My notes refer to our main character, Rick, as “the early-70s version of the man-child.” He has impulse-control problems. He’s well-known in his small Saskatchewan town, and doesn’t want to move to a bigger town because nobody would know him there. He envisions himself as the Marshall of his little town, even dressing the part. Rick doesn’t get along great with local law enforcement. He punches people, he sleeps with a lot of women, and he is the star player on his municipal hockey team.
Best thing I can say about this 1973 movie is that the on-ice camerawork is solid.
Rick’s buddy is married. His buddy’s wife wants the buddy to move to another town to get better vocational training so they can have a better life, but the buddy is resistant because that other town doesn’t have a hockey team.
Did I mention that Rick sleeps around? Loretta is his steady girlfriend, but he sleeps with his boss’s daughter on the regular. He also sleeps with a woman a few towns over who called the cops on him when he twisted her arm.
The buddy reminds Rick that in a courtroom, that’s called assault. But lest you think this movie is progressive for its time, he then offers this advice: “One way to handle a woman … first you gotta strip her down … you take her and you lay her across your knees and you give her a real hard whack … you see, what that does, it gets her blood rushing to her ass, and it gets her hotter than hell. And you just screw the beejeezees out of her and she’s 100% again.”
Loretta asks why Rick doesn’t propose to her. He says that if they get married, one day some woman would be wavin’ her tits in his face, and he would sleep with her. And he couldn’t do that to Loretta, he loves her too much. That’s not a word-for-word quote, but it’s pretty darn close. They have this conversation in the showers after some skating and puck work.
My favorite moment in the movie is toward the end, where there is a tense standoff between Rick and some local policemen. Loretta is trying to talk Rick into acting sensibly. A man on a tractor slowly drives across the street in the middle of the standoff. “Rick, Loretta,” he says, nodding to them. They nod back. After he passes, the movie resumes.
The plot of the movie is the consequences of Rick’s actions slowly catching up to him, and his (poor) reaction to that. The movie is called Paperback Hero, and I believe it’s named for a piece of the only notable song on the soundtrack, Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind.” I’m going to quote the relevant stanza, which will also tell you how the movie ends:
If I could read your mind, love
What a tale your thoughts could tell
Just like a paperback novel
The kind the drugstore sells
When you reach the part where the heartaches come
The hero would be me
But heroes often fail
And you won’t read that book again
Because the ending’s just too hard to take