North Dallas Forty

What distinguishes this screen adaptation of Peter Gent’s bestseller is the exploration of a human dimension almost never seen in sports pix. Most people understand that modern-day athletes are just cogs in a big business wheel, but getting that across on the screen is a whole different matter. And in large measure, that success is due to a bravura performance in the lead role by Nick Nolte. Read full review

Profanely funny, wised-up and heroically antiheroic, North Dallas Forty is unlikely to please anyone with a vested interest in glorifying the National Football League. Read full review

It's a riveting look at what goes on behind the scenes -- mainly pills, booze and shots. If you ever entertained any fantasies about America's autumnal rite's being good clean fun, this movie should set you straight...At the same time, North Dallas Forty is terrifically funny, done with enough humor and wit to offset any potential heavyhandedness -- a Burt Reynolds movie with bite. [3 Aug 1979, p.25]

It's not exactly news that pro football is just big business with the cleats showing. But North Dallas Forty brings the news home in fresh, funny and powerful ways. It's a bitter comedy of Sunbelt manners that packs a substantial emotional wallop. Director Ted Kotcheff, who stays faithful to the spirit of the novel by Peter Gent (an ex-Dallas Cowboy), captures the vulgar, born-again spirit of nouveau riche Dallas society, but he never condescends. The cogs caught in this corporate wheel always remain sweatily human - this is a locker-room satire with soul. [6 Aug 1979, p.55]

The locker room scenes are totally authentic.

Justly renowned as the most realistic movie on pro football, this is the iconoclastic portrait of savvy, rebellious receiver Phil Elliott (Nick Nolte) who finds himself a target for coaches, owners, players and fate itself. [14 May 2000, p.33]

North Dallas Forty wasn't intended to be a traditional sports flick as much as an examination of the cold business side of the game and its institutional pressures, especially during that era, when the paychecks usually weren't commensurate with the pain these disposable players endured. [17 Apr 2020, p.39]

It's both biting and prescient in its satirical message that details the contrast of the desires of selfish individual player taking precedence over the team mentality that the coaches encourage in the locker room. Read full review

Ted Kotcheff’s film is essentially a workplace comedy, but the employees are braindead and wealthy, and the benefits are glory and groupies in equal amounts. Read full review

The central friendship in the movie, beautifully delineated, is the one between Mr. Nolte and Mac Davis, who expertly plays the team's quarterback, a man whose calculating nature and complacency make him all the more likable, somehow. Read full review

The picture breaks down awkwardly when it tries to express directly what it has already said better by implication. This generally occurs in earnest scenes between Elliott and his all too dense girlfriend. Dayle Haddon's inexperienced playing adds nothing even faintly convincing to the badly written love interest, and the rest of the film has to struggle to recover from the resulting dead spots. Still, North Dallas Forty retains enough of the original novel's authenticity to deliver strong, if brutish, entertainment. Read full review

Despite its seriousness, the film is also among the funniest sports movies ever made. [01 Feb 2009, p.E4]

Pro football fans may be disillusioned by this excellent, honest, and often brutal expose of the play-for-pay game. Read full review

It's not another rah-rah football film. Thanks to Nolte, it has its own form of true grit. Read full review

Authentic, if unsurprising, look at the brutal, exploitative, drug-ridden world of top-level American football through the honest, if bleary, eyes of an over-the-hill pro, superbly played by Nick Nolte who attended several colleges on football scholarships. [02 Nov 2003, p.8]

Despite these advantages, North Dallas Forty's descents into farce and into the lone man versus the corrupt system mentality deprive it of real resonance. It's still not the honest portrait of professional athletics that sport buffs have been waiting for. It is, though, a stylish cut above most films of this type. [4 Aug 1979]

Something of a mess, both in terms of the wayward plot which rambles all over the place, and in terms of the rather muddled juggling of audience sympathies. Read full review

Nick Nolte electrifies the football-cum-drugs saga with a remarkable performance as Phil Elliott, a pot smokin', beer swillin', cocaine sniffin' tight end for the North Dallas Bulls. But the erratic direction of Ted Kotcheff and the wayward script are strictly second-string. [10 Jun 2014, p.G15]