Kit Parker Films, with sales and distribution support provided by MVD Entertainment Group, announced this past week that director Francis D. Lyon’s 1953 sports biopic, Crazylegs, starring football legend Elroy 'Crazylegs' Hirsch, Lloyd Nolan (Airport, Michael Shayne: Private Detective, Bataan, Guadalcanal Diary, etc.) and Joan Vohs (Lure of the Swamp, Vice Squad, Girls’ School), will be making its long over-due DVD debut on Feb. 07, 2023.
This is a new 2K film restoration and, as near as we can document, this is the first home entertainment (including VHS) exposure for the film.
It is rare that a college football player gains fame at two rival universities in the Big 10, but that’s exactly what Elroy Hirsch did at both Wisconsin in 1942 and the following year at Michigan. From 1944 until 1946 he was a U.S. Marine … and then made the transition to professional football, where he became a legend.
The film opens with Crazylegs Hirsch leading the Los Angeles Rams to the 1951 championship and after all depart the stadium, Hirsch joins his former high school coach, Win "Brock" Brockmeyer (played by Lloyd Nolan), on the field where they go back in time through a series of flashback sequences and we learn of Hirsch life (he married his high school sweetheart, Ruth — played by Vohs) and his sports career.
All of the action scenes are from real games and feature Hirsch — for the clever use of footage, editor Cotton Warburton would receive the first of two Oscar nominations … he would win in 1965 for his work on Mary Poppins. Indeed, Warburton after his nomination for Crazylegs became a Disney fixture, editing such classics as The Absent Minded Professor, Son of Flubber, The Misadventures of Merlin Jones, That Darn Cat!, The Love Bug and many more.
Bonus features included with this DVD debut of Crazylegs from Kit Parker Film on Feb. 07 are two featurettes — “Hall Bartlett and the Power of Film” and “Haller and Forty” — plus four vintage football programs: Frank Leahy and His Football Forecasts (1955), Football Parade of 1948, Touchdown Thrills of 1948 and Touchdown Thrills of 1949.
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