Monday, Nov. 21, 1977

Good Ole Boys

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

SEMI-TOUGH

Directed by Michael Ritchie

Screenplay by Walter Bernstein

Semi-Tough may or may not turn out to be the year's best comedy--there's Annie Hall to remember and Mel Brooks yet to be heard from--but it is without a doubt the year's most socially useful film. Dan Jenkins' bestseller has been slow to reach the screen, and in the intervening years the subject of his satire--pro football's Lombardi era, with all its dark Nixonian overtones--has lost some of its edge. Adapter Bernstein and Director Ritchie have found a contemporary lunacy with the same rich possibilities in the human-potential movement, and for that they earn the gratitude of right thinkers everywhere. The Kilgore Rangerettes really ought to spell out their names between halves of the Super Bowl.

Jenkins' good ole boy heroes are just the same. Billy Clyde Puckett (Burt Reynolds) is still a natively shrewd running back with a gift for putting on people who think they're smarter than he is because they don't talk in a Southwest Conference drawl. His roommate and lifelong good buddy, Shake Tiller (Kris Kristofferson), is still a sticky-fingered end and an earnest naif. They are still involved, more as pals than as lovers (though that, in time, develops) with Barbara Jane Bookman (Jill Clayburgh). She is a version of that most delicious of Hemingway's conceits--the intelligent and entirely feminine woman who is capable of being a man's man when the occasion warrants it.

What disturbs the good-natured serenity of this trio now is not the spartan demands and hope of playing in the Super Bowl but the intrusion of self-realization. There is a special emphasis on an est-like movement called BEAT. Shake is converted to it, and his new-found saintliness threatens the stability of the maison `a trois. His "seriousness" turns Barbara Jane's head. She must be rescued from both BEAT and marriage by Reynolds, who pretends a conversion of his own in order to expose the shallowness of the movement. The Ritchie-Bernstein version of an est seminar is done with marvelous malice, but it is not their only target. Along the way they take on rolfing, pyramid power and even something called movagenics, which invites its adepts to drop down on all fours and crawl around looking for their lost center of consciousness as if it were a cuff link that had rolled under the bed. Indeed, the movie's funniest moment occurs when Robert Preston, a Texas oilman who owns the team, attempts to proselytize for this cult. He has had an office built to facilitate practice of his new faith. It has a teeny-tiny door you can enter only on your knees, a legless desk resting on the rug, pictures hung at baseboard level.

What that scene says is that no one--not even the semi-tough-minded among us--is immune to the absurdities of ideologies that hold out a promise of instant salvation. On a slightly deeper level, the movie is warning us to beware celebrities bearing false prophecies. Because of the absorption in self and craft that their work requires, performers--be they actors or athletes--can be easy converts, and therefore untrustworthy in their wayward enthusiasms for abstract realms. On the more positive side, the picture suggests that if salvation is to be had, it lies in that pragmatic resistance to the con that has traditionally characterized the American spirit and is so charmingly exemplified by Reynolds.

All the leading players are nice to hang out with, though Clayburgh, who blends something of Carole Lombard and Jean Arthur, deserves special mention. The script talks R-rough, but there is sweetness as well as smartness in it. The acute observation of cult behavior, not to mention the sporting life, suggests painful research somewhere along the way. The picture is, above all, a principled comedy, speaking lightly but honestly about life as it is--and what it might be--in our times. That sets Semi-Tough apart from anything else in recent memory.

--Richard Schickel

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