Movies to warm your cockles by

by David Benjamin

“Sun don’t shine on the same dog’s ass everyday, but, mister, you ain’t seen a ray of light since you got here.” — Opal Fleener

MADISON, Wis.— America is a nation of front-runners. There’s ample evidence of this in the fact that, for example, the most-bought baseball cap every year since before I was born has been the New York Yankees’. Second-most merchandise honors go to the Dodgers, the former “Bums” from Brooklyn who followed the money to Beverly Hills. Without objection, we allow the Dallas Cowboys, owned by a narcissist tycoon, to call themselves “America’s Team.”

We just turned the White House over to a self-styled billionaire whose campaign was funded by the richest man on earth. We feel for Tom Joad but we bend the knee to Daddy Warbucks. Rich though the front-runner might be, cloistered as he’s always been, powerful though he is, he styles himself as downtrodden and unappreciated. Nobody knows, he pules, the trouble he’s seen. His press agents promote him as One of Us. In hopes that our obeisance will earn us a favor, a handout, a pat on the head, we fall agreeably into his retinue.

The rub is that we don’t like to be seen as front-runners. We’ve conjured a mythology of the true American hero as the incorruptible Quixote who faces up to the bullies, overcomes impossible odds and comes out—incongruously, incredibly—on top. This popular delusion has fostered one of our richest veins of cinematic art, which I call the heartwarming underdog movie (HUM). Recently, while exiled from American TV in Paris, I watched a batch of HUMs on DVD.

The heartwarming underdog formula is familiar but it covers a wide range of narrative motifs. Many are BOATS (based on a true story) films and many have sports themes. But they can apply to politics, childhood, litigation, education, social stratification and even—as in Hidden Figures and October Sky—technology.

Our first beloved movie underdog, and the inventor of the genre was Charlie Chaplin, who exploited his Little Tramp character in a dozen flicks, among which was The Kid and best of which were City Lights and Modern Times. The moment in City Lights when Charlie, just out of jail, discovers that the blind flower girl can see is both one of the shmaltziest and most touching scenes ever filmed. That moment taught filmmakers that the unbroken underdog, rising from the ashes of defeat and despair to personal redemption—to victory—is one of the most surefire and lucrative devices in motion pictures, especially when you throw in a little soft-focus, some subtle lighting and an upswell of violins in the soundtrack.

The resilience of the HUM in cinema is exceptional, beginning with Chaplin and Buster Keaton, continuing to such recent entries in the genre as The Boys in the Boat. Since Chaplin, the director most adept at the formula was Frank Capra, who directed a three-game winning streak of classic HUMs that started with You Can’t Take It With You in 1938 and ended with Meet John Doe in 1941. Between these two, Capra created the classic underdog heartwarmer, with Jimmy Stewart Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Capra infused politics into all these stories but dwelt more accessibly on social status, the high and mighty pitted against Everyman, the corporation at odds with the Main Street shopkeeper and the immigrant laborer. Capra assured each moviegoer that he or she is one with the underdog, bravely opposed to the bosses. Like Jeff Smith—or George Bailey refusing to go to work for Mr, Potter in Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life (1946)—we come to believe that we would stand similarly on principle. Coming out of the theater, we say, yes, dammit! We would fight for the lost cause even at the risk of everything we hold dear in our comfortable lives.

As I was indulging in my library of Heartwarming Underdog Movies, I thought about assembling a Top Ten—more accurately, My Personal Favorite Ten. But there are too many HUMs in too many genres.

Civil-rights litigation yields a series of rare, emotionally moving success stories. For example, in A Time to Kill—a story that partakes heavily of sheer fantasy—Matthew McConaughey gets Samuel L. Jackson acquitted by a white jury in Mississippi after Jackson has murdered two good-old white boys for the mere mischief of raping his ten-year-old daughter. This film, based on a John Grisham novel, is fiction. More credible are two films featuring stages in the career of Thurgood Marshall. In Marshall, Chadwick Boseman defends a black chauffeur (Sterling K. Brown) accused of raping Kate Hudson. In Separate But Equal, Sidney Poitier, as Thurgood Marshall, argues Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court—and beats Burt Lancaster!

Also on my list of courtroom HUMs are another Grisham-inspired flick, The Rainmaker, pitting Matt Damon, Sandra Bullock and Danny DeVito against a ruthless insurance company. The mother of all lawyerly HUMs, of course, is Erin Brockovich, which includes the deathless line, “They’re called boobs, Ed.”

My courtroom sleeper is Suspect, in which Cher reluctantly defends a homeless deaf/mute—Liam Neeson in one of his early roles—accused of murder. This one is more suspenseful than sentimental, but a really good underdog story.

Women, especially black ones, are born underdogs. This is why black women feature largely or solely as protagonists in The Great Debaters (featuring Jurnee Smollett), Akeelah and the Bee (Keke Palmer as Akeelah) and, my favorite, Hidden Figures (with the brilliant trio of Octavia Spencer, Taraji P. Henson and Janelle Monae). Also prominent and repeatedly watchable among HUMs about blue-collar broads are Norma Rae (Sally Field) and my wife’s favorite romance, Working Girl, in which Melanie Griffith and Joan Cusack play a sort of Thelma-and-Louise buddy act without the gruesome ending.

Sports stories, of course, dominate the HUM genre. First to mind is Rocky, which partakes of Hollywood’s long-running fascination with prize-fighting. The twist in Rocky is that the hero loses the bout but finds love, a variation that justifies its choice for an Academy Award. However, my favorite boxing HUM is Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man, a BOATS flick about James J. Braddock set during the Depression, with a brilliant turn by Craig Bierko and the maniacal Max Baer. Cinderella Man should be shown, ideally, in a double tearjerker with Seabiscuit, which partakes of Hollywood’s long-running fascination with horses.

The roster of great non-boxing, non-National Velvet sports HUMs is too long for me to include here, so I mention only what I regard as must-sees (over and over when your optimism is at low ebb). Remember the Titans, with Denzel Washington and the underappreciated Will Patton is a civil-rights football saga with a great cast and a script that eschews cheap sentiment. A League of Their Own, glorifying women in baseball, belongs among the great HUMs if only for Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hawks) shouting at Evelyn (Bitty Schram), “Are you crying? Are you crying? ARE YOU CRYING? There’s no crying! THERE’S NO CRYING IN BASEBALL!”

No one has ever made a basketball movie or sports HUM better, of course, than Gene Hackman in Hoosiers, supported with perfect pitch by Dennis Hopper and Barbara Hershey with a laconic script and subtle direction by David Anspaugh. Before I saw the movie, I knew how it would turn out—because I’d read the legend of Bobby Plump and the kids from Milan, Indiana. But I still watch Hoosiers with the same nervous energy and I still get all warm and gooey when Coach Dale tells his team, “I love you guys.”

There are more, of course. You’ve got Invincible, The Rookie, Stand By Me, Stand and Deliver, To Sir, With Love. And what about Dodgeball? Does Chariots of Fire qualify? Is Major League too silly?

You decide. I’m gonna go watch The Karate Kid … again.