The Boy in Blue (1986) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

The Boy in Blue is theoretically a historical film about the life of the great Canadian sculler Ned Hanlon, who dominated world competition in the late 1870s and early 1880s, and who was honored by a postage stamp. More precisely, this film is to Ned Hanlan's life what "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" is to the lives of those famous outlaws, which is to say the resemblance stops at the character's name and a few general facts.

I can sum up my thoughts in three brief sentences.

1. A very good movie could be made about the life of Ned Hanlan

2.  This is not a very good movie.

3.  At any rate, good or not, this movie has very little to do with the life of Ned Hanlan

The rest of the review is just going to elaborate on those points.

As the story is told here, Ned was a championship bootlegger who developed his rowing skills by getting away from the coppers. It plays out like Thunder Road on water. Some colorful characters discovered Ned and turned him pro in order to make their own fortunes in what was essentially a crooked professional sport. Throughout his career, Ned continued to be a naive small-town boy at heart, to refuse to throw races, and to demonstrate excellent sportsmanship despite being constantly taunted by the uppity college-educated snobs who comprised his competition. He was always the underdog. Ned was played by a tall, clean-shaven, muscular Nic Cage (who was in magnificent shape.)

Yeah, right.

In reality, Ned was a tiny guy, 5'8", 155, but nonetheless a mustachioed roughneck who competed in a rough world of gamblers and swindlers. He took a lot of guff from his competitors, but he gave back more than he took. He was not humble or naive by any stretch of the imagination, and he was never an underdog except maybe in his first race in the USA. He was, in fact, far better than his competitors, and once won 200 races in a row. He was not only good, but also cocky about his superiority. He toyed with his opponents, often humiliating them intentionally to please the crowds. When he raced against Trickett, the Aussie who had been the World Champion,

"Hanlan played with Trickett during the race and then crossed the finish with almost a minute and a half lead. To add insult to injury, Hanlan turned his boat around and rowed down to Trickett, still on the racecourse, turned around again and beat him back to the finish a second time."

In other races, he would finish by discarding one oar and using the other on alternating sides, like a canoe. Imagine Lance Armstrong finishing the Tour de France by carrying his bicycle on this shoulders and giving the razzberry to the French riders. That's the modern day equivalent of Hanlan. This guy made Mohammad Ali seem as modest as Audrey Hepburn. In fact, Hanlan was so famous for his obnoxious hot-dogging against badly beaten opponents that Australian Elias Laycock insisted that clauses in their contract be included that forbade Hanlan from mocking him in the race, or embarrassing him in any other way. Read many more great Hanlan yarns on this excellent page, which is specifically dedicated to professional rowing in the 19th century, and which is also the source of the quotation above.

Oh, yeah, remember that bootlegging thing?

Wrong. The real story is much better. Ned's dad ran a hotel on Toronto Island, and there was no school on the island, so Ned had to row to school every day from the time he was in kindergarten. He had been written up in the Toronto Colonist when he was only five years old, and  had won the Ontario provincial championship three times before his trip to Philadelphia. The film's version is nothing like that.

The film's rendering of the story takes a couple of historical characters (like Ned's business manager, Colonel Shaw), and a few of Ned's more colorful anecdotes in which he was not a complete ass, and jumbles them together in nearly random fashion, often taking facts about one race or one person and using them elsewhere. If you did not know the actors and I told you that this movie was made in 1956 you would never doubt it for a minute. It is a classic mid-fifties Hollywood biopic - silly, inaccurate, and corny. If it really were a 1956 movie, 'twould be bad enough, but it is a Canadian film made in 1986, and these filmmakers really should have known better. It was directed by Charles Jarrott, whose most famous film is the respected Anne of 1000 Days. Jarrott did not do an especially good job on The Boy in Blue. The sports scenes are quite ineffectively edited, and lacking in continuity, to the point where some of the racing footage appears to be out of sequence.  

Read the stories at the link above, and I am certain you will agree with me that Hanlan's story would make a fantastic movie. Unfortunately, this is not it, and is not even Hanlan's story. It's basically a Hollywood formula picture with a sitcom flavor, and cannot be considered historical or biographical at all. It's essentially a grade-B attempt to invoke the spirit of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

... And yet, though it is old-fashioned and trite, and has little relationship to Hanlan's story ... I honestly can't deny that it is actually kind of an easy watch, and a very young Cage does a good job in the lead.