Michael Ritchie seemed like a shoo-in for Semi-Tough. The director was coming off The Bad News Bears, a blissfully profane skewering of the American win-at-all-costs mentality as seen through a flailing little league team and their alcoholic coach, perversely released just in time for the bicentennial summer. (It became one of the year’s biggest hits.) So who better to adapt sportswriter Dan Jenkins’ raunchy, rambling bestseller about two good ol’ boy pro football players and their party gal best friend? In his Robert Redford collaborations Downhill Racer and The Candidate, as well as the pungent beauty pageant satire Smile, Ritchie had taken a scalpel to the country’s competitive spirit. But when tasked with bringing to the big screen the gut-busting, gridiron glory of this tawdry locker-room tell-all, the filmmaker turned in… a send-up of the 1970’s self-help craze?
“Loved the money, hated the movie,” wrote Jenkins in His Ownself: A Semi-Memoir, a paragraph later clarifying, “I didn’t hate the movie as much as I got tired of looking for Semi-Tough on the screen.” Indeed, scrapping an author-approved screenplay by Ring Lardner, Jr. and rewriting the script with Walter Bernstein, Ritchie released one of the more doggedly unfaithful adaptations of a popular novel. Some fans considered it treasonously disloyal, (“a worthless hunk of celluloid,” according to John Schulian’s fire-breathing review in the Chicago Daily News) but others, less enamored of Jenkins’s writing — this critic in particular thinks the novel is puerile garbage — find something beguiling in the movie’s offbeat rhythms and the airy, almost European sensibility with which it approaches such a distinctly American game.
Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson star as Billy Clyde Puckett and Shake Tiller, star players of an unidentified Miami football franchise in a league that’s never mentioned by name, because even though in 1977 the NFL was far from the billion-dollar corporate juggernaut it is today, one assumes they were still plenty protective of their brand. These two are constantly clowning around with Jill Clayburgh’s Barbara Jane Bookman, their roommate, childhood friend, and daughter of the team’s eccentric owner Big Ed (played by Robert Preston as one of cinema’s less-convincing Texans). The squad is rounded out with colorful cartoon characters like a looming brute played by Brian Dennehy and Ron Silver’s cryptic Eastern European placekicker, who doesn’t speak a word of English. Life on the road is a free-floating bacchanal of pranks, groupies, and booze for this crew, but lately Shake’s been yearning for something more substantial.
The shaggy-haired philosopher of the team has fallen in with the BEATs, a self-improvement group modeled on the EST encounter seminars created by Werner Erhard that were all the rage for a while back in the ‘70s, and can probably be easiest explained by trying to imagine Scientology’s less scary cousin. Shake’s pledged himself to a guru played with marvelous malevolence by TV game show host Bert Convy as a man who responds to every query with such confident non-answers it takes a few minutes to realize he isn’t saying anything at all. (Convy’s hyper-aggressive seminars in Semi-Tough are clearly an inspiration for Tom Cruise’s Frank T.J. Mackey in Magnolia.) This new consciousness has gotten Shake all shook up.
The best part of the movie is the easy, loopy chemistry between Reynolds, Kristofferson, and Clayburgh, playing a cheerfully childish trio who have lived together for so long they can practically finish each other’s bawdy jokes. But this time when Barbara Jane moves back into their shared apartment after yet another divorce, the balance is suddenly disrupted. She finds herself attracted to this new, spiritually centered Shake. (It doesn’t hurt that he’s played by Kristofferson, who at the time seemed constitutionally opposed to wearing shirts.) For the first time in their lifelong friendship, Reynolds’ Billy Clyde finds himself to be the third wheel, staring down a “do not disturb” sign on their adjoining hotel rooms’ door. He’s surprised by how jealous he is. A little hurt, even.
Reynolds coasted through so many lousy movies in gum-snapping, weisenheimer mode it’s easy to forget what a deft performer he could be when he put his mind to it. Realizing too late that he’s been in love with Barbara Jane all along, the actor layers in a touching sense of longing underneath Billy Clyde’s antics. He wears heartache well. He’s also got a real rapport with Clayburgh – they’d work together again in Starting Over two years later– even if she seems a touch too urbane for such an earthy role. (Schulian’s review said she wasn’t pretty enough for the part. Pig.) There’s a lovely wistfulness to their scenes together, an innocence with which she asks him, “Why didn’t we ever fuck?” Audiences expecting The Longest Yard Redux were no doubt surprised to see something more akin to Jules and Jim on the 30-Yard-Line.
Ritchie keeps a polite distance from the novel’s more notorious shenanigans. Football is a backdrop for the characters instead of the film’s focus, and you’ve never seen a SuperBowl treated so nonchalantly. Scenes like the one in which a heartbroken Buddy Clyde takes solace in the arms of an older, plus-sized groupie would be played for bad laughs in nearly any other film of the era, but are here infused with a subdued melancholy. All of the decadence that served as the book’s selling point is presented as what these characters are so desperately trying to escape, which is why they’re all clinging to New Age cults and crackpot therapies. (A very funny press conference finds an opposing team captain played by Carl Weathers more interested in proselytizing for his “Pyramid Power” program than talking football.)
I honestly couldn’t finish the book, which is narrated by Buddy Clyde with such a preponderance of n-words and other assorted epithets even Quentin Tarantino would tell him to take it down a notch. Jenkins had, shall we say, some struggles with racially insensitive comments throughout his career, and Ritchie was wise to whittle Billy Clyde’s favorite word down to one single deployment in the film. (It’s still indefensible, but at least used by Reynolds to shut down the condescending questions of a wealthy white gasbag treating him like some sort of zoo animal.) The film was a modest but profitable hit eclipsed by its leading man’s other release that year, Smokey and the Bandit. Jenkins channeled whatever frustrations he had with the adaptation into a follow-up book, Life Its Ownself, following the further adventures of Billy Clyde, Shake and Barbara Jane.
Hollywood took another crack at Semi-Tough in a 1980 sitcom starring Bruce McGill, David Hasselhoff and Markie Post. It lasted four episodes.
“Semi-Tough” is now streaming on Amazon Prime.
