I think I see your problem. You have this list. It’s a list of people you need/want to buy a Christmas gift for. The trouble is that they’re into home theatre, and you don’t know Star Trek from Star Wars. You couldn’t tell a Wolf Man from a Wolverine. And you always thought that Paranormal Activity was something too kinky to talk about. Fortunately, Upcomingdiscs has come to the rescue every Christmas with our Gift Guide Spotlights. Keep checking back to see more recommendations for your holiday shopping. These gift guides ARE NOT paid advertisements. We take no money to publish them. With conditions as they are, shopping won’t be easy this season. The nice thing about discs is that they’re so easy to get from places like Amazon that you can give a great gift and stay perfectly safe while you do it. From Sony we have the inspirational story of Rudy in UHD Blu-ray/4K. An inspirational story for an inspirational season. How could you go wrong here?
“You’re 5 foot nothin’, 100 and nothin’, and you have barely a speck of athletic ability. And you hung in there with the best college football players in the land for two years. And you’re gonna walk outta here with a degree from the University of Notre Dame. In this life, you don’t have to prove nothin’ to nobody but yourself. And after what you’ve gone through, if you haven’t done that by now, it ain’t gonna never happen. Now go on back.”
Back in 1982 Daniel “Rudy” Ruettiger tried to get a film made about his inspirational story. He had become somewhat of a celebrity because of his determination to one day play for his dream team, Notre Dame. In the last game of his last year of eligibility to play college football, he was put into the game in the very last seconds. He actually made a pretty impressive defensive stop and became the only player in Notre Dame history to be carried off the field on the backs of his fellow teammates. It truly was and remains an inspirational story, and Rudy decided to use that determination once again to get a film made. Once again it took years and some unfortunate sacrifice. He met a con artist who convinced him he could write a screenplay, and Rudy gave the unscrupulous man all of his savings to do the job. No screenplay, and the guy vanished along with all of his money. It would be a decade later that real interest from real movie people made that dream a reality. The result was Rudy, starring a young Sean Astin as the never give up player. Not long after Astin would become far more famous as the emotional center of Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy as Sam, the dedicated friend and conscience of Frodo, the bearer of the all-powerful and all corrupting ring.
“We’re gonna go inside, we’re gonna go outside, inside and outside. We’re gonna get ’em on the run, boys, and once we get ’em on the run we’re gonna keep ’em on the run. And then we’re gonna go go go go go, and we’re not gonna stop til we get across that goalline. This is a team they say is … is good, well I think we’re better than them. They can’t lick us, so what do you say, men?”
When the film begins, we meet Rudy (Astin) playing football as a young, skinny kid with his brothers and their friends. Rudy runs around wearing a Notre Dame football helmet and begging for more action. But he’s a scrawny kid, and he can’t keep up with the slightly older and bigger kids. Back at the house for a holiday meal, the family gathers around the old television set to watch Notre Dame on television. It’s a middle-class blue-collar household, and all of the sons are expected to work in the smelting plant, earn a good living, have a family and a house with the white picket fence, and engage in the family tradition of cheering for Notre Dame on television. At one of these gatherings Rudy announces that he’s going to someday play for Notre Dame.
Rudy plays for the high school football team. He makes the squad based strictly on his heart and not his minimal football skills. His brothers and friends hate it, because all they hear is that if those skilled players had half the heart that Rudy had, he’d have a championship team. Time goes on and Rudy graduates high school with not the best of grades, and the idea of getting into Notre Dame isn’t remote … it’s impossible. But he heads to South Bend and goes to a community Catholic college where he’s befriended by a warm priest. Father Cavanaugh (Prosky) likes Rudy a lot. He serves as a kind of mentor and could well be the first person who found Rudy an inspiration. Rudy tells him he’s going to work hard and get into Notre Dame, and what’s more, he’s going to make the football team. Each semester he tries hard with his grades, and each semester he is rejected. But that doesn’t stop Rudy, who can almost be called a stalker at this point.
He roams the Notre Dame campus when he can, acting like a student. He joins an athletic booster club so that he can paint the helmets for gameday. He lies about being a student even as he’s growing a bit fond of the girl running the club. He gets thrown out of the club when one day with a couple of beers in him, Rudy slips in front of Mary (Lind) and reveals he’s not a Notre Dame student. He also volunteers to help the groundskeeping crew, where he finds another mentor who helps him keep going.
Enter Fortune (Dutton) who runs the grounds crew for the school’s stadium. He gives in and lets Rudy on the squad even though he knows he doesn’t need the help. Rudy isn’t the best worker, but he grows on Fortune, who leaves a key for him to stay in the fieldhouse at night when he notices Rudy has been leaving a window unlocked so that he can sneak in and use a bed in the room. Rudy spends more time dreaming about the football team than doing his work. He stands in the dressing room and delivers a famous Notre Dame coach pep talk that he’s memorized by talking to the record since he was a young kid. That spirit both bewilders and touches Fortune.
