Semiquincentennial Project #2: The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh

 

 

 

The Semiquincentennial  Movie Project is an ongoing celebration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. During the course of this project your humble blogger is choosing a movie a week to represent each of the 50 states in the Union, as well as a movie scheduled for 4th of July weekend that will represent the nation's capitol, Washington D.C. The order of the weekly entries will coincide with the order of each state's entry into the fold (although, not necessarily coinciding with the date of their entry into said fold).

 

 

 Week #2: Pennsylvania :

 

 

The state of Pennsylvania was the second of the original colonies to be established as a state in the United States. It became a state on December 12, 1787.

Details about Pennsylvania:

State bird: Ruffled grouse

State flower: Mountain laurel

State tree: Hemlock

 The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh (1979):

 

 

It's fitting that the Pennsylvania entry in this project centers around basketball. The basketball movie and Pennsylvania almost go hand in hand. Just look at the list of basketball movies that centered in the state. Celtic Pride, That Championship Season, Full Court Miracle, The Mighty Macs. One of the films that sailed under the radar was a comedy about the fictional Pittsburgh Pythons, a team that apparently couldn't shoot it's way out of a match-up with a team of pre-schoolers.

Pittsburgh is a big sports town, of course. They are represented in the NFL by the Pittsburgh Steelers, in the MBA by the Pittsburgh Pirates and in the NHL by the Pittsburgh Penguins. It seems astounding, to me at any rate, that their is no professional NBA team in Pittsburgh. To be fair there have been a few attempts, but it seems that Pittsburgh is considered a small market city when it comes to basketball. Not to mention the huge competition with the perennial powerhouses in the NFL and the NHL. 

This movie features many basketball stars of the time (late '70's). In film roles playing members of the hapless Pythons were Julius "Dr. J." Erving, Meadowlark Lemon (of the Harlem Globetrotters fame) and Jerry Chambers, but also appearing as themselves on the various courts of the game were a plethora of basketball stars:  Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (L.A. Lakers), Bob Lanier (Detroit Pistons), "Cornbread" Maxwell (Boston Celtics) and Kevin Porter (Detroit Pistons).

The Pittsburgh Pythons are the laughingstock of the NBA. Even the worst teams in the league at least garner some fans who brave the jeers of casual fans and band wagoners who only go to the games when the team is winning. The opening scene of the film shows a vast landscape of empty seats. Nobody, and I mean nobody seems to want to go to the games, and that includes a set of wheelchair bound geriatrics who seem to be serving some kind of punishment, because even they complain:  "I don't want to be here. I wanna go home!" 

 

The Pythons have a problem, not only with being able to perform well on the court, but also with being able to interact with each other off the court. One of them, Lucian Tucker (Jerry Chambers), even openly tries to express his disgust with the team on court, demanding that he be traded forthwith vocally, even while in the process avoiding performing his duties on court. And he doesn't get along with his teammates, especially Moses Guthrie (Julius "Dr. J." Erving), whom he basically calls out as a over paid hindrance.

 

The coach for the time, Jock Delaney (Flip Wilson) is more than a little miffed with his team. You get the idea that he would do anything, if he could just get these malcontents to pull together as a team, but he just doesn't have the General mentality to get things back on track.

The only one who seems to have any faith in the team is a young kid, the ball boy, Tyrone (James Bond III). He tries to give Guthrie some encouragement, saying that Guthrie is just in a slump and he knows that Guthrie can turn it around. Guthrie tells Tyrone that he is a Pisces and he just needs to check his horoscope, which starts the wheels turning in Tyrone's mind.

 

He thinks astrology is the key to turning the Pythons around. So he goes to a local astrologer, Mona Mondieu (Stockard Channing) to get her advice. He tries to convince her to be the team astrologer. In so doing, he tells that the team are ALL Pisces. Of course, they aren't really ALL Pisces... at least, not yet. But fate has thrown it's hand into the fire because most of the team just walks. This sets up a need to get a team together, but fast.

 

They hold open tryouts for any and all basketball star wannabes. Which gets, among others, a local D.J., Jackhammer Washington ( Jesse Lawrence Ferguson) and a local preacher, Reverend Grady Jackson (Meadowlark Lemon) to come to the open tryouts. But there is one stipulation... all of the potential players HAVE to be born under the zodiac sign of Pisces.

 

The owner of the Pythons is a scatterbrain rich guy, H. S. Tilson (Jonathan Winters) is all gung ho about the idea, but his older brother Harvey (also played by Winters) is convinced his little brother is a nitwit.

 

But H. S. intends to follow through with this decidedly off kilter idea. Including the aforementioned Jackhammer and the Reverend, several other players are destined to try to make this idea work, including Setshot Bufford (Jack Kehoe), Driftwood Haney (Peter Isacksen), and Bullet Haines (Malek Abdul Mansour). Most of these guys wouldn't even get a second look by the scouts, but they have one advantage... they are all Pisces.

 

This astrological mumbo-jumbo must have something on the ball, because this group of malcontents go on a tear, moving from last place lunkheads to contenders.  They take on some power houses in the league and mop the floor with them. Of course, this being about a fictional team from Pittsburgh, the rest of the teams are only known by their cities: Boston, Detroit, New York, and of course Los Angeles. But if you are quick eyed (and are familiar with the players of the late 70's) you can't help not missing some big names.

The highlight of the movie has to be the end. The Pisces are playing a game 7 in the NBA finals against Los Angeles, whose team includes the big guy himself, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. But a monkey wrench has been thrown into the mix as Harvey, owner H.S.'s unscrupulous brother, kidnaps Mona. In the end the Pisces end up having to rely on themselves, rather than their astrological mentor.  

 

With a budget of $4 million, the movie made a pretty decent profit, pulling in $8.3 million in ticket sales. It didn't get much fanfare from the critics. (It doesn't even have enough reviews to get a rating on the vaunted Tomato meter, although IMDb user ratings put it at just shy of 5 stars). Is this a great movie? My opinion is it's not entirely bad, although it seems quite predictable. Often during the film certain situations are telegraphed long in advance. For instance, you just had to KNOW that the combative Lucien Tucker, the one who kept demanding to be traded at the beginning of the film, would end up being on the team that the Pisces faced in the finals. Sure, that's a standard trope in sports movies, so it's not like you wouldn't have expected it in the first place.   

In the end, I really can't tell whether this movie is disparaging the idea of belief in astrology or if it is trying to advocate it's power. Just so you know, I don't really believe in all that mumbo-jumbo of the stars having some kind of pseudo magical influence on my life, But then again, I told a woman who did believe in all that hocus pocus stuff and, without having told her beforehand my birth date, she said "You must be a Sagittarius." I was born in early December, and that falls under the Sagittarius zodiac sign, so maybe there is something to this stuff after all...  (Naaaah!)  

That's it for this week.

Quiggy