Movies SEMI-FLUFF

If you’re one of the extras who survived frostbite in the Cotton Bowl and several days of rolling around the Grand Ballroom of the Adolphus trying to get IT. you’ll probably see Semi-Tough no matter what. Anyone without such a vested interest, however, might think twice because most of the time Semi-Tough is softer than a tub of Cool Whip.

In the first place, it doesn’t have a whole lot to do with pro football, even though the major enticement of both the book and the film was the promise of a satirical inside look at America’s autumn madness. So much for press releases. Director Michael Ritchie (Smile, The Bad News Bears) has retained most of Dan Jenkins’ raunchy locker room humor and supplemented it with plenty of drinking, whoring, and partying, but his central concern seems to be doing a send-up of encounter groups and consciousness-raising which, as far as I know, haven’t been hot film topics since Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. The only explanation for the emphasis, other than some private fixation of Ritchie’s, is that it gives Shake Tiller (Kris Kristof-ferson) an excuse for finally abandoning his own true love, Barbara Jane Bookman (Jill Clayburgh) to his old TCU buddy. Billy Clyde Puckett (Burt Reynolds). She can’t get IT, poor thing, and without IT life is little more than sex and football. Is this sort of thing funny even in Southern California?

Reynolds is fine playing himself once again, and Clayburgh is engagingly flip and salty, but Kristofferson is about as convincing a wide receiver as I am an acrobat. Moreover, their little menage à trois is just too self-consciously hip. As Big Ed, Barbara Jane”s daddy and the owner of the team, puts it, “Just ain’t natural, you sharin’ an apartment with two men and not doin ’it.” Unbelievable even, except that verisimilitude is hardly an issue here. Semi-Tough comes across as simply another jock fantasy, a delirious vision of the triumph of pectorals and wheat germ over feminine defenses. For all their provincial views and racist behavior, we’re meant to think that guys like Shake and Billy Clyde are a good deal more wholesome, not to mention slicker, than the fans who idolize them. Hmmm.

Ritchie has always been a good action director, and the game sequences, in which you can see SMU actually moving the football, are quite effective. But he’s also a scatter-shooter who likes to pop away at whatever wanders into his line of fire. In this case that means sportscasters, publishers, country and western music, Madison Avenue, Texans – especially flag-waving, “oil bidness” types – and clergymen with a talent for laundering their special collections through Swiss banks. All the targets are large and easily hit, with the result that the film has a fractured, jerrybuilt quality to it. An amusing parody of a TV commercial, for instance, gets thrown together with a long, humorless scene in which Lotte Lenya, as the head of the Clara Pelf Institute of Muscular Harmony, nearly punches and pummels Billy Clyde into retirement. All part of preparing for the Super Bowl. Semi-Tough is more farce than satire, and mostly crude, clumsy farce at that. See it if you want to applaud your friends and relatives (I spotted four of mine), but try not to encourage their Panavision fantasies. This film isn’t going to do much for anyone’s career.