The Boy in Blue - a movie about rowing

I feel like a better Canadian having found out about this Ned Hanlan character, even more so having heard about him through a Nic Cage movie.

My main complaint is that they seem to have gotten the mustaches reversed, as Hanlan appears to have sported a killer stache, while the secondary villain of the piece (rival sculler Edward Trickett - as an aside, it appears to be a champion rower in the 19th century, you must have been known as Ned...) was cleanly shorn.

Oh well.

So Ned Hanlan, in the film, is a guy who earned his massive rowing pipes by running moonshine across the border to the Americans, who gets discovered by a sleazy-then-good-natured-then-sleazy-then-good-natured guy who wants to introduce him to the wide world of 'professional' rowing.

There's a girl involved, as well, of course.

One other thing: Christopher Plummer's in it!

Gee, a movie about one of the first (if not the first) Canadian sporting hero, co-starring one of the most celebrated Canadian actors ever, shot almost entirely in Canada? You'd think this was a Canadian production...

Ta-DA! This blog's first major piece of Can-con!

"But wait!" you say. "Don't Canadian movies usually do... less than spectacularly at the box office?"

Yes. Yes they do. According to IMDB, this movie grossed $275,000. On a budget of nearly eight million.

In today's dollars, though, that's... still abysmal.

No matter, I've watched an entertaining movie, learned a little bit more about Canada's sporting pedigree, and supported, in my own small way, the Canadian film industry of the mid-1980s.

Also, there were plenty of manly sporting montages, which almost always serve to counterbalance the general coolness and awesomeness of athletes by having them make faces like this over and over again in slow motion:

I guess the A/V club never truly forgets high school...

Anyway, if you get a chance to see this movie, you should do it, and now here's the barcode: