The movie won the Golden Screen Award alongside with Superman (1978) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) in 1979.
The production imported a company of fifty Italian crew to shoot this picture in America.
The sports match portrayed in the film where Charlie Firpo partakes is a game of Jai alai, a sport involving bouncing a ball off a walled-in space by accelerating it to high speeds with a hand-held wicker called a xistera. It is a variation of Basque pelota. The term jai alai, first coined by Serafin Baroja in 1875, is also often loosely applied to the fronton (the open-walled playing area) where matches take place. The game, whose name means "merry festival" in Basque, is called zesta-punta ("basket tip") in the Basque Country of northern Spain. The sport is played worldwide, but especially in Spain and France, and in Latin American countries. It is a high-speed game where the players must wear protective helmets as the ball, propelled by the xistera, the catapult-like basket glove worn on the right hand, can reach deadly speeds in excess of 300 km/h (180 mph).
Just as depicted in the movie, the sport is mainly practiced in Spain and South America and it is kept alive by gambling. In the USA, the sport is mainly practiced in Florida, which boasts the largest pelota stadium in the world, the Miami Jai-Alai Fronton, where the match was filmed.
Just as depicted in the movie, the sport is mainly practiced in Spain and South America and it is kept alive by gambling. In the USA, the sport is mainly practiced in Florida, which boasts the largest pelota stadium in the world, the Miami Jai-Alai Fronton, where the match was filmed.
The picture was shot in the USA which had become the norm of the Hill-Spencer comedy movies of the then recent times such as Crime Busters (1977).
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