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.