Finally he gets his grades up and gets accepted to Notre Dame. Making the football team is another story. He even manages to impress Mary, who mocks him the first time she sees him there as a student, believing he was still pretending. At football tryouts he gets his chance, because Coach Asa Parseghain (Miller) is the first Notre Dame coach in the program’s history to try out walk-ons. Of course, Rudy can’t make the team; he’s getting his head handed to him on every drill. But the coach needs a few guys on a practice squad, because it doesn’t matter if they get hurt to work out his team. Rudy makes that squad; and he continues to take a beating after beating; and at first the teammates kind of resent his effort. It’s the same old “if everyone had Rudy’s heart” all over again. He gets the coach to promise that the next year he would put him on the active roster for one game before he graduates. It’s the only way he can be officially recorded as a member of the team. Unfortunately, Coach retires, and there’s a new sheriff in town, and he doesn’t like walk-ons.
Enter Coach Dan Devine (Ross). He begrudgingly lets Rudy remain on the practice squad as a favor to the old coach, but he has no intention of letting Rudy suit up for a game. By this time Rudy’s teammates are growing fond of him. They see the beating that he’s willing to take and the passion he has for the team. They kind of push Devine into letting Rudy suit up for the final game. In the film player after player struts into Devine’s office placing his jersey on the desk, giving up his roster spot for Rudy. The coach caves, and Rudy gets to suit up. Playing? That’s a different animal completely, and Devine has no intention of letting that happen. As the game winds down, the players start a chant that reaches the crowd, and before you know it the entire stadium is chanting “RUDY”. By a crazy set of circumstances, he gets his chance and makes a tackle. Rudy was a real member of the team, if only for that single moment in history.
The film has become a classic, and these performances are the biggest reason. Astin is totally committed to the character, and every hit and every failure leaves you rooting for him all the more. The casting also created some wonderful chemistry between Astin and several performers. Robert Prosky is perhaps best remembered for playing turnout sergeant Stan Jablonsky in Hill Street Blues. He became quite a loved character, which was a huge accomplishment when you consider he was replacing Michael Conrad, who passed away after three years on the series. But Prosky made his impact, and it was a lasting one. Here as Father Cavanaugh he plays off Astin wonderfully, as he has this bewildered admiration for the young man. Prosky’s expressions are priceless, and the relationship is a huge piece of the Rudy puzzle. The same thing happens again with Charles S. Dutton playing Fortune. The man is a font of street wisdom, and his own heart shows through so incredibly strong that again you can’t imagine Rudy making it without Fortune’s support. We learn more about Fortune as the film unfolds and that he once walked these halls as a player and he genuinely feels what Rudy is feeling. Dutton puts on a thespian clinic here and deserved an Oscar for this role. He didn’t even get nominated, and you can’t watch this film without feeling he was robbed. These three actors are the heart and soul of a film that is all about heart and soul. You also have to love Jason Miller as Coach Asa Parseghian. We know him better, of course, as the tormented Father Karras in The Exorcist.
The film also benefited by being only the second production to ever be allowed to film at Notre Dame, and you can’t beat these actual locations for realism. It doesn’t get any better than the real thing. The crew were also allowed to film during halftime at two Notre Dame games that season. The games were against Penn State and Georgia Tech. So those are real football stands in the film and not just stock footage. They got to react to the film’s scenes live and in person. It’s easy to recognize Penn State’s marching band and many of their fans in the stands even though the two teams had never met in the years leading up to the actual events of the film. The real Rudy makes a cameo in the stands of that final game. This is also Vince Vaughn’s first film. Astin took so many real hits that he needed knee surgery after the film’s production ended.
There are some liberties taken here. Rudy’s older brother here wasn’t a real guy, but a combination of various people in Rudy’s life. The film ignores that Rudy spent four years in the Navy after leaving school, not at the steel plant. The real Coach Devine was furious with the film. The truth is that he was a friend to Rudy, and it was his decision to suit him and play him in the game. He wrote letters to Notre Dame and the studio demanding that the scene of the players forcing him to let Rudy play be removed. He attempted a lawsuit to have it removed. He would later claim if his players had actually ever pulled a stunt like that, he would have kicked them all off the team. The writers and director David Anspaugh decided Rudy needed more of a nemesis to characterize his struggle more clearly. The problem for Devine is he signed a release allowing them to make his character a heavy, but he quickly regretted the decision. Who knows. The film works just the way it was shot. “Son, in thirty-five years of religious study, I’ve come up with only two hard, incontrovertible facts; there is a God, and I’m not Him.”