For Super Bowl Sunday

 I have some buddies who will always watch football-inclusive movies, movies with lots of gridiron action, before the big Super Bowl festivities begin. These are buddies who, later in the year, will complain that the Oscars telecast is too long. Well, one year, I flew from New York to Minneapolis to visit a relative. It was Super Bowl Sunday. There was a TV monitor in the boarding area and the Super Bowl game was underway. When I arrived at my relative's apartment in Minneapolis, the game was still on. The Oscars are too long? Oh, please.

One of my favorite things to see every Super Bowl Sunday is Debbie Reynolds as a dancing football in the breezy 1953 MGM musical, I LOVE MELVIN.

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER had a Saturday article about films that are popular viewing for Super Bowl weekend. The 1930s Marx Brothers madcap comedy, HORSEFEATHERS, was mentioned along with Adam Sandler's WATERBOY and JERRY MAGUIRE starring Tom Cruise. I'd like to recommend a classic film that never gets mentioned. It's a comedy based on a Broadway play. The action takes place during a Homecoming weekend at a Midwestern university. A big, brawny alumnus, who was once a football star at the university, returns for Homecoming. He visits the wife of a bookworm professor having trouble with university officials about a piece of writing he wants to read to his students. The brawny, ex-football star had a major crush in college on the professor's then-coed wife.

This comedy stars Henry Fonda, Olivia de Havilland, Jack Carson, Joan Leslie, Eugene Pallette and Oscar-winner Hattie McDaniel. Underneath the football influence in this comedy, is a story about American freedom of thought and speech versus fascism. This old movie, in a way, could feel relevant in these post-White House insurrection times. The comedy, from Warner Bros., is 1942's THE MALE ANIMAL. Here's a clip.

The only thing that sets my teeth on edge about this movie is how Black groundbreaking actress Hattie McDaniel is presented. She's a maid and pretty much a bit player saddled with having to speak in that stereotypical way White Hollywood studio execs seemed to love. Hattie McDaniel and Olivia de Havilland had strong, important scenes together in 1939's GONE WITH THE WIND. In 1940, Hattie was the first Black person nominated for an Oscar and the first to win. In THE MALE ANIMAL, she's the only one amongst those fellow cast member stars I mentioned who had won an Oscar. You'd never know it from the quality and size of her role in THE MALE ANIMAL.

A drama that's full of football and muy, muy macho is Oliver Stone's is 1999's ANY GIVEN SUNDAY starring Al Pacino as a struggling NFL coach and Jamie Foxx in an excellent performance as a showboat NFL star. As in several Stone films, it poses as extremely heterosexual fare but is has homoerotic visuals in some scenes. In the overlong ANY GIVEN SUNDAY, notice the extensive full frontal male nudity in locker room scenes.

I suggest some guys stream this film and watch it again. I saw it in wide release so I could review it on TV. The film ended, credits started to roll and lots of folks in my particular cineplex audience left. The credits seemed to go on forever. But, near the end of the closing credits, there was a final scene from the movie and it had a major revelation. 

The folks who left when the credits began, didn't know how ANY GIVEN SUNDAY really ended. Here's a preview of it.

Have a great Super Bowl Sunday weekend.