Knight-Errant Hoosiers

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

The first time Coach Norman Dale (Gene Hackman) meets his new team, everyone witnessing the encounter knows intuitively that whatever obstacles lie in their path, the Hickory Huskers are going to win the high school basketball championship of Indiana this season.

This conviction arises not from any air of promise about them but from their total lack of it. Norman and his charges are such stuff as Rocky Balboa and the Karate Kid are made of -- not to mention old Frank Capra movies. The coach is a Knight-errant, a good man with a blemish on his record that only redemptive labors can expunge. The players are few in number and woefully lacking in any natural gift for the game. Worse, Hickory's only talented hoopster has quit the squad, and the townsfolk do not care for Norman's outsider independence. All the Huskers have going for them is that they are undermutts representing a very small, very poor town. But as every moviegoer knows, that is a guarantee that in the end, they are going to win big. And, just possibly, as every moviemaker dares hope, gross big.

Still, if some cynical calculation attended the making of Hoosiers, some honest craft went into it as well. Someone remembered, or went to the trouble of finding out, how it felt to live in a small Midwestern town in the 1950s, when there was nothing better to chew on than last week's game and nothing better to savor than next Friday's. By laconically contrasting images of despair and hope -- bleak winter fields and the throbbing heat and noise of a jam-packed gym in the fourth quarter when the game is close -- Director Anspaugh achieves an admirable objectivity. He neither condemns nor justifies the sporting passion when it is distorted by claustrophobic pressure. He just tries to understand it.

A similar spirit moves in his actors. Hackman is wonderful as an inarticulate man tense with the struggle to curb a flaring, mysterious anger. Barbara Hershey is just as fine as a teacher trying to put a dispassionate face on a passionate nature. And Dennis Hopper brings some fresh, forceful observation and a jittery melancholy to his characterization of a onetime star athlete who has become the town drunk. There is a quirky authenticity about these figures, and the landscape they inhabit, that one does not expect to find in movies whose chief business is to warm the heart, not to inform it. Hoosiers may not transcend the banality of its story line, but it does take its shot. And comes close to making the movie equivalent of a three-point play.