Semi-Tough

SEMI-TOUGH was one of the big hits of 1977, a winning combination of rom-com, sports flick and social mores lampoon. Its amiably sharp director Michael Ritchie called it as a “strong statement for frivolousness”, a fair enough capture of its loosey-goosey construction, a blithely anarchic mix of pre-p.c. ribald jokes and pungent, laugh-aloud takedowns of widespread therapy nonsense, with stray moments of real cause & effect behavior sprinkled in just when needed. Though the public thronged, reviews were mixed, taking the script to task over fiddling with its source, Dan Jenkins 1972 novel, a 317-page comic bestseller that on Sports Illustrated ranked #7 on its list of Top 100 Sports Books of All Time. Fresh off tackling another slice of Americana with The Bad News Bears, director Ritchie and screenwriter Walter Bernstein (Fail-Safe, The Molly Maguires) took the pro football setting and focus of the book and used it as a backdrop for the skewering of “fix yourself” crazes that were running rampant at the time. Five decades on, for the most part, it holds up as an entertaining snapshot of an era. *

BARBARA JANE: “How could we have so much fun and not end up in bed together?” BILLY CLYDE: “I guess cause we didn’t want to spoil the fun.”

‘Billy Clyde Puckett’ (Burt Reynolds), ‘Marvin Tiller’ (Kris Kristofferson) and ‘Barbara Jane Bookman’ (Jill Clayburgh) are longtime best friends and roommates. Billy and Marvin are pro football players for a Miami team owned by ‘Big Ed Bookman’ (Robert Preston), Barbara’s dad. She’s been married and divorced several times, Billy Clyde and Marvin have actively trod a hedonistic path. When Marvin gets turned onto a self-improvement course he gets seriously ‘serious’ and Barbara’s feelings for him turn from sisterly to frisky: wedded bliss looms. Billy, his feelings hurt by his friends turn toward the altar, decides to investigate ‘Bismarck Energy Action Training’ to see what’s turned Marvin inside out, and he surprises Barbara when he joins her at a B.E.A.T. seminar. Barbara tries but can’t “get” the “it” that Marvin got. Billy does—or is he just pulling handy legs?

Both were 40, past due date for pro football players

Then and Now—-your diligent observer first tagged this on kickoff, late in ’77. At the time, like a lot of people, I was amused by Burt, from movies (The Longest Yard) and his funny guest shots on TV. I wasn’t nuts about the co-stars, and while my Guy Credentials are pretty well established, football has never enchanted me the way the culture insists it should, but I recall thinking that the movie was enjoyable. Seen anew after a forty-nine year break, for a while that felt like a chore, a dutiful revisit for compendium’s sake. Not having a dog in the fight around the book, initial re-impressions were colored by having lost affection for Reynolds a long way back (he was gum-chewing as a ‘cute’ character tic here—a pack of Wrigley’s too far, so much it ticked me off (paging Sean Penn and Mickey Rourke with ceaseless cigarette smoking welded into their contracts) and was still feeling (or dredging up) latent wary resistance to co-leads Kristofferson and Clayburgh.

Then, 22 minutes in, after being bombarded with coarseness and indulgent behavior, there’s a sequence with Billy Clyde and a post-game groupie named ‘Earlene’ (Mary Jo Catlett, 38, debut) who is, let’s say, ‘heavier set’ than your average cheerleader ~~bimbo~~ bombshell. What starts with snarky sexist putdowns turns into something with actual sensitivity, and Reynolds playing, while smoothly tapping the grin-meter, deepened into a characterization with more on the ball than catching a forward pass, or making one at every waitress or stewardess within reach. As Billy tries to deal with his friends new realities (and his unspoken love for Barbara) the script leaves the locker room and field (football in any depth is tangential) for the beg-to-be-clotheslined arenas of ego-trepanning. He sees Big Ed in his office (Preston bluster-energized as ever) doing a crawl therapy to “get back in line with gravity.” He experiences a session of “pelfing” from stern-love practitioner ‘Clara Pelf’. She’s hilariously done by Lotte Lenya, and under her ‘care’ the tissue & issue re-arrangement conjures a version of rolfing if done by SPECTRE. Lenya, 78, made this her final on-screen appearance; she only acted in five feature films between 1931 and 1977.

The most welcome dig and sharpest cut is dealt to the group con job of B.E.A.T., a bayonet-pointed jab at the very popular ‘est’ wallet tappers run for two decades by Werner Erhard. Semi-Tough‘s semi-Erhard is ‘Friedrich Bismarck’, superlatively covered by Bert Convy, 43, in the high point of his film career; Glenn Erickson nailed the Friedrich character as a “a sincere phony“, the sort of slick used car salesman-as-spiritual guru that exist to repeatedly shear the sheep that seem to resemble a good third of the population. Gee, what is someone like that broke into politics? Nah, we’re not that dum…

After stumbling seemingly stoned thru A Star Is Born (sit thru that version again, or just practice defusing bombs?) Kristofferson is okay as the genial, path-seeking Marvin: I never warmed up to his acting until he played a bad cop in Lone Star. At 33, Clayburgh had survived the ignominy of Gable And Lombard (thanks to Silver Streak); she’s fine here even if Barbara isn’t all that pleasant (for that matter, hardly anyone in the story is; amusing, yes, likable not so much); she does click with Reynolds (they both buoy Kris) and a year later they’d re-team for Starting Over, a superior comedy.

Smokin’ bandit—after that choppy start Reynolds stops goofing around and gets down to smart comedy acting, and we remember why we liked him at his best. Toiling thru a decade of desultory apprenticeship in nine lame movies and four TV series, smirky Burt moved up a notch in 1972 with Deliverance, then nimbly bounced between hits and misses for five years before this arrived, along with the huge audience grabber Smokey And The Bandit, the double whammy thus cementing The Reynolds Run, a slew of winners that finally faltered in 1983 with the downhill plunge of Stroker Ace.

Made for $5,700,000, it kicked a winning field goal at the box office, but post-game analysis depends on which referee calls it. Ultimate Movie Rankings has the gross at $61,600,000 and 7th place; other sites like Box Office Mojo list 11th and $37,187,000. Math isn’t my metier, but a discrepancy of $24,413,000 is–well, someone is way off.

With Brian Dennehy (38, second role, as a merrily stupid and violence-bent defensive end: if you ever wanted see his butt, this is your chance), Roger E. Mosley (one of the nicer characters), Richard Masur, Carl Weathers (confident), Norman Alden, Ron Silver (31, third film appearance, as ‘Vlada Kostov’, a Russian place-kicker who doesn’t speak English, slyly funny and a far cry from his later super-intense jerks), Dick Schaap, Joe Kapp, Edd “Too Tall” Jones, Paul Hornung. The poster art ↓ was a low-water mark for mainlined sleaze. 108 minutes.