The Basketball Fix shoots an airball
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
The CCNY point-shaving scandal.
The story
I don't recall how 1951's extremely, um, 1951 The Basketball Fix wound up on my watchlist, but the NBA postseason seemed like the perfect time to take a look at a contemporary scripted take on the gambling contretemps that threatened to overwhelm not just CCNY and the six other colleges implicated, but the fledgling pro game as well.
As it turns out, there isn't really a "perfect time," because The Basketball Fix isn't worth your time – even if you don't have to pay to watch it, which I did, and even though it's only 64 minutes long, because it feels much longer. The film isn't incompetently done; the actors, almost all of them mid-century Hey, It's That Killer Of The Week's Lawyer!s or poor man's versions of bigger names, do a decent job with stodgy social-hygiene exposition about the nature of the central crime. And Eisenhower-era styling makes "freshmen" already in their late twenties look even more obviously too old, but that's not the cast's fault. At least Marshall Thompson (Daktari) as Johnny Long can shoot it.
But as I scrawled soggy dialogue like "Santy Claus won't be coming this year" on my notepad and wondered desultorily how such a historically prudish age squared itself with these skimpy uniform shorts, I started to wonder if the problem isn't the topic itself. I reviewed Inside Game in this space a few years ago, and diagnosed that movie's problem thusly:
I could say most of that about The Basketball Fix as well; TBF's cast isn't as facile with the point-spread explanation, and the script thinks we need many more scenes than we do, paced far more slowly than we do, that underline Johnny's motivations for changing his mind about a series of offers from the oleaginous Mike Taft (The Oregon Trail's William Bishop). But then the writing has law enforcement yoinking players off the court during a championship game (without calling a time-out, in one instance); this may have happened in just that way, and I understand narratively why that has to happen onscreen, but the story hasn't really established why it would have had to happen in life, like, statutorily.
But as I said, perhaps it's just the nature of a story like this that it seems eminently cinematic on paper – gangsters! skeptical journos! half-court shots! – but, in a straight telling of it, there's just not much there there. The Basketball Fix I think dimly understands that, and is maybe trying to do a Frank Capra thing, giving you a lot of texture and little character runners so the audience is more invested in the outcome of a comparatively straightforward story.
It understands less well how to do a Frank Capra thing, though, or how to proportion it. I saw a couple of the ingredients, like Taft's horoscope-obsessed moll Lily (Hazel Brooks), whose dry response to Taft's "What a dribble!" – "Don't say that, he's a nice boy" – gave me a chuckle. So did the coach's (Walter Sande, Bad Day At Black Rock) Rusty Ryan-esque appetite. And if you like the 2BR sportcoats and handfuls of brilliantine that characterize the style of that time, you'll find something to enjoy here. (Taft's dainty poolside huaraches will probably stay with me longer than any of the plot elements, tbf.)
But as true crime, it doesn't do anything the Wikipedia entry can't. (Then again, the Wikipedia entry can't seem to nail down what became of implicated NBA ref Sol Levy, so if someone's got reading or a documentary to recommend about that, let's hear it in the comments.) - SDB