source: Number One

At age 37 Aaron Rodgers is quickly becoming the next Ron Catlan. Is there a remake of this movie in the ready? Maybe they could get Adam Sandler to play his part. This movie was much better than I expected based on the rating. The acting was above average and Jessica Walter was superb. Sorry to see that she and Mike Henry both just recently passed away in 2021. Charlton Heston always delivers a worthy performance regardless of how good the picture is and John Randall played the head coach perfectly. 7/10.

The faded star-quarterback for the New Orleans Saints, over-the-hill at 40 and nursing a bad knee, considers retirement after an anonymous source disparages his season performances in print. Character rumination stacks the deck against our embittered hero: he's offered a management position with a computer firm and another job leasing cars (both offers are seen as dead-ends), while his unhappy wife is ready to walk out and a former teammate comes to him begging for a loan ($200!). Screenplay by David Moessinger is full of cynical one-liners substituting for insight into these unfulfilled people, while the football milieu is used mainly as a backdrop to the melodramatic action off the field. Charlton Heston is all wrong as an athlete--just because the man is tall and lean doesn't mean he's an ideal candidate for a football uniform. Heston is also unusually harsh with spouse Jessica Walter, who tired quickly of the Football Wives circle and now runs her own successful fashion business (Heston insults her creativity, equating it with an apparent inability to conceive a child; she slaps at him, he grabs her, and they end up making love). Director Tom Gries offers us only a flicker of insight into the world of professional football. He tries avoiding gridiron clichés, and his narrative timeline is interestingly woozy (mixing staccato flashbacks with bits of reality and, maybe, delusion), but the overall mood of the piece is unbelievably morose. Moessinger really does appear to believe that 40 means you're finished, washed-up. Heston may have felt there was something in the script he could play, something substantial and (atypical for the actor) not-heroic, but the picture isn't convincing. The foundation of the story--an aging man's fear that he's no longer useful after outgrowing his profession--is a good dramatic starting point for a character portrait (and still feels relatively fresh today), yet the writing is pretentious and dishonest. As to the downbeat finale, it underlines the pervading message that we're all "whores", like it or not. ** from ****

Heston plays a character you can easily dislike as a pouty jerk spoiled old man. Yes I say old man because he looks old as dirt playing tris QB who should instead he considering a retirement community.

"Number One" is a very unusual movie. It's one of Charlton Heston's least familiar movies and it's a portrait of an aging pro quarterback who is about as likable as Ebola. He also is pretty pathetic as he refuses to grow old gracefully and retire. Ron Catlan (Heston) is the starting quarterback for the New Orleans Saints. His best years are behind him and a rookie is biting at his heels and is aching to replace him. But instead of accepting that it's time to hang up his cleats, he deals with aging by sulking, pushing away his lovely wife and having a sad mid-life crisis. The film would be a hard one to recommend for many viewers, as Ron is just a jerk. But I appreciate it because it shows a darker side of professional sports....and as a portrait of a flawed man, it's well crafted. For me, there was an aspect of the film that was sloppy....though I doubt if many younger viewers would see this problem. Unlike most football films, this one features REAL NFL teams....and in the movie, Catlan is supposed to have started his career with the saints...about 15-20 years earlier. But the Saints played their first season in 1968...and so the timeline just doesn't make sense. It also doesn't make a lot of sense to have used Heston, as he was 46 when he made the film....and he seemed a bit too old to be playing Catlan. Still, despite these errors, the film is compelling. My wife, who hates sports, STILL enjoyed the film and watched it with me. I think it's because the movie really isn't about sports but is about a man who cannot face the truth about himself. If you do see this film (it's currently on the TUBI channel on Amazon Fire/Roku), you might find yourself laughing at the sex scene late in the movie. It's use of slow motion and intercutting scenes is clumsy to say the least.

Charlton Heston's second of three films with director Tom Gries was this film set in the world of pro football. Heston plays a quarterback who's seen his best days, but just wants to hear the roar of the crowd. I can't think of another reason he could possibly have to stay. Later on his career Heston played in a really great film about pro football, Any Given Sunday where he played the Commissioner of the game. Number One is seen from a different angle, that of the player who sees nothing out there for him when he's through hence he keeps going. Heston has not even heard too many cheers lately, in fact in a bad performance as the film opens he gets quite a few boos. Sports fans can be mighty fickle. Football has a caste system more than any other team sports. The glamor guys are the backfield and the line are the grunts whose job it is to protect the glamorous ones who score the points. Two other portrayals of aging football players that of Roy Jenson and Bruce Dern. Jenson has one scene with Heston where he hits him up for a touch after a game and briefly and movingly describes his rather bitter life after the career was over. Dern is different. As he puts it so eloquently he'd play a game on Sunday and he'd hurt through Tuesday. When he started hurting through Saturday it was time to quit. Smart man, as a running back and a glamor guy buy definition he's used his celebrity to build a nice profitable automobile leasing business and is looking to diversify. Next to Heston I liked him best in the film. Dern typifies something that Stan Musial said about baseball. He knew when to quit when just getting into the uniform and playing a kid's game for lots of money ceased to be fun. Heston should have heeded his and Dern's advice. A couple of women in Heston's life are wife Jessica Walter and football groupie Diana Muldaur. Walter has a very successful fashion designing business and hangs around with a crowd that Heston hates. It's the whole macho thing with Heston, but he also envies the fact they and the wife are making a success of something they love and are talented in. Number One ranks up there with other great football films like the aforementioned Any Given Sunday. Heston paid great tribute to Tom Gries as a great director in his memoirs. His three films with Heston, Will Penny, Number One, and The Hawaiians give testimony to that.

