Slap Shot

In the fictional Rust Belt city of Charlestown, Pennsylvania (inspired by the real city of Johnstown, where the movie was filmed), the local steel mill is about to permanently close and lay off 10,000 workers. This indirectly threatens the existence of the town's minor league ice hockey team, the Charlestown Chiefs, which is struggling with a losing season, incompetent players, and increasingly hostile spectators. Player-coach Reggie Dunlop, like most of the team, has no employment prospects outside hockey. As a money-saving measure, the team's penny-pinching manager, Joe McGrath, signs the young, immature Hanson Brothers.

After seeing Charlestown fans responding positively to violence, Dunlop unleashes the Hansons, whose play mainly consists of brutalizing the other team. To motivate the players, he leaks to a newspaper a fabricated story about a potential sale to a community in Florida, hoping that if the team becomes popular enough, it will happen. The brawls bring fans to the games, increasing attendance, and the Chiefs start winning.

Ned Braden, the team's top scorer, refuses to take part in the violence; Dunlop attempts to get him to fight by exploiting his marital troubles, encouraging but failing to get Braden's wife Lily to leave him due to his coldness. Games devolve into bench-clearing brawls, which become increasingly violent. Dunlop offers a $100 reward to any player who assaults Tim McCracken, the player-coach of the rival Syracuse team. The Chiefs rise up the ranks to become contenders for the league championship. Dunlop attempts several times to reconcile with his estranged wife Francine, who wants a divorce and to take a job on Long Island. After Lily moves in with Dunlop to get away from Braden, Dunlop takes her to meet Francine, and the women commiserate over their difficulties in being married to hockey players.

Eventually, Dunlop meets the reclusive team owner, Anita McCambridge, and learns that his efforts to increase the team's popularity and value through violence have been for naught, as McCambridge would make more money if she folded the team as a tax write-off. Dunlop decides to abandon the strategy of violence for the championship game, believing it to be his last, and the rest of the team agrees. Their opponents from Syracuse have stocked their team with violent "goons.” After the Chiefs are crushed during the first period while playing a non-violent style and getting booed by their fans, McGrath tells them that National Hockey League scouts, whom he invited, are watching the game.

Dunlop and the rest of the team, except Braden, switch back to brawling, much to the delight of the fans. When Braden sees Lily cheering for the Chiefs, he enters the rink and performs a striptease, adding to the audience's enjoyment and breaking up the fight. When McCracken protests this "obscene" demonstration and sucker-punches the referee for dismissing him, Syracuse is disqualified, granting the Chiefs the championship. With the Chiefs folded, Dunlop accepts the offer to be the player-coach to a Minnesota team, intending to bring his teammates with him. In a parade held for the Chiefs, Dunlop fails to convince Francine to stay with him and watches her drive away.

The original screenplay by Nancy Dowd is based in part on her brother Ned Dowd's experiences playing minor-league hockey in the U.S. in the 1970s. At that time, violence, especially in the low minors, was a selling point of the game.^[12] Dowd would call his sister “from these various towns—Utica, Syracuse, New Haven—and tell me how he was being beaten-up and having his teeth knocked out.” That, she told The New York Times, “sort of fascinated me.”^[13]

Dowd was living in Los Angeles when she got a call from Ned, a member of the Johnstown Jets hockey team. He gave her the bad news that the team was up for sale.^[14] Dowd spent a month with his team doing research for a movie. She worked her own notes and from tape recordings that her brother had made for her in the locker room and on the team bus. She was paid $50,000 for the screenplay, which took four months to complete, and was present during the entire filming.^[13]

The movie was filmed in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, and in central New York State (Clinton Arena and Clinton, Oneida County; Utica Memorial Auditorium, Utica; Colgate University, Hamilton, Madison County and the Onondaga County War Memorial Auditorium, Syracuse).

Nancy Dowd used Ned and a number of his Johnstown Jets teammates in Slap Shot, with Ned playing Syracuse goon Ogie Ogilthorpe. He later used the role to launch a career as a Hollywood character actor, an assistant director, and eventually a line producer. The characters of the Hanson Brothers are based on three actual brothers: Jeff, Steve, and Jack Carlson, who played with Ned Dowd on the Jets. The character of Dave 'Killer' Carlson is based on then-Jets player Dave "Killer" Hanson. Steve and Jeff Carlson played their Hanson brother counterparts in the film. Jack Carlson originally was written to appear in the film as the third brother Jack, with Dave Hanson playing his film counterpart Dave 'Killer' Carlson. However, by the time filming began, Jack Carlson had been called up by the Edmonton Oilers, then of the WHA, to play in the WHA playoffs, so Dave Hanson moved into the role of Jack Hanson, and Jerry Houser was hired for the role of 'Killer' Carlson.

Paul Newman, claiming that he swore very little in real life before the making of Slap Shot, said to Time in 1984:

There's a hangover from characters sometimes. There are things that stick. Since Slap Shot, my language is right out of the locker room!

