The Express 78 Cast: Rob Brown, Dennis Quaid, Charles S. Dutton Director: Gary Fleder Rating: PG for thematic content, violence, language, sensuality Running time: 119 minutes Everyone who remembers Ernie Davis says he was a good man. But if you believe the makers of The Express, a bio-pic of Davis — he was the first black man to win college football’s Heisman Trophy but died of leukemia before he had a chance to play in the National Football League — he was close to perfect.
Maybe that’s a fair depiction, but we’re not reviewing Davis’ life, we’re reviewing a movie about Davis’ life. While we understand filmmakers take dramatic license in bio-pics, The Express is patently dishonest about a few things.
For instance, the movie depicts a harrowing bus ride that Davis (played by solid Rob Brown ) and his Syracuse University teammates take from their campus in upstate New York to Dallas to play in the Cotton Bowl on Jan. 1, 1960. As they roll through the South, we’re treated to kinescoped images of angry mobs of white people irritated that the times are changing. When the bus hits Arkansas, we get predictable images of Orval Faubus and scenes from the Central High fiasco.
At the time Davis and company would have been rolling through Arkansas, Little Rock schools had already re-opened as an integrated system.
So what, you might ask. Certainly Davis encountered racial prejudice during his collegiate career. In the movie (and in real life ), Davis was named the most valuable player of that Cotton Bowl, but the Syracuse team boycotted the awards ceremony because Davis and other black members weren’t allowed to attend the presentation.
Perhaps we’re supposed to take all those freighted images metaphorically — maybe Davis was only letting his imagination race over the recent horrors of the Jim Crow South. That’s plausible, and were the movie more artfully written, I might buy it.
But consider this: One of the most important sequences concerns a game Syracuse plays against overmatched West Virginia University in Morgantown in front of a feral crowd of shrieking, bottle-throwing hillbillies. Things are so bad that Syracuse coach Ben Schwartzwalder (grimacing Dennis Quaid ) doesn’t want to let Davis score, pulling his black halfback out of the game in favor of a white scrub when they get into goal-line situations.
The premise is that if this white crowd sees a black player score a touchdown they might be moved to homicide, and Schwartzwalder is worried about his team’s safety.
How sad must these thwarted folks be that they can’t abide the thought of a black man achieving even transient sporting glory ?
But there’s a problem here. I looked that game up. They didn’t play it in West Virginia in front of a frothing crowd ready to overturn the Syracuse team bus. They played that game in Syracuse. Coach Schwartzwalder was not only a West Virginia alumnus, but a WVU football hero. (Since his death in 1993, the winner of the annual Syracuse-WVU game has been awarded the Ben Schwartzwalder Trophy. )
While the movie never explicitly points this out, Davis wonders if the rules “down here” (meaning West Virginia, meaning the South ) might also be Schwartzwalder’s rules.
Schwartzwalder is the closest thing to an actual character the film produces. But Quaid is not given a lot to work with aside from level gazes and shoulder claps. He could be a recovering bigot or just a pragmatist who wants to win. There’s a kernel of a good idea here but the movie doesn’t trust us to suss out subtleties; it cranks up the contrast to the point that there’s only, uh, black and white.
The Express ’ virtues are limited — it’s corny, the football choreography (which blends in actual footage of the real Davis ) is splendid if predictably slow-motioned and highlight enriched, and none of the performances caused me to bust out laughing.
Lots of people are willing to attest to the majesty of Davis’ athletic gifts and character. But it’s hard to trust a movie when you catch it in lies. That may be the convention but that doesn’t mean it’s right.
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