The football equivalent of "The Bad News Bears," "Little Giants" tells a fun family tale of sibling rivalry. Ed O'Neill is building a pee wee powerhouse, an younger brother Rick Moranis collects all the leftovers to create his own underdog squad called The Little Giants. Such an unassuming flick also tackled gender issues, as linebacker Becky "Ice Box" O'Shea holds her own against the boys, from golden arm quarterback Junior Floyd to meathead tailback Spike Hammersmith. Look for cameos by John Madden, Emmitt Smith and Bruce Smith, as well as Harry Shearer as the play-by-play announcer.
Warren Beatty made his directorial debut, co-directing with Buck Henry in "Heaven Can Wait." The title was borrowed from Ernst Lubitsch's 1943 comedy fantasy, while the plot was a remake of "Here Comes Mr. Jordan" (1941). Instead of a boxer, Beatty plays a quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams who's accidentally brought to the afterlife by an over-eager angel, and then comes back to life in the body of a millionaire.
Before leading the "Fast & Furious" franchise, Paul Walker played high school quarterback Lance Harbor, who led Billy Bob and the rest of Jon Voight's squad to "play like gods." The film fittingly arrived the same year as "American Pie" (1999), offering up a memorable whipped cream bikini. As a young girl says, "West Canaan, sex and football. That's all there is."
Few stars were box office draws in the '70s like Burt Reynolds, and between "Deliverance" (1972) and "Smokey and the Bandit" (1977) came his classic turn as Paul Crewe in "The Longest Yard." Director Robert Aldrich went from "The Dirty Dozen" down to 11 players, a collection of prison inmates known as The Mean Machine, who take on the guards in a game for sheer pride. Reynolds returned for the 2005 remake, starring Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, Michael Irvin, Bill Goldberg and Nelly.
Twenty-two years after "Brian's Song" (1971), James Caan returned to the football screen as head coach of a fictional Division I university in "The Program," written and directed by David S. Ward ("Major League"). The film features a string of memorable characters: smooth quarterback Joe Kane (Craig Sheffer), speedy running back Darnell Jefferson (Omar Epps), his book-smart girlfriend Autumn Haley (Halle Berry), snot-bubble linebacker Alvin Mack (Duane Davis) and steroid meathead Steve Lattimer (Andrew Bryniarski), who memorably exclaims, "Starting defense! Place at the table!" Consider it the "Top Gun" of football movies. It's shunned by the critics but has plenty of mainstream appeal.
Oliver Stone wrote gangster words for Al Pacino in "Scarface" (1983), but he gave him the best football movie monologue in "Any Given Sunday" - turning a sports cliche ("football's a game of inches") into a goosebump-inducing locker-room speech. Pacino plays the aging coach of the fictional Miami Sharks, run by owner Cameron Diaz, appearing a year after she dated Brett Favre in "There's Something About Mary" (1998). The star-studded cast includes acting and football royalty: Jamie Foxx, Dennis Quaid, James Woods, LL Cool J, Lawrence Taylor, Jim Brown, Terrell Owens, Matthew Modine, Aaron Eckhart and Charlton Heston.
In "Wedding Crashers" (2005), Bradley Cooper's backyard football teammate proclaimed, "Crab cakes and football, that's what Maryland does!" Seven years later, Cooper proved he could act, playing a bipolar Philadelphia Eagles fan who has a tendency of spiking the ball on life's one-yard-line. Jennifer Lawrence won an Oscar as his pill-popping soulmate, while Cooper, Robert DeNiro and Jackie Weaver all earned Oscar nominations, as did writer/director David O. Russell, who also directed Christian Bale to an Oscar in "The Fighter" (2010). Excelsior.
Football's version of "The Pride of the Yankees," "Knute Rockne, All American" similarly tells a tale of an American sports legend who died too early. In this case, it's legendary Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne (Pat O'Brien), who pioneered the forward pass and the pre-snap shift. While the off-field story suffers from the aw-shucks idealism of many of the era's biopics, the on-field action is groundbreaking, mixing live action with archival footage. The film is most famous for Ronald Reagan's dying speech as George Gipp, later used by Reagan as a presidential slogan and voted the AFI's No. 89 Movie Quote: "Some time when the team is up against it and the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to go out there with all they've got and win just one for The Gipper."
Sandra Bullock earned an Oscar as the white adoptive mother of black teenager Michael Oher, who comes to live in her family's middle-class suburban home. "Big Mike" was born to play football; all it takes is some motherly coaching by Bullock, who asks him to pretend he's protecting their family each time he protects the quarterback. Tim McGraw also turns in a fine performance, playing the opposite of his alcoholic father in "Friday Night Lights." The film proves that social change does not always come from picket signs, but also by average people who speak up against the prejudicial "ladies who lunch." It also speaks to local sports fans, opening with Lawrence Taylor's career ending "blind side" of Redskins quarterback Joe Theisman and closing with the knowledge that Oher still plays for the Baltimore Ravens.
