Haunted by his mysterious past, a devoted high school football coach leads a scrawny team of orphans to the state championship during the Great Depression and inspires a broken nation along the way.
Anyone reared in Fort Worth, Texas, or, for that matter, in and around North Texas, has at some time become acquainted with the institution of the Masonic Home and School for Children. Originally opened in 1899 in southeast Fort Worth as the Masonic Widows and Orphans Home, it served in that capacity until 1910 when the widows were moved to the Texas Masonic Retirement Center and the orphanage and school continued as an independent school district.
In 1927, Rusty Russell was hired as a teacher and football coach to try to forge the unruly, undisciplined, ragtag group of boys into a team that could hold its own against other schools in the University Interscholastic League’s IA team grouping. ‘12 Mighty Orphans’ was written by Texas sportswriter Jim Dent who has a noteworthy list of football-themed books to his credit, including ‘Junction Boys,’ the New York Times bestseller based on Bear Bryant’s A&M training camp in 1954. Russell didn’t have raw talent or size, or even uniforms or a football available to him as a coach, but he managed to come up with new tweaks on plays that had never been used before to assist his team. Many of those “tweaks” had a lasting impact and changed the way football came to be played. The story of the orphans and their football team is what it is. It’s an underdog story modeled after many, many sports stories of underdogs. Everybody loves them. Not to mention these underdogs were real. Their backstories were woven from the often tragic threads of the Great Depression. Embellishment and exaggeration are prone in picturing underdogs in the best story light. But adherence to absolute historic detail may bear more on Dent, the authentic teller of the story of the Masonic orphans and their coach. The film is not necessarily trapped in second to second accuracy. Of necessity, stories must be breached for brevity, for continuity in a 60-90 minute format. There is enough truth to tell in this film to have kept me involved.
Luke Wilson is everything you would want Rusty Russell to be: intelligent, compassionate, dedicated, loyal, and unwavering. History would nick away some of those qualities, but not enough to deflate the character for me. I am a Fort Worth East Side girl, and you’ll never erase all the East Side out of me, though I am no longer physically there. My mom was a cheerleader at Handley High School from 1938-1939. She cheered at games between Masonic Home and Handley and I heard stories when I was young about the boys from the homecoming over for games. She no doubt saw Coach Russell and met some of the boys who played against her two brothers, my uncles. Maybe this personal touch of nostalgia allows me to overlook a certain amount of “schmaltziness.” Martin Sheen, one of the actual few non-Texans in the film, (Treat Williams being another, as well as Robert Duvall, who somehow seems like he ought to be a Texan) is Doc, the always slightly inebriated softie who looks out for the boys’ best interest or at least intends to.
Wayne Knight would seem appropriately cast as the film’s bad guy, Frank Wynn. Actually, to be transparent, there are two bad guys but Wynn is the real bad guy who actually was abusive to the boys at the home and is portrayed just as Jim Dent wrote him. It is, however, difficult to tease Newlander out of Knight’s portrayal of the director of the orphanage. The second fiddle bad guy is interesting. He is Luther Scarborough, the football coach at Polytechnic High School on Fort Worth’s East Side, close to Texas Wesleyan University in the neighborhood which still takes the name of the high school. Lane Garrison, who also collaborated on the screenplay, plays the garrulous, pompous coach who happened to also be my principal at Handley Jr./Sr. High School in 1959, the last year the school existed and I was a ninth-grader. I have to admit, seeing my principal portrayed as a jerk was pretty entertaining! And, Garrison graduated from the same high school as my granddaughters, though twenty years prior. Who said Texas was big?
Everything in this film seems six degrees from the Masonic School one way or another. The film is criticized for misogynistic language. Well, guess what? Language was pretty misogynistic in 1938 and especially in a football locker room. Ditto the criticism for an ending that isn’t totally satisfying, so why bother to tell the story? Easy answer there. This is a no apology, feel-good story that may be embellished but it is not made up. The director gets a bit carried away with coloring the frames to place the story as if in a film of its day. It’s often too dark with too many shadows. And it’s predictable, for sure. However, we all just emerged from a pretty dark time, and as our lives are just beginning to look up, maybe a little….well, it’s about damn time to just rear back and enjoy a story from the era of our parents or grandparents. A football story. This is, after all, Texas, and judging from what I observe every fall, Texas and the entire country, at least, likes a good ole football story!
Available on Blu-ray™, DVD, & Digital August 31st
