Product Details

• Actors: Nick Nolte, Charles Durning, Mac Davis, Dayle Haddon, Bo Svenson
• Directors: Ted Kotcheff
• Writers: Ted Kotcheff, Frank Yablans, Nancy Dowd, Peter Gent, Rich Eustis
• Producers: Frank Baur, Frank Yablans
• Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono), English (Dolby Digital 5.1)
• Subtitles: English
• Dubbed: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Studio: Paramount
• DVD Release Date: January 30, 2001
• Run Time: 119 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (50 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B0000541AT
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #68,680 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• Learn more about "North Dallas Forty" on IMDb

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

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

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.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Seamy side of American institution October 4, 2000

By George Schaefer

Format:VHS Tape

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.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Film About Football, NOT A Football Film January 27, 2005

By E. VANDERWOLF

Format:DVD

I remember this coming out when I was a kid. I also remember I wasn't allowed to see it other than in its butchered form on Network Television. Now I know why.

This is a fantastic film. One thing that struck me is that for a football film, there is very little actual football in it. Which is the reason for the title of my review. This film is ABOUT football... not a football film. It's about the players in a time when the league was still young and, I dare say, corrupted by the use of pain killers and alochol. It was the hey dey of the Cowboys, the Raiders and the Steelers and football players were treated like Rock Stars.

It's the film "Any Given Sunday" wanted to be. But failed miserably at even being a cheap imitation.

If you loved 1970's films and 1970's football, this film is a must see.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A better halftime show than Janet Jackson January 30, 2006

By Jason A. Miller VINE™ VOICE

Format:DVD

This is an unsparing, unsentimental look at pro football in which the players are alternately brutes, and slaves to management. Coaches shamelessly manipulate the players and then discard them the moment injury strikes; the players are drugged up in order to coax them onto the field, while at the same time the unpopular players are ensnared by drug charges in order to trap them at contract renegotiation time.

"North Dallas Forty" is probably one of my favorite sports movies, and definitely my favorite football movie. That's because of its defiant outsider approach -- "Ball Four", the baseball book that made Peter Gent's football novel possible, only ever wound up a lame sitcom; "North Dallas Forty" goes all the way. Even though the movie is based on the Dallas Cowboys of the 1960s, the instantly dated 1970s' filmmaking technique remains timeless (even if it's from the same director who made "Weekend at Bernie's", which is timeless for very different reasons).

Part of the movie's continuing appeal remains its cast. Nick Nolte is a brilliant lead, as the rebellious but honest-to-a-fault North Dallas wide receiver Phil Elliott. Phil tells it like it is and sees management for what they are, but doesn't realize he's being cheated out of his career until the third or fourth time he's been double-crossed by owners, coaches and friends alike.

Playing a riff on Dandy Don Meredith, country singer/songwriter Mac Davis plays sly quarterback Seth Maxwell. The rest of the football team is filled out with several ex-NFL players. John Matuszak's second acting career was launched by this movie, and Bo Svenson's football career should have been launched by this movie. The coaches, Charles Durning (as a cliche-spouting offensive coordinator) and the great G.D.... Spradlin (playing a thinly veiled Tom Landry) both dominate their scenes. And yes, that's Dabney Coleman as an oil man and part owner who delivers one of the movie's best lines ("Do you speak Canadian?").

Dayle Haddon looks great as Phil's love interest, but otherwise gets overshadowed by the rest of the cast. She seems so disinterested in Phil throughout the movie that I was convinced their relationship wouldn't make it another week after the story ended.

Kotcheff directs his football scenes with an interesting approach that could never be duplicated today: there's not a single wide shot of a packed house, not a single closeup of a spectator in North Dallas face paint and a Maxwell jersey. Gone are the excesses of modern TV football coverage, and the only product endorsement I could spot was for xylocaine. Most of the early football action is shown in mute flashbacks, and the climactic game against Chicago is not joined until after the two-minute warning. Even with such minimal football, however, Kotcheff's action is so muddy, bloody and cruel that you can imagine the final game sequence was cued up in L.T.'s VCR the fateful Monday night he tangled with Joe Theismann's leg.

Always worth watching every late January, "North Dallas Forty" is one of those films you hope is never going to be remade, because the original has everything you need in a football movie. Read more ›

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars For movie lovers and football fans May 18, 1999

By A Customer

Format:VHS Tape

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.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars It's the real deal July 28, 2004

By Larry VanDeSande TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:DVD

Taken from Pete Gent's book about life with the Dallas Cowboys of the Don Meredith era, this movie (a quarter century later) is still the only film that deals with much of the reality of professional football in America. Other movies have been funnier ("The Longest Yard"), others have used more Hollywood fantasy to make their point ("Any Given Sunday"), but none other than George Plimpton's "Paper Lion" have any accuracy.

Not only is "North Dallas Forty" accurate, it is accurate in the extreme. It shows players taking shots in their joints in order to play in the game. It shows the way management treats players like meat, like yesterday's newspaper. It shows the way players eschew teamwork to look out for themselves, their statistics and their salaries. In a very Hollywood way, this movie uses big stars but makes a valid point about pro football in a way no film ever has.

I went to Pete Gent's school, Michigan State University, where I lived in an athletic or "jock" dorm. I knew football players at MSU including a couple that went on to become pros and all-pro in the NFL. I'll never forget the day I showed up for my test in freshman Natural Science when I had a little chat with the two football players in my class, one of whom went on to become an all-American and all-pro in the NFL and blocked for O.J. Simpson.

"We were at the professor's house last night going over the test," one of them told me moments before the test was passed out. That was one of my first real-life lessons in how college athletes are different from the rest of us. When the "North Dallas Forty" version of college football is made, maybe that scene will be included....

Until then, you have this film to help you understand how the NFL really works and what it's employees go through during their careers, which average 4.3 years. Read more ›