A year before he was cast as Sonny Corleone in "The Godfather" (1972), James Caan gave his breakthrough performance in "Brian's Song," the football version of "Love Story" and "Terms of Endearment." The biopic follows the real-life relationship of legendary running back Gale Sayers (Billy Dee Williams) and his Chicago Bears teammate Brian Piccolo (Caan), who died of cancer a year before the film's release. The made-for-TV flick suffers from an admitted syrupy flavor, but it remains a bona-fide tearjerker. It also became the blueprint for all racially-themed sports buddy pairs, from Gerry Bertier and Julius Campbell in "Remember the Titans" (2000) to Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese in "42" (2013). The film was remade in 2001 starring Sean Maher and Mekhi Phifer.
Based on the best-selling novel by H.G. Bissinger, "Friday Night Lights" follows the true story of Permian High School's 1988 run at the state championship in Odessa, Texas, where football is king and autumn bleachers serve as sanctuary pews. The film was so powerful that it inspired an Emmy-winning TV series by the same name. Anyone who's ever put on the pads will bawl the minute Billy Bob Thornton gives his final halftime speech, articulating those fleeting moments of youth athletic glory: "Most of you have been playing this game for 10 years. You got two more quarters, and after that, most of you will never play this game again as long as you live. ... I want you to take a moment and I want you to look each other in the eyes. I want you to put each other in your hearts forever, because forever's about to happen here in just a few minutes."
Baseball has "Bull Durham" (1988). Hockey has "Slap Shot" (1977). And football has "North Dallas Forty," a simultaneously hilarious and brutally realistic tale loosely based on the 1970s Dallas Cowboys. Nick Nolte plays Philip Elliott, a broken down wide receiver who makes the most of each moment he's called off the bench. The laughs include locker-room bathtub jokes and pool parties where meatheads ask women if they've ever tried a "quarterback sandwich." More importantly, "North Dallas Forty" was perhaps the first film to expose the dirty, pill-popping world of professional sports, where painkillers are your playbook and cortisone shots are your teammates. The film's journey is not a glamorous portrayal, but rather a character study of a man who learns he doesn't need the sport to be happy, refusing to catch a pass in the final freeze-frame. It holds up much better than its 1970s contemporary, "The Longest Yard" (1974). Classic.
Just a year before his Oscar win for "Training Day" (2001), Denzel Washington created the best football coach ever put on film in Herman Boone, head of the first racially integrated football team at Virginia's T.C. Williams High School. The white and black players bond over cheers of "left side, strong side" and Motown jams on team bus rides. The film launched a number of careers, from Ryan Gosling ("Drive") to Wood Harris ("The Wire") to Hayden Panettiere ("Nashville"). While the on-field action is occasionally unrealistic and the tone slightly Disney-fied, there's no denying the film's emotional power as Coach Boone takes the Titans on a jog through Gettysburg: "50,000 men died right here on this field, fighting the same fight that we are still fighting among ourselves today. ... If we don't come together right now on this hallowed ground, we too will be destroyed."
The seeds of "Jerry Maguire" were planted back in the 1980s, when Tom Cruise played a high school quarterback in "All the Right Moves" (1983) and writer/director Cameron Crowe penned a linebacker rampage in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). When the two collided for "Jerry Maguire," it was a real-life case of "help me, help you." The result was one of the all-time great date movies with everything from front office free agents ("Show me the money!") to tissue-worthy romantic comedy ("You had me at hello"). "Jerry Maguire" earned an Oscar win for Cuba Gooding Jr., a critics'-choice award for Renee Zellweger and a spot as the only football flick to make the AFI's Top 10 Sports Movies. Said the best list to the sports movie: "You complete me."
After creating the best basketball movie of all time in "Hoosiers" (1986), writer Angelo Pizzo and director David Anspaugh reunited for history's finest football flick. "Rudy" tells the real-life underdog tale of Dan "Rudy" Ruettiger (Sean Astin), a 5-foot-nothin' whose sole life dream is to play Notre Dame football. Through sheer determination, he overcomes physical and academic limitations to finally get on the field - and be carried off it. With an uplifting score by Jerry Goldsmith and a supporting cast that includes Jon Favreau, Ned Beatty and Vince Vaughn, "Rudy" was ranked the AFI's No. 54 Most Inspirational Movie of All Time. In the land of sports flicks, "No one, and I mean no one, comes into our house and pushes ('Rudy') around." The secret to life, ladies and gents, is right there in Rudy's unstoppable drive.
