Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies".

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's film is the biographical sports movie "Pride" directed by Sunu Gonera and released by Lionsgate in 2007.

The screenplay by Kevin Michael Smith, Michael Gozzard, and J.

Mills Goodloe is based on the true story of Philadelphia swim coach Jim Ellis.

"Pride" stars Terence Howard, Bernie Mac, Kimberly Elise, and Tom Arnold, with support from Evan Ross, Nate Parker, and Kevin Phillips.

We first encountered Jim Ellis when he is a young man entered in a swimming competition in the mid '60s.

Despite the support of his coach, because Jim is Black, he is hounded out of the meat by a hostile white crowd.

Some 10 years later, Jim is a college graduate looking for employment as a physical education teacher in Philadelphia and finds himself encountering a milder version of the same sort of dismissive racism he's had to deal with his whole life.

At the suggestion of a clerk at the unemployment office, Jim takes a temporary day job dismantling the Marcus Foster Recreation Center in a poor Philadelphia neighborhood.

The Center has long since ceased to attract young people.

Although its lone basketball hoop remains popular with a group of Black teenage boys.

The Center's janitor, Elston, resents Jim's presence and his work taking apart the place Elston has happily if not productively worked for many years.

Jim discovers the Center's neglected swimming pool, cleans it up and fills it primarily for his own use.

But when the city takes down the Center's one basketball hoop, the group of teenage boys has no place left to spend their time.

Jim offers the use of the Recreation Center's pool instead.

Not all the boys are comfortable in the water, but a few show real promise as swimmers.

Over time with Jim's coaching, their swimming ability and their confidence improves.

And Jim begins to consider establishing the city's first African-American swim team under the name PDR, Pride, Determination, Resilience.

African-Americans have had a difficult history with swimming as a skill, a community activity, and a competitive sport in the United States.

The municipals bathhouses built for working class people in the 19th and early 20th century were segregated by gender, not race, and African-American shared space there with whites.

But when cities began building swimming pools for recreation, starting with the fairgrounds pool in St. Louis, Missouri in 1913, the facilities were open to both men and women from all socioeconomic classes.

Jeff Wiltse, author of "Contested Waters", a social history of swimming pools in America, notes that public pools created a sexually charged public space because men and women were in close unchaperoned proximity and the swimming costumes of the time revealed more of a person's body than their street wear did.

He writes, "The thought of Black men interacting with white women at a municipal pool where erotic voyeurism, physical contact, and making a date were all possible, heightened fears and compelled city officials to officially exclude Black swimmers."

Throughout the United States and most notably in the South, municipal swimming pools were strictly segregated and facilities set aside for use by African-Americans were few, separate, and far from equal.

Even as public swimming pools proliferated between 1920 in 1940 becoming informal community centers during the summer and offering young people swimming lessons, Black men and women, boys and girls continued to be systematically excluded.

When America's public schools were desegregated by court order in 1953, many whites deserted them in favor of private members only suburban swimming clubs.

Public pools were left with fewer swimmers and dwindling public support leading to the closing of many municipal swimming pools.

At the same time, backyard pools were becoming popular in wealthier neighborhoods, but the percentage of African-Americans who could swim dropped and Black competitive swimmers were almost unheard of.

Wiltse see notes, "It was much more likely and easier if you were white, middle class, and you grew up in the suburbs to have a pathway to becoming a competitive swimmer than if you were not, especially if you were poor, non-white and lived in a city."

This was the situation Jim Ellis and the young people he coached faced in 1974.

Jim Ellis was born in Pittsburgh in 1948 and graduated from Westinghouse High School where he was on the swimming team.

He swam competitively at Cheney State, the oldest of the historically black colleges and universities where he also studied mathematics.

He wanted to become a teacher but was initially unable to find a job.

Because of his previous experience as a lifeguard, he became a water safety instructor at the Sayre Morris Recreation Center in West Philadelphia.

He often worked with young people who had been rejected from other team sports.

In 1971, he formed PDR, standing for Philadelphia Department of Recreation, but also Pride Determination Resilience at the Marcus Foster Recreation Center in the Nicetown neighborhood of Philadelphia.

PDR was the first African-American swim team in the United States.

A rebuttal to the disadvantages black swimmers had faced over the previous a hundred years.

Coach Ellis' program was a major success.

His teams were competitive at the highest levels.

PDR team members participated in swimming trials for every US Olympic team from 1992 to 2007.

Ellis coached the PDR team from 1971 until 2010.

He's credited with diversifying the sport and helping to break down social and cultural barriers that have prevented black boys and girls from learning how to swim.

When "Pride" premiered in March of 2007, it was generally praised for the performances of its lead actors with Terrence Howard singled out for his portrayal of Jim Ellis, but praise for Howard and Bernie Mac was often said in contrast to the predictability of the film's plot.

For example, Claudia Puig wrote in a review for USA Today "Pride is a fairly predictable entry in the highly predictable inspirational sports drama genre, but the movie is saved by the earnest believable performance of Terence Howard and by Bernie Mac in a more serious role than usual."

Many critics folded the film for hitting all the standard points of sports dramas and disagreed about whether the movies of virtues were enough to make up for its faults.

In fact, the critical response to "Pride" was pretty much split down the middle.

Keith Phipps in a review for the AV Club neatly summarized the more positive assessment among his peers.

"The plot plays out as predictably as anyone might expect," he wrote, "But the fine details keep Pride squarely above average."

It's not that movies focused on swimming have been all that common, especially in comparison to films about baseball, football, basketball, boxing or even ice hockey.

There have been about 30 narrative films whose plots involve swimming and diving released worldwide since 1927.

That includes swimming movies in all genres, from dramas to comedies, to musicals, to zombie films, and some of them have only a tangential relationship to the business of swimming and diving.

By comparison, there have been 20 fictional films about surfing release since 1959 and 20 movies about cheerleading made since 1978.

Only eight of the 30 swimming movies are based on true life events.

Of those six are about competitive swimmers, four women and two men, and one is about Hungarian water polo team.

The other is "Pride".

In 2007, the same year "Pride" was released, Jim Ellis received the President's Award from the International Swimming Hall of Fame.

After retiring from PDR, Ellis went on to coach the Salvation Army Aquatic Program in Philadelphia.

in 2015, he was named one of the 30 most influential people in swimming during the previous 30 years and four years later, he was inducted to the American Swimming Coaches Hall of Fame.

Just one small indication of what PDR, Pride Determination Resilience can achieve.

Please join us again next time for another "Saturday night at the movies."

I'm Glenn Holland.

Goodnight.