Repeated days of sub-freezing temperatures, not to mention icy streets, make for too much television time for retired people who like to get outdoors.
Cable news, sports channels, and the internet can all whittle away at the day, but it leaves me more cynical than I should be.
I read, but if I’m at it too long, I doze off to sleep.
So, I watch more movies than usual: Netflix, Amazon and old reliable Turner Classic Movies which, although I’ve seen many of them multiple times, are worth enjoying again.
One TCM classic I recently watched, “Trouble Along the Way”, was made in 1953, the same year I finished high school.
Of course, I am aware of societal changes, which are reflected in both the movies and real life, over the past 65 years, but three things in that movie stood out as reminders.
In case you haven’t seen it, the film’s stars John Wayne and Donna Reed, with a supporting cast including Charles Coburn and Chuck Connors.
Wayne plays football coach Steve Williams who has been banned from all the major conferences for unethical conduct and is using gambling to support himself and his 11-year-old daughter.
Coburn plays Father Burke, the aging rector of obscure St. Anthony’s College, a Catholic university that is in financial straits and about to be closed. To save it, and himself from forced retirement, Father Burke hires Williams in hopes of building a lucrative sports program. Williams accepts the job after learning that his former wife, now remarried, complained to Social Services that he is an unfit father, and plans to sue for custody of his daughter.
Reed plays Social Services worker Alice Singleton who is prejudiced against the coach because she suffered from a relationship with her father similar to that between Steve and his daughter.
As the title implies, there’s a lot of trouble along the way,
Father Burke uses his clerical connections to schedule St. Anthony’s against high profile Catholic universities, including Notre Dame.
Coach Williams, knowing he can’t compete with those sports goliaths with the inadequate athletes at St. Anthony’s, recruits a couple of seasoned assistants and a freshman class of skilled football players, including a quarterback who has been playing professional football in Canada.
Cashing in on unsavory deals in his past, Williams uses extortion or blackmail to have his games played at the Polo Grounds in New York as well as to equip his team with the best. The St. Anthony’s freshmen, whose credentials are faked, practice all summer and roll over their first opponent before a sellout crowd.
Then things go sour when Father Burke learns of the coach’s unethical methods.
I won’t go into detail about how it all unravels and then, as in so many John Wayne movies, turns out all right. As usual, Wayne’s character is rough around the edges with certain flaws, but he really has a good heart.
Here are three things I noted, comparing then and now.
• In telling his future assistants how they can recruit good players, and make money for themselves, Coach Williams discloses his plan to skim off concession and promotional sales revenue from sellouts at the Polo Ground and divide it among players and coaches — kind of like socialism as one assistant put it.
The assistant coach, played by Connors, says count him in. For once, he allows, he wants to make as much money as the players.
He, of course, implied that college athletes were receiving monetary benefits. I have heard such things went on back then as they are alleged to occur now.
One difference now, though, is with their multi-million dollar a year contracts, big-time college coaches are making more than the players.
• Like it happened in a lot of movies before nudity and profanity were allowed on the big screen, the Wayne character, ends an argument with the Reed character with a forcible embrace and kiss. She, of course, vehemently objects, but instead of filing a harassment suit, falls in love with the guy.
• Finally, there’s a lot of cigarette smoking by the lead characters. Taboo these days. Get naked but don’t smoke.
Their final acts had nothing to do with the movie and perhaps not even with smoking. Neither was reported to have lung cancer.
But both Wayne and Reed died of cancer, Wayne of stomach cancer at the age of 72 in 1979, and Reed of pancreatic cancer in 1986, 13 days shy of her 65th birthday.
Watching them in a movie is still a fun way to while away a couple of hours when it’s 9 degrees outside.
Charles Dunagin is a veteran journalist with the Enterprise-Journal in McComb.
