Glory Road

This was enjoyable enough to watch on an early Friday evening, but it's really something of a bizarre film. Basic narrative elements like a conflict that lasts more than one scene seem to go missing. The team doesn't seem to need to overcome anything in particular to achieve greatness. It's just that by recruiting black players and putting a lot of them on the floor, Texas Western manages to field a really great team that cruises through the regular season and then, just as you would expect, faces some tough games in the NCAA Tournament. The other thing is that, to a contemporary audience, it's just almost impossible to believe that people were ever so racist as to not believe that black people could play basketball well. You're so trained in the contemporary mindset where the "racist" view is that black people are intrinsically better at basketball and the "anti-racist" view is that black people just happen to be better at basketball that nothing about this seems plausible. When you look at Kentucky's five white dudes on the court against Texas Western's five black dudes, Kentucky looks intuitively like the underdogs no matter how many times the movie instructs you that they're the favorites.