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.