#8: The Boy In Blue (1986)

Hello! My name is Ed and I am trying to win the lottery by watching Nicolas Cage films.

You know how famously popular film Star Wars has that whole writing bit at the beginning where it goes:

“It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire.”

Imagine a film that instead has a writing bit at the beginning that goes:

“Before baseball, football or soccer, one sport alone captured the imagination of both rich and poor — sculling.”

Fuck everything.

The thing about watching and writing about these films twice a week is that between watching them, buying a lottery ticket with numbers inspired by them, waiting for the result and finishing the write up, each one ends up sticking around in my brain for 2–4 days — so this whole era of early Cage mediocre-to-crappy period drama has been a time of fairly low morale.

But bloody hell, The Boy In Blue.

The Boy In Blue is, very loosely, the story of real-life Canadian rowing champion Ned Hanlan, and when I say loosely I mean that had he not died in 1908 some of this would probably have been actionable. Hanlan’s actual biography is more or less: was good at rowing, so it needed a bit of fleshing out.

So there’s some Triumph Against Adversity: Will poor smuggler done good Ned Hanlan win the day and prove he is the goodest at rowing despite the rich rowing barons who want him to lose so they can win a bet or something?

And a Love Story: Ned wants to do some full kissing on rich rowing baron Christopher Plummer’s daughter.

But fundamentally what we’ve got here is just “Damp Rocky” — training montages and everything.

But this is really is damp stuff — if it wasn’t for the fairly appalling (although incredibly tame) sex scenes and everyone shouting ‘Bugger!’ constantly for reasons of dubious historical accuracy, this would pass as an educational TV special for bored Canadian children.

Side note here: it’s notable that almost all of the films I’ve watched for this endeavour have involved superfluous topless ladies. Presumably life before the internet was bad enough that people would buy a ticket to see some rubbish period drama on the off-chance that a lady’s top would fall down.

The storytelling is so mechanically laboured that the cast sleep their way through it — bang out the lines to get through the scene, move on. The film has so little confidence in its ability to make Hanlan’s actual life interesting that it fabricates wildly — most notably falsely suggesting that he was banned from rowing in America after deliberately capsizing a rival’s boat, which is a pretty shitty thing to say about someone.

The film’s main attempt to add colour is it’s truly sub-Police Academy level ‘jokes’. For instance: “You oughta be an actress!” Ned’s manager tells a prostitute who’s just helped them out of a fix. “I am an actress!”, she replies. Then Motormouth Jones does a noise.

Above all this the film’s biggest flaw is a complete failure to capture what might be compelling about rowing as a sport — the tension in the racing scenes always comes from someone having sabotaged Ned’s boat — there’s no question that he might not measure up. Indeed, his ability to recover after his opponents are handed huge leads suggests boat sabotage might be a reasonable handicap.

Cage himself is not on particularly good form — lumbering around alternately grinning stupidly and doing a cross face depending on how much he’s being mugged off by rich people in each scene. His ostensibly Canadian accent vanishes depending on whether he’s remembered to do it. In interviews he’s made it clear that he considered the film at best a ‘learning experience’, and afterwards he had his back tattooed with a fluorescent lizard in a hat to make it harder for directors to cast him in ‘shirtless beefcake’ roles.

The absolute best thing that can be said The Boy In Blue is at just over 90 minutes it is mercifully short. And to think that just 4 weeks ago I was complaining about watching 48 minutes of The Best Of Times.

THE NUMBERS

2 — When Ned is arrested for smuggling or sinning or something, he is thrown into Cell Number 2.

3 — Apparently it will cost Ned $3 a fancy carriage to impressive Margaret, “velvet seats and all”.

10 — At one in the film point some chancer is selling Ned Hanlan pillowcases for 10 cents — 25 cents after he wins! You can actually buy Nicolas Cage pillowcases but sadly they cost a lot more than 10 cents.

20 — Ned buys Margaret a puppy for $20. Remember, puppies are for life, not just trying to impress slightly dull posh women.

40 — The Boy In Blue gets a rowing boat with a special sliding seat that will “put 40 yards on a mile easy”. Whatever the hell that means. It involved the number 40, anyway.

50 — The inventor of the special sliding seat is offered $50,000 for the patent. In fairness, the technology it replaces is apparently rubbing loads of oil over the back of your trousers so I guess I’m in.

THE RESULT

Perplexing. The actual Cage numbers only matched 1 ball, but the Lucky Dip I won last week matched 2, winning a further free Lucky Dip. This whole exercise would have been a lot less complicated if they hadn’t changed the rules of the stupid lottery.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Hopefully I can step back from the ledge as we move beyond Cage’s dreary period drama era, with Francis Ford Coppola’s answer to Back To The Future, Peggy Sue Got Married. Which now I think about it is technically a period drama. SAVE ME FROM MYSELF.