'Express' works as a football film and a chronicle of its era

“The Express,” the sixth feature film directed by Norfolk native Gary Fleder, comes in a notable notch above the usual sports film. It is at its best when it is not a football movie at all but a chronicle of an era - the 1950s and early 1960s when America was going through a period of changing values.

Ernie Davis, the first African-American to win college’s most coveted football award, the Heisman Trophy, never marched in a picket line or attended a sit-in but was a groundbreaking athlete who suffered the effects of racism even as he received great acclaim. The brevity of his career and the passage of time have caused him to be largely forgotten - until now.

Davis died of leukemia at age 23, just before he would have begun his professional football career with the Cleveland Browns. As pictured here, he is the so-called “Elmira Express,” recruited from Elmira, N.Y. to lead the Syracuse University football team to an undefeated 1959 season, and the national championship. 

He is played in a stoic and noble way by Rob Brown (“Finding Forrester,” 2000). Sidney Poitier never played a threatened character with more nobility.

Dennis Quaid makes a bold and impressive crossover from leading man to character actor with a droll, gruff and colorful portrayal of Syracuse coach Ben Schwartzwalder. It’s one of Quaid’s best performances, although the script seems to hint at more conflict than is allowed to surface. Schwartzwalder is a man of the South, West Virginia, who, it is hinted, may have harbored some racial tensions on his own. The coach merely wants to win. He apparently wants no trouble from the Civil Rights movement at all. He recruits and nurtures Ernie Davis as a star to follow the team’s other legendary star, Jim Brown. He orders no interracial dating, along with other rules.

Along the way, the coach becomes a father figure and mentor for the fatherless Davis. This is the real drama - the drama of how the coach and the team grow amidst a world that is growing and expanding.

Fleder graduated from Norfolk Collegiate before going to Boston University and University of Southern California in a remarkably fast-starting film career that has resulted in six films and work with stars such as Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman, Morgan Freeman, Ashley Judd, Michael Douglas and, now, Quaid. It marks, finally, his escape from the thriller genre that dominated his career with commercial successes like “Kiss the Girls” and “Don’t Say a Word.”

“The Express” is a remarkable job of marshalling all the forces of filmmaking, from the football scenes to the dramatic moments. Fleder has largely achieved his goal to make the canvas of the ‘50s his central focus. Much in the way that “Seabiscuit” was not a horse racing movie but a chronicle of the Great Depression, “The Express” is not just a football movie, but a study of the Civil Rights era.

The vintage cars and costumes are effective. The musical score by Mark Isham avoids the usual emphasis on pop tunes and smacks of an Aaron Copland aura of Americana.

Like “Mississippi Burning,” though, the film has been beset by a number of accusations of misinformation. Some Syracuse vets, present at the lavish world premiere in that city, claim that, rather than ostracized, Davis was revered as a football hero during his college career and that the way had been cleared for him by Jim Brown. West Virginians have loudly protested a scene in which the Syracuse team is required to keep their helmets on to avoid thrown objects in a wild scene of racism. The West Virginians quite correctly point out that the game in question was not even played in West Virginia but in Syracuse and that the Syracuse coach was, and is, a much admired native son of the state - not likely to spark protests. Some of the scores of specific games have been challenged, although it will make little difference to the mainstream audience. The point is that Syracuse always wins and it is glory road for Davis.

The factual allegations are rebutted with the usual claim that this is not a documenary. Nor, for that matter, is it a remake of “Brian’s Song,” the legendary football tearjerker. Needing conflict, Charles Leavitt’s script could have gone either for the racial issue or the tragic death. The death, in fact, seems anticlimactic and is handled rapidly in the last moments of the film.

Charles S. Dutton adds the strength of a great character actor as Davis’ grandfather.

Real life football legends represented include Floyd Little and Jim Brown, both of whom, like Davis, wore Number 44 for Syracuse. Some, in fact, suggest that the movie should actually have been made about Brown who led the way as a pioneering African-American player two years before Davis. Brown, though, was, and is, an aggressive, abusive and controversial figure who, in addition to his amazing athletic career, has had run ins with the law as well as a movie career. Davis’ gentlemanly ways were much more to the liking of the producers.

Fleder’s handling of the football sequences are free of the usual frantic editing that creates a blur rather than action. Here, we can keep the score, which is nothing to be taken for granted.

Best as a period piece, “The Express” is a bold change of pace for the young Norfolk kid who went away to Hollywood and has realized much of his dream. He is just now stepping into the mature portion of his already-impressive directorial career.

  Mal Vincent, (757) 446-2347, mal.vincent@pilotonline.com