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Item number 2089-45, Grading is cover/record: M- using Goldmine standards. wlp,swol,xol Please see seller profile for abbreviation descriptions.

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The second film directed by actor Bill Paxton is a marked departure--in both form and content--from his debut 2001's FRAILTY a shadowy gothic tale of murder. THE GREATEST GAME EVER PLAYED is a sports movie slash Horatio Alger rags-to-riches tale with undertones of class consciousness and social critique. The story is based on a real-life event--the 1913 U.S. Open golf championship--at which two equally sympathetic young men both of whom grew up economically and socially disadvantaged go club to club in one of the most exciting and dramatic athletic events of the early 20th century. The film focuses on the competition between the British star Harry Vardon Stephen Dillane and the young American prodigy Francis Ouimet HOLES star Shia LaBoeuf. Though they hail from opposite sides of the Atlantic the struggles that the two young golfers have had to overcome are markedly similar; both grew up in hard-scrabble working-class homes that happened to be adjacent to golf courses and both were preternaturally disposed to

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Elvis Presley tries on boxing gloves for Kid Galahad, one of his post-Army pictures that still has some fresh air and innocence in it. First spotted crooning from the back of a pickup truck, Elvis plays an ex-G.I. newly returned to his foresty birthplace, where shifty Gig Young runs a boxing camp. Naturally the kid turns out to have talent with the gloves, and a gamblers/mobsters/boxing formula soon kicks in. Meanwhile, Elvis turns his attention to Joan Blackman (from Blue Hawaii) and Young resists making an honest woman of girlfriend Lola Albright. Charles Bronson, who didn't get on well with Elvis, has a hefty role as an incorruptible trainer. The songs squeezed in around this are humdrum, and even the best ones can't accurately be described as rock & roll. Director Phil Karlson, a dab hand at action films (The Phenix City Story), gets some savagery into the fight scenes, and the early location work has a nice breezy feel. As for Presley himself, the early signs of stupor are beginning to be apparent; after the enjoyable opening reel he lacks the old spirit, looking understandably unengaged by the material or his co-stars. --Robert Horton