Newman stated that the most fun he ever had making a movie was on Slap Shot, as he had played the sport while young and was fascinated by the players around him. During the last decades of his life, he repeatedly called Reg Dunlop one of his favorite roles.^[15] Al Pacino wanted to play the role of Reggie Dunlop (#7) but director George Roy Hill chose Paul Newman instead.^[16]

Nancy Dowd rejected suggestions that the film was sexist and said that she considered herself to be a feminist.^[13]

Slap Shot was a moderate hit upon release, grossing $28,000,000 during its theater run, which placed it at #21 among movies released in 1977 and well below the receipts of Paul Newman's three previous wide-release films: The Towering Inferno, The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which all grossed over $100 million.^[23]

Reviews were mixed and ranged from Rex Reed writing in The Daily News that it was “violent, bloody and thoroughly revolting,” to Newsweek's assertion that the film was “tough, smart, cynical and sentimental—the key ingredients in our new pop populism.”^[13]

Variety wrote that "director George Roy Hill is ambivalent on the subject of violence in professional ice hockey. Half the time Hill invites the audience to get off on the mayhem, the other half of the time he decries it. You can't really have it both ways and this compromise badly mars the handsomely made Universal release, produced by Robert Wunsch and Stephen Friedman."^[24] Vincent Canby of The New York Times described the performances as "impeccable" and thought the film had "a kind of vitality to it” but found it "unfunny" and noted an "ambiguous" point of view with regard to violence. ^[25]

Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times was negative, writing that since the "characters possess so little dimension and since we have so little opportunity to get to know and therefore care about them, their incessantly brutalizing behavior and talk can only seem exploitative in effect. What's more, in playing for laughs, Slap Shot gives the nasty impression of seeming to patronize both the players and their fans."^[26] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote "Slap Shot comes at you like a boisterous drunk. At first glance it appears harmlessly funny in an extravagantly foul-mouthed sort of way. However, there's a mean streak beneath the cartoon surface that makes one feel uneasy about humoring this particular drunk for too long."^[27] Tom Milne of The Monthly Film Bulletin described it as "a film which, while deploring the incidence of violence in sport, does everything it possibly can to make the audience wallow in that violence."^[28]

Gene Siskel gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four in his original print review, writing that "what Slap Shot does to its ultimate failure is exaggerate every one of its fine facets. It's as if those locker room tape recordings had been edited to remove the silences and banalities to include only the most outrageous sex-and-violence. And regrettably, 'Slap Shot' moralizes about violence in its tacked-on, whipsaw ending. This, after filling the screen with nonstop mayhem."^[29] Years later he said, "My initial review was mixed and then I saw it two weeks later, thankfully, and I knew it was a terrific film."^[30] He included it among the runners-up on his year-end list of the 10 best films of 1977, explaining that "the more I saw it, the more I liked it."^[31]

The Wall Street Journal's Joy Gould Boyum seemed at once entertained and repulsed by a movie so "foul-mouthed and unabashedly vulgar" on one hand and so "vigorous and funny" on the other.^[14] Michael Ontkean's strip tease displeased Time's critic Richard Schickel, who regretted that "in the dénouement [Ontkean] is forced to go for a broader, cheaper kind of comic response."^[14] Despite the mixed reviews, the film won the Hochi Film Award for Best International Film.

Pauline Kael in The New Yorker was mixed, writing that "I don't know that I've ever seen a picture so completely geared to giving the public 'what it wants' with such an antagonistic feeling behind it. Hill gets you laughing, all right but he's so grimly determined to ram entertainment down your throat that you feel like a Strasbourg goose." However, she praised Newman for giving "the performance of his life—to date."^[32]

In the years since its initial release, Slap Shot has come to be regarded as a cult classic.^[34][35][36]

Critical reevaluation of the film continues to be positive. In 1998, Maxim named Slap Shot the "Best Guy Movie of All Time" above acknowledged classics such as The Godfather, Raging Bull,^[37] and Newman's own Cool Hand Luke. Entertainment Weekly ranked the film #30 on its list of "The Top 50 Cult Films".^[38] In the November 2007 issue of GQ, Dan Jenkins proclaimed Slap Shot "the best sports film of the past 50 years."^[39]

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a rating of 85%, based on 39 reviews, with an average rating of 7.10/10 and the critical consensus stating "Raunchy, violent, and very funny, Slap Shot is ultimately set apart by a wonderful comic performance by Paul Newman."^[40]

The film is standard viewing for young ice hockey players on road trips, including Christian Hanson, son of David Hanson, who saw the film for the first time when he was 11 years old during a hockey road trip with his team.^[41] After the Humboldt Broncos bus crash in 2018, a broken Slap Shot DVD was found at the crash site.^[42][43] Steve Carlson met with some of the survivors.^[44][45]

Concurrent with the release of the film, Berkeley Books released a novelization of the screenplay, written by Richard Woodley.^[46]

The film was followed by two direct-to video sequels: Slap Shot 2: Breaking the Ice (2002) and Slap Shot 3: The Junior League (2008). Paul Newman and the rest of the original cast did not participate in either sequel, with the exception of the Hanson Brothers, who had major roles in both.^[47]

• List of films about ice hockey