http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/story.html?id=ee120233-19ef-43ac-9618-f8fd867744e4&k=8364

When Dick Irvin Jr. sat down to watch the movie on the life and times of Maurice Richard, he wondered how his father, the Habs coach in the '40s and '50s, would be portrayed


Dick Irvin Jr. had been warned long before he bought a ticket for a Forum matinee of The Rocket, Charles Biname's film on the life and times of Maurice Richard.

Irvin had been told that his late father, the Canadiens coach from

1940-55, through the Rocket's most glorious and turbulent days, is strongly portrayed by veteran Canadian actor Stephen McHattie. So strongly, in fact, that some see Irvin Sr. as a pinstriped tyrant with a deep intolerance for the French language.

But when the film opened with the 1955 Richard Riot, the coach in a volcanic rage upon learning his team is forfeiting the game to Detroit, a son simply settled back and watched not his father on the big screen, but an actor playing a role.

"My mother and I used to talk about how calm Dad was the night of the riot," Irvin says.

Then 23, he'd been in the press box keeping statistics for the Canadiens and was at his father's side as the violent mayhem unfurled in all its ghastly wonder, having been hit in the face with a cloud of tear gas.

"I was chicken," Irvin recalls. "I wanted to get in the car and go straight home, but Dad wanted to drive around town and see what was going on."

The dark study of Richard by director Biname and screenwriter Ken Scott is a dramatic look at an athlete who transcended the sporting life.

It is scrupulously true to much of the era and its people. But it also takes a few liberties in shaping the Rocket, searingly played by Roy Dupuis, as the catalyst for a political and cultural revolution that would sweep Quebec.

In making Richard this kind of hero, the script requires an antagonist. It finds a few, first in the acid English tongue of young Richard's machine-shop boss, and later in Irvin, an anglophone coach who, with managers Tommy Gorman and Frank Selke Sr., is imported to run the Canadiens.

Richard must lead his disciples against not just five NHL teams, but also the anglos who for decades have held them tightly in check off the ice.

The film suggests this both with and without a subtle hand.

"They've exaggerated my father's personality a bit, turned him up a notch or two from what he really was," Irvin says.

"But I was satisfied with the movie. It captured the era."

Irvin phoned McHattie a few days ago. It was their third conversation, twice having spoken pre-production last summer as the actor sought to get a feel for the man he'd portray.

Irvin's input also was sought by writer Ken Scott and Martin Lacroix, who managed the hockey casting and choreography. The two were particularly interested in Richard's legendary goal that won Game 7 of the 1952 Stanley Cup semifinal against Boston, returning to the ice concussed and bloodied to score a game-winner he wouldn't remember.

"I told Stephen that he had a role to play and he played it very well," Irvin says of his talk with McHattie. "I didn't feel strange watching the movie, as he thought I might have.

"In fact, I got a kick out of it as it unfolded, no matter what was happening on the screen. They took poetic licence with my father's character to a degree, but I had no problem with that.

"I kidded Stephen that he could have taken his hat off on the train, and he laughed."

Though a few details bend the truth, Irvin was impressed by the film's attention to detail.

Irvin Sr. trained and showed dogs in Western Canada as an offseason hobby. In the movie, he is seen with a miniature pinscher and a collie, two of his breeds; he never had the animals in Montreal, however, where the film puts one on his lap and the other on a leash.

There is a scene that former Canadien Floyd Curry loved to relate to Irvin Jr., in which the coach hauls a net into the dressing room, holds up a puck, and wonders aloud why his players can't put an object this small into an object this large.

The rookie Richard storms out of the dressing room at one point, leaving a trail of sticks in his wake, when Irvin tells him he won't play that night. The film accurately has the coach turn to his players to say: "That's the guy I want playing for my team."

McHattie is true down to the scar on Irvin's cheek, suffered as a player when cut by the skate of New York Rangers' Butch Keeling, and his fedora, wool suits, watch chain, pocket watch and chewing gum.

But a few things miss, such as Irvin trying to motivate his French players by bitterly calling them pea-soupers, a racist insult that his son and Elmer Lach, the Rocket's centreman on the Punch Line, say would never have passed his lips.

Not once does Lach recall Irvin challenging Richard face to face.

"He'd yell at Toe Blake, who sat on one side of the Rocket in the dressing room, and at Kenny Reardon on the other," Lach said. "Irvin knew which guys he could whip. The Rocket wasn't one of them."

Richard charges into Irvin's Forum office in 1955 to learn he has been suspended by NHL president Clarence Campbell, the prelude to the March 17 riot. In the office is Lach, played by the Phoenix Coyotes' Mike Ricci, but Lach had in fact retired in 1954.

And near the film's end, Irvin visits Richard in a tavern to explain why he'd handled the superstar as he had.

"My dad was never in a bar in his life," Irvin says. "But I didn't mind the scene, because it kind of sets the record straight with the Rocket. Richard listens, but he says nothing. And my dad doesn't wait for an answer.

"My father was portrayed as (the film) wanted. I'm not upset by that. And it seems to me that when you watch a football movie, the coaches are always the hyper guys, aren't they?"

dstubbs@thegazette.canwest.com

© The Gazette (Montreal) 2005