Montreal Gazette
19 November 2005
Rocketing to social change
Did 1955 Richard riot ignite Quebec? 'Responsible for the first revolution of French Canada in the modern era'
by Brendan Kelly
Did The Rocket start the Quiet Revolution? There is certainly no shortage of people who believe that the Forum riot in the spring of 1955 was one of the first rumblings that big things were about to change in Quebec.
The fans went nuts in the arena and on the surrounding streets that night because Maurice (The Rocket) Richard had been suspended for the rest of the season, including the playoffs, for slugging a linesman a few nights earlier at the Boston Garden. But many people, including everyone associated with the new biopic Maurice Richard, are convinced that mob's anger was about something more than hockey.
Sure they were peeved with the ruling of National Hockey League president Clarence Campbell, but they were even more furious that French Canada's national hero was being mistreated by the Anglophones running the NHL at the time.
The film from director Charles Binamé opens and closes with the riot, and the filmmakers make it abundantly clear they think this is a defining moment in modern Quebec history. That's one of the surprises of a film that so easily could've been a feature-length Hallmark-card-like update of the sanctimonious Heritage Minute on The Rocket. As soon as it was announced that uber-producer Denise Robert, leading distributor Alliance Atlantis and matinee-idol Roy Dupuis were teaming up for the big-screen version of the Richard story, cynics figured it could easily be a travesty.
But the film - which opens across the province Friday - is anything but. Thanks to Ken Scott's well-researched, hard-hitting script, Maurice Richard turns out to be a tough, no-bs story that's all about politics and hockey, arguably Quebec's two defining obsessions.
"Maurice Richard is responsible for the first revolution of French Canada in the modern era," said Dupuis, who previously portrayed The Rocket in the Heritage Minute and in a Radio-Canada TV miniseries. "He's the one who brought together the French-Canadian people who were, at the time, second-class citizens. That was the beginning of the fight. Before that, there was only submission and frustration. We were dominated. The bosses were Anglophones. There was a real injustice at the time and Maurice Richard always fought against injustice. There was nothing that made him madder than being called 'French pea soup' or 'French frog.' You have to wonder: Did The Rocket's incredible intensity on the ice come from all that frustration, from a desire to change things?"
One of the most powerful moments in a film chock full of powerful moments is the scene where legendary Canadiens coach Dick Irvin, played with ferocious intensity by Stephen McHattie, deliberately punches Richard's hot-buttons by throwing a few anti-French racist epithets his way. The look in Richard's eyes when he hears this says everything you need to know about the rage simmering just below the surface of franco Quebec at the time.
Scott, one of the province's most gifted screenwriters, makes the segue from light comedy (La Grande seduction) to dark drama with remarkable ease here, and Scott also makes no apologies for this political take on the Rocket story
Scott was there at the last Canadiens game at the Forum in 1996 when they presented all of the Habs captains, and, like anyone who witnessed the moving ceremony, he was blown away by the emotional 15-minute standing ovation elicited by the appearance of Richard.
Scott admits that Richard was first and foremost a great hockey player and probably wasn't even conscious of his position as a symbol of the seismic changes on the go in Quebec at the time.
"To see a French-Canadian win at something was very important because they were losing at everything else," said Scott.
Alliance Atlantis plans to give Maurice Richard a massive launch in the rest of Canada in March, but will English Canadians be turned off by this political discourse about Richard fighting the oppressive Anglos?
"The film is not a charge against Anglophones," Scott said. "When (Richard's Habs teammate) Butch Bouchard says it's normal that the French Canadian players should speak French on the bench, the film is saying that Francophones have to stand up for themselves and get what was theirs and win some battles. And that was what was important for Maurice Richard.
"He was winning the battles on the ice and that was a metaphor (for winning the off-ice battles). I just tried to write as accurately as possible about what was happening in the '40s and '50s."