"They say I look bigger with my clothes off."

September 25th, 2012
The Boy in Blue, (1986)
Nicolas Cage is Ned Hanlan

I'm not sure what the buzz around The Boy in Blue was on its release but I have to imagine that audiences were a little surprised when they discovered that, despite the movie's promotional poster and dramatic trailer, The Boy in Blue is not some sort of antiquated, Canadian Rocky.


It does have some of the Rocky hallmarks - at least a fourth of the movie is Nicolas Cage, shirtless, training for the "next big race" and there's a driving synth score pushing the whole thing forward, despite its 1880's setting - but The Boy in Blue doesn't just want to thrill and inspire you. In fact, thrilling is probably third on its list of prerogatives. The first and second are to educate and instill a sense of pride in Canadian heritage. Funded by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Telefilm Canada, BIB shows its hand from the first frame as text appears, reading:

"Before baseball, football, or soccer, one sport alone captured the imagination of both rich and poor - - sculling."

Sure, you kids have heard about all the baseball and football and soccer greats a thousand times but let me hip you to the original cool: sculling: the sport of kings. And who do you think was the greatest sculler of all time? Why, Ned Hanlan, Canada's favorite son and, in 1880, the first world sporting champion in an individual or singles event! Can-a-DA! Can-a-DA! Can-a-DA!



From conception to film The Boy in Blue seems targeted less at the megaplex than at lazy, Canadian teachers looking for a couple of periods to themselves. Like Beethoven Lives Upstairs (fond memories of which I owe to my own lazy teachers), BIB is vague historicity draped over tried-and-true dramatic devices cribbed from better films. I suspect the story of Ned Hanlan it presents owes as much to Chariots of Fire as it does to actual events.

Hanlan, as Cage plays him, is a charming scoundrel; an incorrigible rake with a stockpile of natural talent and just enough self-destructive tendencies to pad his story out to 90 minutes.  Before he's spotted by a sleazy manager with a secret heart of gold (David Naughton) he's happily making a living as a rum runner, delivering boatloads of bootleg liquor as he's literally pursued by torch-wielding mobs of bobbies and teetotaling ministers. One early scene takes its beats recalls the Keystone Kops as the bobbies burst into Hanlan's home, interrupting him in flagrante delicto for breaking the law and fornicating out of wedlock. Hanlan pulls up his pants (after pleasuring the woman to climax first, of course. Can-a-DA!) and jumps out the top floor window into his waiting escape boat. Didn't know Canada's number-one sculler had so much attitude, didja? HISTORY!

Predictably, Naughton's slippery manager starts managing Hanlan as a professional racer and Hanlan wins big. This is thanks, in part, to a wise, old Canadian named Walter (veteran Canadian character actor, Sean Sullivan) who invents for Hanlan a sliding seat allowing him to use his legs to power himself as well as his arms. This story is completely false (the sliding seat was invented by Harry Clasper, an Englishman with no ties to Hanlan) but The Boy in Blue again presents it as not only true but a piece of Canadian pride. Watching it I was reminded The Jolson Story, a delightful early biopic that, under the guidance of a still-living Al Jolson, restructured history to present its subject not as just a successful vaudeville singer but as a faultless American hero, friend to all races and creeds, who invented modern jazz, cinema and show business simultaneously. It doesn't matter if Jolson invented jazz or Hanlan was the first man to use a sliding seat because it feels like they did.

And if Hanlan wasn't such a visionary outsider or preternatural talents would he have caught the eye of probably-also-fictional, villainous race-promoter Col. Knox (a slumming Christopher Plummer)? And would he have been able to fall in love with Knox's beautiful but unapproachable daughter? No, those things would not have happened. A 90-minute montage of Nicolas Cage doing sit-ups and winning races isn't a movie, people!

There's a famous story of Cage as a scrawny kid getting bullied out of some Twinkies only to come back the same day with slicked back hair posing as his own "cousin" and intimidating the bully into giving those Twinkies back. I've been thinking about that story a lot while watching these early Cage films. Similar to how I don't know how much of Cage's eccentricities to credit to the directors, I'm not sure how often anyone was telling him to strip down and flex the shit out of his rippling muscles but he's done it in just about every film up to this point so maybe it was part of his contract. If being a bulked-up heartthrob was as big a priority to Cage as I think it was then there's no question in my mind why he took a role in a cheapo period picture that required him to pump iron for most of its running time. You almost feel like he's pushing his body to the limit just to please you and show you how dedicated he is to his craft. IMDb user "anonymous" certainly thinks so.

Which is not to say Cage doesn't act with the rest of his body. In one great scene a bunch of snooty, stuffed-shirts are talking about the way Cage smells behind his back to a high society lady. Cage confronts them with, "You want to know how I bathe, Miss?" He then throws his drink in a dude's face and rubs that dude's face against his own [Cage's] chest. "AND THEN I SCRUB BEHIND THE EARS!" he yells.

Another sequence has Cage being trained by a broad, Irish, Paulie Pennino-type (to whom Cage is nothing more than "a piffle in the wind"). I don't even know how to describe the face Cage makes behind his back, so here, you describe it:

Ultimately, though, the real star of The Boy in Blue is a proud sense of Canadian exceptionalism sprinkled with a jingoism. To set Hanlan up for the world championship regatta in England we are introduced to his opponent, Edward Trickett. Trickett, the first Australian world champion in any sport and holder of the world record before Hanlan, is presented as a heel and unscrupulous bastard. Just lookitim.

Edward Trickett (bastard) telling Hanlan he'll be "pissing down [his] backside this Saturday."

The Boy in Blue posits that it's only because of Trickett's unsportsmanlike taunting during an American Regatta (prompted by that villain, Col. Knox, of course) that Hanlan loses his cool and rams his boat, only to be banned for life from sculling in the US. Leaving behind the snakelike Australians and fickle Americans, Hanlan returns to his little corner of Canada, where a hero is treated like a hero. As he steps off the steamer he is greeted by crowds of singing children and smiling townsfolk. "To Hell with those bastards," shouts a man. "We still love ya!"

After the one-two-three-four punch of serious-yet-flawed Cage movies from Rumble Fish to Birdy, The Boy in Blue is a treat. It's so silly and it plays so loose with its own history that its educational aspirations totally undo themselves.  Lightweight as it is, the wave of Nicolas Cage's marvelous Golden Age is just beginning to swell, cresting with his next four movies: Peggy Sue Got Married, Raising Arizona, Moonstruck and Vampire's Kiss all in a row. Now that's real history!