Fast Break

I've seen nearly 1,200 movies, and this is my favorite. Not the BEST I've ever seen, but my favorite. Former Brooklyn junior high basketball coach-turned-delicatessen manager desperately wants to coach again. A small liberal-arts college in the Nevada desert wants him to build their team from nothing, for a salary of $60 for every game won. With the help of his playground-pickup-game teammate (New York Knick star Bernard King), he scours the streets for five great but undiscovered players. Then they go to Nevada, pick up a freshman quarterback in a school without football, and become an unbeaten sensation. Now the trick is to get nationally-ranked Nevada State (fictitious school filling in for UNLV) to play them in an exhibition game.

That's it; that's the plot. It sounds silly and contrived, like a T.V. sitcom meets an Horatio Alger story. So how come I loved it so much? How come in a list of favorites that includes The Godfather, All the President's Men, Sunset Boulevard and Rocky, this far lesser story of underdogs overcoming adversity is my greatest pleasure? Four things, I think: the characters are real, not cardboard cutouts, and they all have very real reasons for leaving New York for Nevada; Kaplan brings with him his "Welcome Back Kotter" sensibility for helping young people that everyone else has written off to achieve more than they ever thought possible; the film contains at least three hysterical AND original scenes, one of which would dubbed an all-time classic if 5 million more people had actually seen this film; and I'm not a sports fan, but the basketball games in this movie, especially the grand finale, are genuinely exciting. It's not ever going to make Halliwell's tome as a genre-defining classic. It may not even make your Saturday night video list. But it should.

Because it's real, it's fun, it's silly, and unlike more than half of what Hollywood feeds us today, it has a plot that keeps moving from the beginning to the end. And that's saying a lot.

It uses the old plot about a down and out coach whipping into shape a sports team filled with losers. And of course, there's the big game at the end, with a nail biting climax. Yet it works.

Why does this movie work? Because of many reasons. It's obvious the filmmakers took care to try to remove as many cliches as possible, and make it less predictable. More focus is on the characters instead of the old plot. The characters are more believable, and evolve through the course of the movie - they're likable. The "big game" is exciting, even though we know what will happen. Plus, there are a lot of big laughs in this movie.

Not great, not bad, this film from the disco era has not aged well but still contains some amusing moments. (Is it me, or does film and TV from the late 70s seems so much older and dated than from any other time period in the post-WWII era?)

But the thought that kept entering my head as I watched Gabe Kaplan smirk and wink-wink through his performance was that 10 years later, Billy Crystal could have done this movie is his sleep... and done it better.

6 out of 10 stars: perfect during a snooze on a lazy rainy afternoon...

This is the perfect role for Gabe Kaplan and he makes the most of it as a wise-guy citified coach coming to an Oral-Roberts-like white-bread evangelical university to bring a winning basketball coach. Every body has a lot of fun all around and things move rather quickly. Bernard King has astonishingly good coming timing and acts well too.

Gabe Kaplan, of WELCOME BACK, KOTTER fame, stars as a NY restaurant manager who loves basketball. He plays street ball with the ghetto kids, studies sports journals and high school yearbooks, and dreams of coaching. When a remote Nevada university offers him a coaching position for Room & Board, he jumps at the chance, leaving his frustrated wife behind, but taking 4 talented black kids with him to outfit the team. (One of these is a real NBA player.. check it out).

Unless you have a magic vhs copy that has lasted for decades (if you do, get it transferred to DVD now!), you will be hard-pressed to find this great movie. However, GOOD NEWS! There are a couple of versions on YouTube for which I'd gladly pay $ 5.00 for a viewing, but, as of today, they are free of charge. Enjoy!