Grab your beer, pretzels, chips 'n dip......BQ hit the gridiron to sample three very different films about America's favorite bone-crunching, head bashing pastime.........
As the song goes......are you ready for some football?
Paper Lion (1968) seems a logical place start.....an ever-so-slight comedy based on one of the 'living my sports dream' exploits of patrician journalist and part time actor George Plimpton.
Plimpton found a surefire attention getting crowd pleaser for his articles and books.......attempting to play in professional sports (boxing, golf, baseball, etc.) with real professional athletes, searching for insights into the sports he infiltrated, as well as his own motives for these foolhardy excursions.
'Paper Lion' recounted Plimpton's brief but memorable time posing as a rookie quarterback for the Detroit Lions. Naturally, the tall skinny writer with spaghetti arms and legs fails in all sorts of spectacularly painful ways........and the coaches and players (all played by the real Lions coaches and players have no trouble spotting him as a poseur phony-baloney dilettante.
Alan Alda, then a young stage actor, made of most of his casting as Plimpton, bringing the same kind of goofy earnest energy he later used as the star of the beloved "M.A.S.H' Tv series. Thankfully, he made no attempt to duplicate Plimpton's well known semi-British accent.
The use of the actual footballers did give 'Paper Lion' a semi-documentary atmosphere, but at the end of the day, the film's goals were limited to easy laughs displaying Plimpton's humiliation and embarrassment as he valiantly presses on. And Laurence Roman's simple basic script offered no insights into Plimpton himself........giving Alda nothing to work with other than his skill at physical gags.
Mildly amusing at best, in football terminology, a minor punt with little chance to score....but for the game, likable Alda,, I'll signal at least 2 & 1/2 stars (** 1/2)
Semi-Tough (1977) arrived 11 years later, based on a best-selling, raucous comic novel by sportswriter Dan Jenkins. While the book mainly offered up a good natured rollicking, rambling pile-up of funny incidents, the people in charge of the film held loftier goals......
Director Michael Ritchie had already carved out a reputation for American social satire ("The Candidate", "Prime Cut", "Smile", "The Bad News Bears"), and Walter Bernstein's script jettisoned most of Jenkins' novel to concentrate on lampooning self-help guru Werner Erhard's 'Est' seminars.
What's still left from the book (sort of) is the lifelong romantic triangle between two pro NFL players (Burt Reynolds, Kris Kristofferson) the freewheeling daughter of their team's owner (Jill Clayburgh).
Reynolds was at the very height of his stardom as cinema's smirking stud, barely containing his giggles at his own deadpan wit. When Kristofferson, his ever laid-back mellow teammate proposes marriage to Clayburgh, Reynolds, who's nursed his own lifelong crush on her, slyly plots to destroy the nuptials.
Somehow this all involves a lengthy sendup of the ludicrous Erhard training sessions, with Bert Convy expertly enacting the guru as nothing but a self-aggrandizing snake oil grifter. (If that sounds like too severe a description, then why does the movie take such great satisfaction in seeing Convy take a knockout punch during a finale slapstick brawl?)
While the faux-Erhard sequence drags on way too long, the film scores way more laughs with its other trendy target - the pseudo chiropractic torture fad of "rolfing". Here dubbed 'delfing', we watch Reynolds submit to agonizing physical therapy from Dr. Delf herself (Lotte Lenya) Maybe what I found funniest was the sight of Lenya delivering far more pain to Burt Reynolds than she ever got a chance to against Sean Connery in "From Russian With Love".....
Oh right....the football stuff itself? Pitched at farce level, it generates only some moderate silliness......with Brian Dennehy as a barely human Neanderthal player who literally manhandles women like a little boy abusing Barbie dolls and Ron Silver as Russian place kickers who glowers like he's a KGB spy.
And the rom-com 'triangle'? Pathetic indeed, with the bland Clayburgh fatally miscast as a supposed Texas wild child firecracker who outrages her team-owning daddy (Robert Preston) by shacking up with Reynolds and Kristofferson. Not that she ever displays a smidgen of chemistry with either of them.....
A few sporadic laughs here and there, but 'Semi-Tough', struggling for a touchdown, never manages anything better than a 2 & 1/2 star (**1/2) field goal..
North Dallas Forty (1979) It's fitting that the 3rd football film of this post shows up to finish out the 1970's.....
Because it thoroughly belongs among the quintessential films that made that decade famous and one that we now all sorely miss.........angry, raw, unafraid to offend anyone, at times viciously funny and a raging middle finger to corporate bigwigs and all other figures of authority.
No good ole boys, just horsin' around comedy here...... based on a novel by former Dallas Cowboy wide receiver Peter Gent it's a ripped-from-the-headlines, toxic expose of everything rotten corrupt and physically lethal in professional football........ particularly the sport's warping of the American obsession with winning at all costs.
Gent's fictionalized version of himself is the horribly bruised and battered receiver Phil Elliot (played to perfection by Nick Nolte). Phil bristles with disgust at what he views as false camaraderie imposed on the team by its stern, unforgiving coach (G.D. Spradlin) and the team's billionaire owner. (Steve Forrest).
Phil's wracked with constant pain he vainly tries keeping at bay with vast amounts of illegal drugs (some of which the team doctor dispenses and rest Phil steals out of the team's pharmaceutical supply.). But more than the drugs, what truly keeps him going is his unyielding belief in the purity and innocence of his gifted, ball-catching hands. Never much of a get-along guy or team player, Phil lives only for those fleeting moments on the field when he can revel in the excellence of his own skills.
Unlike his best bud teammate (Mac Davis) who's only rambunctious up to a point, Phil's on a collision course with the team's powers-that-be, who prize blind loyalty and strict adherence to their code of conduct above all else. He's rebel who's cause is only himself and you can sense his quest to function under his own worldview is doomed from the start.
And yet I don't want to make any of this sound overly depressive.....in its furious, unflinching takedown of pro football, the film frequently erupts into some wildly outrageous laugh out loud sequences......(especially in the locker room prior to the start of the Super Bowl, as Forrest, Spradlin and Charles Durning as a sycophantic assistant coach attempt a victory rally, complete with a priest's hapless attempt to bless the team, most of whom know bullshit when they hear it.
(And there's sure as hell a big difference between Brian Dennehy's more comic "Semi-Tough" goon and this film's version of the hulking Neanderthal lineman, played here for both scares and laughs by Bo Svenson.)
As in many other anti-establishment 1970's movies, "North Dallas Forty" stays true to the cinematic era that spawned it......as Nolte's given one last defining (but ultimately futile) opportunity for a finale cathartic rage against all the accumulated power structures allied against him. And as far as BQ's concerned that makes the film, far more than the previous two, a 4 star (****) touchdown. This is one not to miss.
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