of all football fans.

“Semi-Tough” (1977)
In the same area code genre-wise as “North Dallas Forty” only much lighter, “Semi-Tough” starred Burt Reynolds as Billy Clyde Puckett and Kris Kristofferson as Marvin “Shake” Tiller in a gleeful glimpse at the eccentricities of the sport. Billy Clyde and Shake both fall hard for the same woman — Barbara Jane Bookman, daughter of the team’s coach, played with elegant wit by Jill Clayburgh. Made in 1977 from a novel by sportswriter Dan Jenkins, it was more a takeoff on the lifestyle of the modern American professional football player and the self-help movement, but the stuff on the field is enjoyable, too.

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