Sport
A crusade for nuclear disarmament disguised as a sports film, Amazing Grace and Chuck was also a stinker – but it certainly captured the zeitgeist of a generation fearing world’s end. By Martin McKenzie-Murray.
Amazing Grace and Chuck: sport’s box-office bomb
One of sport’s strangest films might also be one of its worst, but it retains a fascination for me today for the unlikelihood of its existence as well as its status as one of those particular cultural artefacts of the 1980s: the anti-nuclear film.
Amazing Grace and Chuck (1987) was mawkish, ridiculous and now long forgotten. It starred Joshua Zuehlke as Year 7 student Chuck Murdock, a star pitcher in his local Little League in Montana. As the proud son of a fighter pilot, Chuck might have assumed the noble necessity of his country’s defence posture – at least, that is, until a school excursion to one of the several Minuteman III missile silos embedded throughout his state’s Great Plains.
They remain there today: hundreds of nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, designed to be launched within a minute and capable of a range of 13,000 kilometres. Their capacity, and the grim consequences of nuclear war, are relayed to Chuck and his schoolmates with a lack of varnish by their local congressman. But while his mates blithely absorb this information and move on, the precociously sensitive Chuck receives all of this as a terrible nightmare.
Assured of the strict and sober protocols for the weapons’ deployment, Chuck remains unpersuaded and asks penetrating questions of the congressman, who seems incapable of answering without depending upon the prevailing nuclear logic of deterrence. We possess these weapons, he says, so we might never need to use them.
To make his point, the congressman explains the power of the Soviet Union’s corresponding weapons and the need for the United States to possess its own so it might neutralise the threat of a first strike via the capacity to retaliate. Should his sister drop a fork in their kitchen at the precise moment the Russians dropped a nuke on Montana, the congressman tells Chuck, his young sister would be vaporised before her fork hit the floor.
Understandably, Chuck’s terror is not assuaged by this and he wakes in fright that night having dreamt of a blinding flash and the sudden annihilation of everyone he knows.
Poor Chuck’s terror has been aroused, and so too his conscience. Undeterred by his age and anonymity – or his father’s scepticism and the contempt of his teammates – Chuck decides to abandon baseball until the world is entirely rid of nuclear weapons.
Chuck’s protest is written up as a curiosity in the local paper, which happens to catch the eye of basketballer “Amazing Grace” Smith, star player for the Boston Celtics. Grace is played by Alex English, then a major star for the Denver Nuggets, who unusually was given permission to actually play for the Celtics in a preseason match so the filmmakers could capture footage of him in their jersey. (Today, English is almost as obscure as the film he starred in, despite his unusual talent. In a decade that featured Magic Johnson and Larry Bird for all of it, and Dr. J and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for most of it, it was English who was the 1980s’ highest scorer in the NBA.)
Grace is inspired by Chuck and immediately announces his own withdrawal from basketball until the world is cleansed of its nightmare weapons. He moves to Montana, where he purchases a barn to serve as a kind of commune for others, and their unlikely protest snowballs around the world – threatening sports leagues and the profits of a shady and murderously ruthless industrialist.
Once laughed at, Chuck and Grace now have the attention of assassins as well as the US president (played by an aged Gregory Peck, who took almost no money for the role). Even his father comes to begrudgingly respect Chuck and protect him from the violent attentions of local rednecks presumably upset about the prospect of football being cancelled.
It was a “Frank Capra picture for the nuclear age – and I love it”, Peck said at the time. “I had no intention to make a movie now, but this story touched my heart and I had to do it.”
Capra was a fair comparison – the Italian–American director specialised in making “fantasies of goodwill” and compulsively mythologised the influence one brave individual might have against collective inertia or malice.
The sentimentality of Amazing Grace and Chuck was steroidal, its plot unabashedly absurd. But “what the film has on its mind is the nuclear nightmare, and most especially the spectre of nuclear war as it has infiltrated the consciousness and the fears of children, whether or not they admit it to their parents, their teachers or even their closest friends,” read the Los Angeles Times review.
And it was true. The film was not so much given to nuclear holocaust but children’s fear of it. It was very different to other anti-nuke films made around that time. Ted Turner’s 1980 Doomsday Video, for instance, in which he filmed a military brass band performing the hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee” and which he intended his new network, CNN, to play in the event of the world’s end by nuclear conflagration.
It was different to The Day After, the 1983 movie made for American TV that attracted one of that country’s largest audiences outside a Super Bowl. A dramatic simulation of the aftermath of major nuclear war, it resembled the BBC’s superior Threads, which was broadcast the following year in Britain and in 1985 here.
Curiously, it was not Amazing Grace and Chuck that was shown to me in a classroom when I was a boy but rather the infinitely grimmer and very adult Threads. Evidently, children’s untethered fear of the world’s end was not a concern to whichever teacher assembled us in the TV room that day in the late 1980s. There we watched the good people of Sheffield variously vaporised, scorched or fatally crushed by collapsed buildings.
And they were the lucky ones. The other victims more slowly succumbed to radiation sickness, and the unluckier still led numb and meagre lives amid the blackened carapace of civilisation while feeding off rats. If Amazing Grace and Chuck was Frank Capra for the nuclear age, Threads was its Thomas Hobbes.
I was not without my own precocious sensitivity at the time, and had my own fears – some grounded in reality, others merely the symptoms of an inflamed imagination. I feared my father’s death (a likelihood), and my own through AIDS (imagined, but not without cause). To the other column of fantastic or neurotic fears could be added abduction, spontaneous human combustion and global irradiation. The latter was given some grounding by watching Threads and studying the government pamphlets on nuclear war that my father possessed by way of his volunteering for a radiation monitoring course with the Civil Defence School. Contained within it were those other artefacts of the Cold War age: graphics showing the concentric circles of blast zones; illustrations of people finding shelter from thermonuclear violence beneath desks.
In Amazing Grace and Chuck, the protagonists become sufficiently dangerous to the status quo (a concept left murkily unarticulated beyond its shorthand of dark rooms and cigar smoke) that the Celtics’ player is murdered when his private jet is blown up over the Rocky Mountains.
Young Chuck, in homage to his dead friend and political martyr, adds to his protest by conspicuously renouncing another pleasure: speech. His pledge of silence also quickly finds global emulation and is cause for one of the most unwittingly funny lines I know in all of film. “The thing that’s beginning to concern me is this silent-children thing,” one of the US president’s advisers says. “It’s new.”
Acknowledging not only Chuck’s influence but also his moral wisdom, the president pays the boy a visit in his bedroom, which is decorated with posters of famous athletes who have also come to recognise his saintliness. The president has come to show Chuck an agreement with the Soviet Union to mutually disarm their nuclear weapons, and hopes it will find his approval.
It certainly does – thus restoring the use of Chuck’s voice and pitching arm.
The film was largely derided when it came out, and one can see why it was Zuehlke’s only cinematic appearance – as one might ponder whether his vow of silence was written less to develop the plot than it was to help conceal the young star’s weakness. But god knows, in that humid mental atmosphere of the 1980s, it was the more appropriate film to have shown us kids that day.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 7, 2025 as "Box-office bomb".
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