Semi-Tough (Charley Associates, United Artists, 1977)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Tuesday, September 5) Turner Classic Movies commemorated the upcoming start of the National Football League’s season with a whole night of football movies, and I watched one: Semi-Tough, a 1977 romantic comedy starring Burt Reynolds as Billy Clyde Puckett and Kris Kristofferson as “Shake” Tiller (it’s not until nearly the ending of the film that we learn his true first name is “Marvin”), teammates on the Miami football team (which is not called by its real name, the Dolphins) who are sharing an apartment, in a Noël Coward-esque Design for Living arrangement, with Barbara Jane Bookman (Jill Clayburgh), semi-professional nature photographer and daughter of the team’s oil-millionaire owner, Big Ed Bookman (Robert Preston in one of the many larger-than-life characterizations he was good at). Barbara Jane pointedly tells Billy Clyde that his life’s priorities are “fucking and football – in that order,” and though neither Billy Clyde nor Shake are sexually involved with Barbara Jane (at least until the very end of the film), the arrangement between the three of them unsettles her dad, who’s already upset with the two brief marriages out of which she’s already bailed. Semi-Tough is an unusual football movie in which the football sequences are perfunctory and more beside the point than usual. It began life as a comic novel by Dan Jenkins and the dramatic rights were bought by Broadway producer David Merrick. His original intent was to produce it as a stage musical, with a script by Ring Lardner, Jr. (co-writer of the film M*A*S*H), but ultimately that fell through.

Next Merrick tried to set it up as a movie, but the director he ultimately ended up with, Michael Ritchie (1938-2001), was known for his quirky tales of people under stress and had a particular predilection for sports movies. His theatrical feature-film debut was Downhill Racer (1969), with Robert Redford as a champion skier, and two films and three years later he teamed up with Redford again for The Candidate, Jeremy Larner’s mordant political satire in which Redford plays an idealistic young U.S. Senate candidate whose ideals are gradually ground down by the sheer burden of campaigning and the weight of the compromises he has to make. Ritchie’s next film was Smile, a great satire on the whole industry of beauty pageants, and by the time he made Semi-Tough he’d become a star director with The Bad News Bears, a heartwarming comedy about a lousy Little League team whose irascible coach (Walter Matthau) turns them around and makes champions out of them. (There were two sequelae but Ritchie wisely avoided making either of them.) He would score again commercially with Fletch (1985), a spoof of private-eye films starring Chevy Chase, and this time he would direct the sequel, Fletch Lives (1989). Ritchie’s films took a jaundiced view of the entire American success ethic and in particular our rush to compete with each other over frequently pointless prizes.

Scripted by Walter Bernstein – whom I mentioned just one post above this one in connection with his uncredited work on the 1960 Franz Liszt biopic Song Without End – Semi-Tough is a movie that spoofs then-current New Age phenomena like EST (“Erhard Seminars Training,” led by a Jewish man named John Paul Rosenberg who went by the name “Werner Erhard” after Ludwig Erhard, founding chancellor of the German Democratic Republic, better known to U.S. audiences as “East Germany”) and the deep-tissue massage technique, “Rolfing.” “Rolfing” appears here as “Pelfing,” done by Dr. Clara Pelf (Lotte Lenya, widow of the great German composer Kurt Weill, whose presence here puts Burt Reynolds one degree of separation from Bertolt Brecht), whose “treatment” of Billy Clyde unsettles him both physically and mentally so much one wonders how he can still function as an athlete after enduring Dr. Pelf’s idea of massage. EST is depicted as “B.E.A.T.” (“Bismark Energy Action Training”), run by a man who calls himself “Friedrich Bismark” (Bert Convy, in a performance that comes close to stealing the film) even though – as a B.E.A.T. attendee blurts out during a B.E.A.T. session – his real name is “Irving.” Many of the most ridiculed parts of the real EST sessions appear in B.E.A.T., including the introduction to the course – in which Bismark tells the audience, “You’re all assholes,” and the ban on using the bathroom during the first 12 hours of the session (one woman in the movie announces, “I’ve just peed in my pants – and I feel so liberated!”), as well as the EST/B.E.A.T. teaching that you are responsible for, and have freely chosen, everything about your life and the word “IT,” in caps, which symbolizes the understanding of yourself and your place in the universe you’re supposed to acquire from having completed the course.

Thanks to a series of come-from-behind victories, the Miami team makes it to the Super Bowl, and there’s a bizarre interview on a sports channel in which Billy Clyde Puckett announces that he’s taken the B.E.A.T. training and got “IT,” and it’s made him a better player, while the opposing team’s captain, Dreamer Tatum (Carl Weathers), says that B.E.A.T. is nonsense and instead he believes in “pyramid power,” which in practice means placing a model pyramid over your dick to make yourself more sexually capable. (Later we see Billy Clyde placing a model pyramid over his crotch after a woman – obviously a prostitute – leaves his hotel room after he’s been unable to get it up with her.) There’s also a neat subplot involving other members of the Miami team, including slow-witted Puddin Patterson (Walter E. Mosley) who gets his kicks from dangling helpless women off balconies; and Vlada Kostov (a young and surprisingly cute Ron Silver), a Russian soccer-style kicker (in the 1970’s there was a short-lived vogue in the NFL for importing European soccer players to kick field goals, which they could supposedly do better than home-grown kickers because they’d learned to kick with their insteps, which allegedly gave them better range) who doesn’t speak a word of English and needs an interpreter to do sportscasters’ interviews. Shake Tiller takes the B.E.A.T. training and insists that it’s worked for him – he says he hasn’t dropped a pass since he took it – and Barbara Jane starts an affair with him and takes B.E.A.T. herself to build their relationship and get closer to him. Only Barbara Jane not only doesn’t get “IT,” she denounces the whole course as "sadistic abuse, pious drivel, and sheer double talk."

As luck would have it, Billy Clyde is in the same B.E.A.T. course as Barbara Jane and he doesn’t get “IT,” either, though he pretends to. The Miami team wins the Super Bowl from the usual come-from-behind victory beloved of just about every writer who does a sports movie – it’s interesting to see the halftime show, which back then looked like just about any other halftime show instead of the gargantuan extravaganzae Super Bowl halftime shows have become since (to the point where people who aren’t that interested in the game itself still turn it on for the halftime show) – and after the game there’s supposed to be a wedding between Shake and Barbara Jane, presided over by Friedrich Bismark himself. Only at the last minute Shake backs out of the wedding after learning that Barbara Jane never got “IT,” and she transfers her affections to Billy Clyde after he admits he never got “IT” either. One intriguing aspect about Semi-Tough is it’s honest about the homoeroticism of football and in particular the locker-room hijinks before or after games; though there isn’t any depiction of Gay sex in the movie there are a few brief passing shots of players’ dicks in the opening scene (at least I thought there were, though that could have been just imaginative direction on Michael Ritchie’s part to make me think I was seeing things I really wasn’t) and Burt Reynolds, five hears after his infamous Playgirl centerfold (he was shown nude, all right, but with his hand over his cock), is dressed in ultra-tight pants that showed off at least in outline what disappointed Playgirl buyers hadn’t got to see au naturel. (One of the other characters ridicules him for the small size of his ass.) I’m not usually a fan of football movies, but Semi-Tough was a quite enjoyable and entertaining film that made fun of some pretty silly social phenomena of the time as well as being very, very funny overall – and though the football scenes are pretty much beside the point I loved the sequences of the hapless Miami team trying to play Green Bay in a driving rainstorm, sort of like this year’s Burning Man.