In all my years of watching, playing and obsessing over the great American game of football, I assumed that I left no stone unturned and no useless tidbit of trivia unknown. From Roger the Dodger to Broadway Joe, Night Train Lane to Prime Time, my daddy taught me well. Yet, somehow, the Elmira Express seemed to slip through the cracks. How is it probable that I could sit through every Saturday of every fall since I was seven without ever once hearing the legend of Ernie Davis?
Well, thank God there’s Hollywood to bail my ass out.
“The Express,” opening tomorrow, chronicles the life of Ernie “Elmira Express” Davis, the first black collegiate to ever win the Heisman Trophy, and this generation’s seemingly forgotten link between Hall-of-Famers Jim Brown and Floyd Little. The heir-apparent to Jim Brown at Syracuse, Davis set new precedents for the running back position en route to the Orangemen’s first and only national football title in 1959.
It would be easy to write off “The Express” as another in a long line of derivative, over-the-top inspirational sports timepieces that have developed into what has become the “Remember the Titans” genre of movie-making. This is not one of
those movies.
The Ernie Davis story doesn’t try to inspire with the glorified Disney-fication of last-minute touchdowns and improbable comebacks against insurmountable odds. Instead, “The Express” plants itself on the foundation of hard-line factual portrayal, hyper-real production design and considerable performances by Rob Brown as the title character, and Dennis Quaid as coach Ben Schwartzwalder.
The typically tame and very mainstream Quaid takes on this very atypical role as the bitter, crotchety and aggressively old-school coach who dynamically acts as both the film’s protagonist and antagonist. Portrayed like a microcosm of the conflict, turmoil and change of the United States in the 1960s, Schwartzwalder was one of the first coaches in college football to recruit black athletes, while still submitting to established rules of inequality between blacks and whites. As Schwartzwalder tries to restrict what Davis and his two black teammates can do on and off the field, it takes Davis’ unabashed pride and strength to convince him that his old way of thinking is exactly that – old. Throughout the film, the dichotomy of Schwartzwalder is superbly conceived and exceptionally realized by Quaid, who plays one of the most complex characters I’ve seen in
recent films.
“The Express” certainly sticks to the formula of most sports movies of this era, but it features the discipline, restraint and wherewithal to keep that formula from crossing over into cliché. There’s more than a fair share of montages, close-up action shots and poignant moments of love and loss, but it’s all well-balanced and works effectively in perpetuating the story forward without ever being tacky or emotionally overwrought.
I wouldn’t put “The Express” in the realm of “Hoosiers,” “Field of Dreams” or “Rudy,” but I will say it does what it does with near-flawless execution and never once forces an eye-roll or a cringe. It’s a nicely made movie that doesn’t require an interest in football to enjoy it. You’ll leave the theater in a pleasantly bittersweet mood.
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