An ambitious young football star is trapped in a dying mill town--unless his gridiron skills can win him a way out.
Sensitive study of a headstrong high school football star who dreams of getting out of his small Western Pennsylvania steel town with a football scholarship. His equally ambitious coach aims at a college position, resulting in a clash which could crush the player's dreams.—Jerry Milani <[email protected]>
For old-fashioned movie-making and salt-of-the-earth values, this drama has all the right elements. Tom Cruise is an ambitious teen trapped in a dying mill town--unless his football skills can bring him a college scholarship. His chances look good, but will a clash with coach Craig T. Nelson ruin his dreams? A stirring story, laced with realistic gridiron action and romance.
"All the Right Moves" is set in the fictitious, declining small steel mill town of Ampipe (short for the fictitious American Pipe works), typical of many such towns and mills situated in southwestern Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh.
The movie was filmed in 1983 in part in the city of Johnstown, PA, one such town.
The present writer of this synopsis lives in the real town of Ambridge on the Ohio River northwest of Pittsburgh, so named for the American Bridge works that once prospered here. Since the 70s and 80s we have witnessed the closing of a number of mills and the further deterioration of several of our old steel towns, which were once booming. So-called brown fields have often replaced once proud, industrial sites. Boarded up store fronts and now vacant factories with their rows of broken windows cast a dark shadow.
In the film, Stefen is a bright high school football student athlete who hopefully sees his sports accomplishments as his ticket to a college scholarship, an engineering degree, and life beyond the hopelessness of a dying mill town. Run-ins with the coach, however, dash those hopes when Stefen is cut from the team for his 'attitude' problem.
Here is a sometimes painful, sometimes touching look behind the scenes at adolescence in the often-tough, often-coarse world of the small, increasingly depressed towns of industrial America.
