Product Description

A semi-fictional account of life as a professional Football (American-style) player. Loosely based on the Dallas Cowboys team of the early 1970s.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20628 in DVD
• Brand: Team Marketing
• Released on: 2001-01-30
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .0" h x .0" w x .0" l, 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 118 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
A very savvy, 1978 film directed by Ted Kotcheff (First Blood) dealing with the seamier side of professional football. Phillip Elliott and Maxwell (Nick Nolte and Mac Davis, respectively) are players for a Texas football team loosely based on the championship Dallas Cowboys. Though at the peak of his football career, Elliott is a personal and physical mess, needing all manner of drugs prescribed by the team physician to play and even to move around. The indifference of the team management and the hypocritical stance toward recreational drug use versus the drug abuse practiced by the players leads to a crisis of conscience for Nolte. The combination of Nolte's volatile presence and Davis's understated performance as the quarterback who thinks he's seen it all helps make North Dallas Forty one of the best sports films around. --Robert Lane

Customer Reviews

a real good film
Nick Nolte&Mac Davis give great performances in this film.this film pre-dates all of the maddness that has happened in the NFL since it's release.drugs,sex,coaches,etc..this film is one of the best sports movies.the real life Dallas Cowboys finally caught up with the film in the mid-90's.

Seamy side of American institution
This movie really blew the lid off a lot of the shenanigans that go on in professional sports. I'm sure that many were upset with the portrayal of athletes as drunken, pill popping idiots but that was probably a reality back then. This movie precedes Any Given Sunday by two decades and still hits harder in its revelation of football's seamy side. Nick Nolte is superb as Phil Elliott. Mac Davis also gives a fine performance. The scenes of athletes being shot up with painkillers to play is intense. The laissez faire attitude of coaches and team owners is probably more realistic than the NFL would care to admit. I love the scene when Nolte gets suspended for smoking marijuana and his response is that the team is injecting harder drugs into him each Sunday just so he can play. That kind of mirrors the insanity and stupidity of the NFL drug testing policies even today. Football is an American institution but indeed there is a dark side. This movie does a fine job of pointing that out.

For movie lovers and football fans
NORTH DALLAS FORTY delivers first-rate entertainment. Football fans will note stinging parodies of a few famous NFL players/coaches. Among quality performances from Nick Nolte, Mac Davis, Charles Durning and the late John Matuszak, actor Bo Svenson stands out. Svenson adds depth to what could have been a cartoonish role of an immature, stupid muscle-head, and it is unfortunate that I have not seen him in anything else this good. The film's poster makes NORTH DALLAS FORTY look as though it is a pro football version of ANIMAL HOUSE. Sure, NORTH DALLAS FORTY is funny at times, but the film also takes on the abuses in big league sports and management's selective enforcement of the rules. Sports journalists, let alone other sports films, ought to address those issues as boldly.