MVN: Most Valuable Network

The late Charlton Heston did not win any Oscars for his role as Saints QB Ron "Cat" Catlin in 1969's Number One, but 40 years later the "B" movie remains a novelty.

Catlin is an over the hill QB coming off a recent championship and the slow moving plot revolves around his decision to keep playing or retire, which descends it into a yarn about  star athlete ego in excess. There is a crumbling marriage, an affair and the upcoming season, and throughout the course of the movie, the viewer waits for redemptive qualities in Catlin but ultimately is provided with very little. His wife and fleeting mistress, played by Jessica Walter and Diana Muldaur, are spunky and sexy, are the better halves of the couplings and the plot should have included much more of them.

A young Bruce Dern stole the show, playing Heston's former wide receiver who has moved on with his life with no regrets and is better adjusted for it, having walked away from the game before it walks away from him. He is definitive Sixties hip. Locker room appearances from various old former Saints like big Doug Atkins and Dave Whitsell are endearing, as is a club scene with the venerable Al Hirt, as himself.  N'Awlins, baby.           

Despite the screenplay's flaws, there are many alluring scenes for Saints - and New Orleans - fans. Game and crowd footage from grand old Tulane Stadium is excellent, providing a pleasant trip down memory lane for older ones and a glimpse of what it was like for younger ones who have only experienced the Saints in the comparatively sterile Superdome.

A good scene takes place in Audubon Park, when the rookie back-up who wants Heston's job, played by Kelly Williams, effectively tells him, "Look man, you were one of the greats, like Tittle.....Unitas, but it's over. Sorry man - the king is dead". The casting director was somewhat prescient in making that role for a black quarterback, which  hardly existed in 1969; it may have been to stir a little "controversy" and sell more tickets.

There are some cool scenes of Heston tooling around in a big, steely American car in the Quarter at night, and on lower St. Charles. There are also scenes in the original Saints ticket headquarters on Lee Circle with then Saints GM Vic Schwenk playing himself, as well as practice clips in the team's first facility out on David Drive and Airline Highway that bristle with the scent of training camp and a season anew, making the movie timely viewing for this summer.           

Four decades later, the original Saints uniforms with gold pants and white or black jerseys, with jazzy striping and numbering, are still far superior to those homogenized versions of today. Uniforms change subtly over time but when Jim Mora became head coach in the 1980's, he had them patterned after those of the Steelers to shake a "loser's image". That malarkey has sufficiently expired and a grass roots movement to bring them back should begin.

The music is mostly good, period background stuff, handled by Beverly Hills composer Dominic Frontiere, which has a twist onto itself. Mr. Frontiere eventually headed Paramount's music division in the 1970's, but made headlines for both being the ex-husband of Rams owner Georgia Frontiere (she had several) and serving prison time for a Super Bowl ticket scalping scandal in 1980, which reportedly netted him with about a half million IRS un-reported dollars from tickets provided by his ex.  

Georgia Frontiere (who died 18 months ago from breast cancer) was a former sometime night club singer and chorus line performer, a buxom, blonde, fast-laner. She was thrust into the pro football world in April 1979 when her then husband, Carroll Rosenbloom, the owner of the Los Angeles Rams, drowned in the ocean while swimming near his Florida home. At the time, some thought the drowning was suspicious since Rosenbloom was known to be an adroit swimmer and the surf that day was not up.

Rosenbloom had groomed his son from a previous marriage, Steve, as his successor, but he left 70 percent of the Rams' ownership to his wife, evidently to minimize estate taxes. She quickly asserted control as the first and only female owner in pro football, firing her stepson and replacing him as the team's general manager, and subsequently moved the Rams from Los Angeles to St. Louis in a lucrative new stadium deal (come to think of it, this is all good screenplay material itself........).

It's always been difficult to make a high quality film about pro football. Many of them have not been been made with league consent for trademark use of teams and logos (Number One is an exception - the game footage uses actual teams and players, though Heston looks every bit the 46 that he was when the film as made, breaking a rib in the process), which stretches the believability factor. Also, how many twists can there be on the somewhat tired sports cliché of overcoming adversity to win? And how much of that adversity is real - or Hollywood contrived?

Brian's Song (1971) was a sentimental fact based favorite about Brian Piccolo and Gale Sayers' race blind, cancer terminal friendship while they were with the Bears. I still need to see The Longest Yard (1974) with Burt Reynolds as a former pro in prison in its entirety. Former Cowboy Peter Gent's novel, North Dallas Forty (1979) was an acclaimed movie with Animal House theatrics, starring Nick Nolte and country singer Mac Davis. Incidentally, actor G.D. Spradlin played head coach in both that film (as Tom Landry) and Number One (as then Saints head coach Tom Fears).

Tom Cruise as player agent Jerry Maguire (1996) told lots more about the real business of pro ball than did Oliver Stone's so called expose, Any Given Sunday (1999). Besides trying to get used to seeing Al Pacino as a football coach, the movie was a  typical media  over-hyped, melodramatic bust (save a good player on painkillers performance by  Lawrence Taylor), leaving some fans scratching their heads why they were even fans of the damn game.

Perhaps the best of the lot is 2006's under-rated Invincible, starring Mark Wahlberg in a true story about former Eagle receiver Vince Papale's ascendance from bartender to pro football player after a walk-on tryout at the beginning of the Dick Vermeil era in Philadelphia in the 1970's. Greg Kinnear ably plays Coach Vermeil in all polyester, eager beaver detail. There are archives from NFL Films and the rest of the playing footage is plenty real, and good.         

Number One spawns no sharp reactions either way other than being the greatest bad movie ever made for Saints aficionados. It was made during a simpler, stiffer, yet in some ways arguably better, era. The original United Artists poster for the flick includes "When you are Number One, you have no where to go but down!"  In the end, how far Cat Catlin goes down is less categorical and more subject to viewer's interpretation and preference, mildly controversial in that regard. The answer has hardly kept movie viewers sleepless all this time yet Number One remains on the recommended list.    

Number One is not easy to find. A friend graciously found and sent me a copy.  It's doubtful your local video store will have the DVD. Cursory Netflix and Amazon searches did not yield it. In January a message board on media hub IMDB.com said Eddie Brandt's Video (818-506-4242) might have it for $16 or so, and am told that Steve Perry at sportsdiscs08@gmail.com might have it. Seems local TV stations like WWL and WDSU TV could be convinced to show it in place of tedious syndicate reruns, if emailed enough.       

   

  

 

   

  

 

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