The Travolta/Cage Project #12 The Boy in Blue (1986)
Definitely the cover of a movie that takes place in the 19th century.
Well, friends, we have made it to yet another movie that I never would have even thought about watching and writing about had I not committed myself to experiencing EVERY movie John Travolta and Nicolas Cage have made over the course of their sometimes glorious, sometime spotty careers, for this column and the Travolta/Cage podcast despite my deep love for both of these actors.
That’s because 1986’s The Boy in Blue, an inspirational racing drama about real-life Canadian hero Ned Hanley is terribly obscure. It’s not available via streaming stateside so I had to buy a DVD, then overnight it to Clint for twenty-five dollars so he could be underwhelmed by it as well. But I’ve also happily skipped/ignored the early Cage vehicle because it’s a historical sports drama, a sub-genre I could not find less engaging. It’s not just a historical sports drama: it’s a goddamn movie about the sport of sculling.
What the fuck is sculling you ask? According to the ever so hyperbolic words that begin The Boy in Blue, “Before baseball, football or soccer, one sport alone captured the imaginations of both rich and poor—sculling. The masses turned out by the thousands to cheer their heroes as they battled on the water, while gamblers won and lost fortunes on their outcome.”
Sculling is essentially solo rowing, a sport and tradition The Boy in Blue tries very hard to make seem fascinating, important and cinematic. It fails.
As we’ve already seen, when Nicolas Cage connected with a role he was willing, even eager to go to masochistic extremes to play it as intensely and unforgettably as possible, whether that meant losing 15 pounds, having two teeth removed and sleeping with his head in bandages for weeks for Birdy or eating a live cockroach for Vampire’s Kiss.
Cage’s reputation as a method actor makes his stubborn unwillingness to do ANYTHING to accommodate the demands of playing a nineteenth century Canadian. Hanlan may have been a legendary Canadian hero born in 1855 but Cage plays him instead as an American time-traveler whose vibe never stops being “cocky Los Angeles dude from the mid-1980s.”
Cage is among our most contemporary of performers, which makes his early appearances in period fare like Racing With the Moon and The Cotton Club all the more puzzling, but he’s never been as distractingly, inappropriately modern the way he is here. Cage stops just short of ad-libbing references to Pac-Man or Ronald Reagan to really broadcast just how little he cares about verisimilitude.
My wife wandered in when I was about half-finished with The Boy in Blue and asked why Cage was wearing modern clothes in a period movie because the workout garb Cage wears while exercising or crushing the riveting world of sculling, including any number of headbands, sure looks like leisurewear from the Reagan decade rather than the 19th century.
Dude might as well be rocking a Speedo.
The Boy in Blue is notable mostly for its hats and its mustaches. Everyone has a very fancy, elaborate mustache and hat and wears at least six or seven layers of fancy clothes at all times with the exception of hero Ned Hanley (Cage), who is frequently unclothed, the better to reveal his ridiculously shredded frame and eight-pack abs and clean-shaven baby face.
I assumed, foolishly, that Hanley must have bucked tradition by being the only man in 19th century Canada not to rock an elaborate mustache, or Cage would be a proud member of the film’s mustache brigade. Nope! A quick glance at Google images reveals that Hanley sported a handsome mustache just like everyone else in the movie much, if not most of his adult life.
Alas, this appeared to be yet another instance of Cage refusing to do the bare minimum necessary to play a person who actually existed, although The Boy in Blue predictably transforms the raw material of Hanley’s life into a thin pudding of underdog cliches and melodrama so overwrought that I felt like I was watching an SCTV sketch parodying one of those movies only Canadians know and care about that somehow morphed into an actual movie.
At least Cage got into ridiculously good shape to play a world-class athlete, although considering how amazing he looked this whole decade it would be more accurate to say that he remained in male-model shape to play yet another brash young hunk defined by his sweaty physicality and overpowering hunkiness.
In that respect, The Boy in Blue represents at once the apex and the nadir for the Hollywood super-hunk/athlete stage of Cage’s career, when he’d already established himself as a talented comic and dramatic actor with real presence and intensity, but was still as known for being a stud with an amazing body as he was for his eccentricity and talent.
The Boy in Blue opens with its scruffy underdog hero just barely eking out a living bootlegging before his incredible sculling skills are discovered by Bill (David Naughton), a mustached dandy of questionable ethics who realizes that he can make a fortune for himself, and possibly for the raw but talented young rower as well, by getting Hanley to face off against real competition.
Hanlan is a diamond in the rough when Bill finds him. Like so many characters Cage played early in his career, this is one Canadian national hero who FUCKS. Hanlan drinks too much, he chases women of ill repute and has no respect for propriety or his ostensible social betters, most notably various snobs from the world of Harvard and Yale.
Hanlan’s incredible natural gift for sculling quickly makes him a big name in the world of sculling, among fans, gamblers and competitors alike but his brash swagger and irreverent personality—he’s straight up the Poochie of the 19th century skulling the world, he has so much ‘tude—make a controversial figure, especially after he’s banned from racing in the United States after attacking another sculler’s boat during a match.
Along the way he dallies with women of wealth and distinction, makes powerful friends and enemies, helps sculling evolve as a sport and a cultural tradition and a bunch of other bullshit I had an awfully hard time giving a mad-ass fuck about. Cage has made many, many bad movies over the course of his career, to the point where he and Travolta have become synonymous with sub-par cinema. Yet Cage has never made a movie that was bad in quite the same way as The Boy in Blue, in no small part because it is an INTENSELY Canadian movie about a historical figure Canadians revere because he accomplished the impossible and beat Americans at something with an INTENSELY American, Southern Californian lead performance from Cage.
Late in the film Cage as Hanlan tries to keep a posh woman he’s in love with from returning to her fancy boyfriend, arguing adorably, “Don’t do it, Maggie! He’s a wet goose! He takes two hours to get dressed in the morning! He’d bore you silly! He’s going bald, Maggie! He uses Dr. Morse’s Hair Promoter! Bald and boring!”
In moments like this, The Boy in Blue realizes its enormous potential for unintentional self-parody. I wish the whole film was Cage calling rich rivals wet gooses and accusing them of using Dr. Morse’s Hair Promoter. But explosions of old-timey color like that are the exception rather than the rule, alas.
At this stage in his career, Cage unmistakably had a bit of a Matthew McConaughey thing going on. I am a heterosexual man but I spent much of The Boy in Blue waiting for him to take his shirt off because holy shit did he ever look good half-naked as a young man.
Cage would of course become legendary for his talent, personality and eccentricity but early on it was all about his buff physique, sexiness and smoldering good looks.
At the end of The Boy in Blue we learn that our rebellious hero went on to completely dominate his sport before retiring and running for public office and winning in a landslide.
I found that surprising because The Boy in Blue depicts Hanlon as a guy who doesn’t seem interested in anything other than winning, chasing women and sticking it to uptight society folks. But apparently he became a successful politician, possibly because he also legislated while shirtless.
Unless you are a Nicolas Cage completist, there is absolutely no reason to track down The Boy in Blue. It’s not worth the money or the hassle. If you just want to ogle Cage’s body, meanwhile, you’re better off with Valley Girl and Racing With the Moon, where he gets to act and play a real character and not just be almost disconcertingly sexy.
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