This is a good date movie if you and your date don't want to watch the movie. The young lady I was with wanted me to pay attention to her, so I did. We had a wonderful time "paying attention" to each other. By the way, we both thought it was a lousy movie - it took about 15 minutes to figure out that Charlton Heston did not make a credible football player, washed up or otherwise, and he didn't do such a great job with the straight acting, either. I do remember Heston opening the blouse of the character played by Diana Muldaur. Diana was a babe in those days, in that '60s, long-flowing dark hair, eye-shadow junkie makeup style. Unintentionally funny were some of the lines mumbled by a few real-life New Orleans Saints football players of the era - Dan Abramowicz, Doug Atkins (a very large human being), and another one who delivered what was supposed to be a locker room go-get-em speech. Sounded like he swallowed his mouth guard. Like I said, a great date movie if you don't want to watch the movie.

Chuck Heston is not a football star, but an actor playing one. I laugh at the comments made by the other comments here; expecting Chuck to play like a pro. That's why they call it acting. Truthfully, football is only a backdrop for a story about a faded legend trying to hold on to his career by the skin of his teeth. It's an interesting tale of all of us; facing the reality of old age. Being that this was filmed in the late 1960s, it has a real 60s flair to it, which to me makes it kind of neat. I liked the "surprise" ending. Number One is not the greatest movie ever made, but it is a decent entertaining flick.

In the 1980's when people first began buying VCR's, and critics educated consumers by summarizing and rating hundreds of films, I enjoyed browsing in bookstores and reading comments about both my favorite and least favorite movies. When I could never find "Number One" in any video guide, I wondered if Charleton Heston hadn't interceded to demand that no company make this movie available on videotape. I first saw "Number One" not long after its release in the fall of 1969. An 8th grader at the time and an avid professional sports fan, I sat in the theater and anxiously awaited the start of a film about a professional football team and its past-his-prime star quarterback. As the curtains began to part, professional football players, much larger than life on the movie screen, charged toward me and the rest of the audience. Feeling more like I was attending an NFL game than a full-length film, I excitedly named to myself the players that I recognized. Unfortunately, those first few minutes proved to be the high point of the story. For the most part the attempt to blend NFL players and actual game footage with actors and created situations didn't succeed. Repeatedly, # 17, Ron Catlan (Charleton Heston), dropped back to pass, looked 20 yards down field for a receiver, set his feet, then drew back his right arm. As he began to release the ball, though, he abruptly transformed into another #17, the true New Orleans Saints quarterback, Bill Kilmer, whose athleticism and spiraling passes contrasted noticeably with Catlan's mechanical style. Catlan's undersized helmet and ill-fitting uniform contributed to Heston's awkwardness. If I remember correctly, his comparatively large body stood out even amongst some of those who blocked for him. The makers of this movie did include some realism by showing that near the age of 40 an accomplished professional athlete, rather than quietly and humbly making the transition to the non-playing phase of his life, may endure much frustration, which he sometimes acts out recklessly. Ron Catlan, not unlike plenty of the professional athletes of that era and of any other, berated his wife and eventually betrayed her trust. However, since the dialogue during these segments sounded less than believable -- "You can't even produce a damn baby!" he shouted at his wife during a quarrel as he pinned her against the kitchen table -- the scenes that did not require Charleton Heston to play football compensated little for the inauthenticity of the ones that did. So... rather than make me believe that I was witnessing a legendary football player who is struggling to accept the end of his playing career, the movie constantly reminded me that I was observing a legendary actor, unsuited this time for the role he had agreed to play.

This movie erupts a devastating bluntness that effortlessly shatters everyone!! Coming to grips with the fact that your life is not the way it is suppose to be, has Charlton Heston and Jessica Walters in a permanent state of flux!! The movie audience cannot always empathize with the idea that the main characters in the movie are the culprits, but, often times, this is the case!! The term "Has Been" is now as crippling as the term "Never Will Be"!!! Relationships and infidelity end at sexual consummation or boredom, and reveille with candor and fate are the real punishments for everyone in this film!! This movie was extremely realistic and the acting was effective!! Many issues that Charlton Heston struggled with will never be solved.. His character is such whereby he knows his days as a professional football player are over, but he cannot accept this at all!! That being said, he concocts a myriad of reasons as to why his life no longer makes sense!! This movie is excellent because it portrays human inadequacy in a way a lot of films do not!! Experimentation with what might remedy everybody's arctic desolation becomes relegated to one morally impervious endeavor after the next! Unfortunately, this happens a lot more than we would like to think!! A composite rude awakening with bitter reality pursuant to the future is the instrument that makes this movie powerful!! I give it a thumbs up!!