Semi-Tough (1977)

I want to share something. I just peed in my pants. And it feels GOOD!

When Dan Jenkins set out to write his first novel, all he had was a title and experience. A veteran sportswriter whose work had appeared in the likes of Playboy and Sports Illustrated, Jenkins had just one book to his name by 1972, a collection of golf stories winningly titled The Dogged Victims of Inexorable Fate (1970). Semi-Tough (1972) would be a crude-as-fuck romp through the world of American football, narrated by the self-described “humminest sumbitch that ever carried a football,” Billy Clyde Pickett, a man who never met a racial slur he didn’t like (though of course he isn’t a racist) and who has been somehow tasked with writing a diary leading up to the big game against his nemesis, the Jets.

For all its broad comedy, the book was based heavily on real life. Per Jenkins’s memoir, His Ownself: “I’d known a pulling guard who stole the refrigerator out of his mother’s home and sold it to get poker money. I’d known a linebacker who could out-fart a city bus. I’d know a tackle who kept a mad dog chained up in his dorm room to keep away thieves and fags. I’d known a fullback who didn’t bathe or brush his teeth for eight weeks because he couldn’t get a date with Priscilla Ann Dodge. He thought she must be rich with a name like that.” It was foul-mouthed and irreverent, an almost-satire of the kind of sports tell-all books that came out in the wake of Jim Bouton’s controversial Ball Four (1970).¹ It was precisely the kind of work that would attract Burt Reynolds, who was about to make a name for himself in Deliverance (1972) and parlay that into a successful career in action comedy. Reynolds optioned the book on publication but, thanks to his growing success, wouldn’t be available to star until four years later.

In the meantime, Ring Lardner Jr was tasked with writing the first script. Lardner, son of a celebrated sportswriter and humorist (Ring Senior) and one of the Hollywood Ten, had recently returned to screenwriting with The Cincinnati Kid (1965) and won his second Academy Award for his adaptation of Robert Hooker’s M*A*S*H (1970). According to Jenkins, this first script was a faithful adaptation, but first drafts are rarely what make it onto the screen, especially when Michael Ritchie is involved.

Ritchie was brought onto the project by United Artists, and seemed like a perfect fit for the material. This was a man who’d made a career in movies about competition, whether it was skiing, politics, beauty pageants or Little League. Semi-Tough was, for all intents and purposes, a bawdy sports comedy that would combine Ritchie’s semi-realistic shooting style with his ability to handle a large cast and politically incorrect humour. But Ritchie had other ideas. He’d recently read Powers of the Mind (1975) by Adam Smith (a pseudonym for economics commentator and novelist George Goodman), which had attempted to do for the “New Age” movement what he’d previously done for Wall Street. Many professional athletes of the 1970s were espousing consciousness-raising bunk in interviews, inspired by the Human Potential Movement of the late ‘60s and its evolution into “est” (Erhard Seminars Training), which aimed to “transform one’s ability to experience living so that the situations one had been trying to change or had been putting up with clear up just in the process of life itself.” For Ritchie, Semi-Tough wasn’t a raunchy football comedy; it was a chance to satirise self-improvement. And if you think that makes for a weird combination, well, boy howdy, do we have a plot summary for you.

Billy Clyde Puckett (Reynolds) and fellow Miami pro football dude “Shake” Tiller (Kris Kristofferson) live with the team owner’s daughter Barbara Jane (Jill Clayburgh) in a cosy little “friend triangle,” which becomes threatened when the (already twice-divorced) Barbara Jane develops feelings for Shake. See, Shake is a different guy now: the once boorish banter merchant has been transformed into the beatific epitome of self-confidence, thanks to a self-improvement programme known as B.E.A.T. (Bismark Energy Action Training) led by dead-eyed smoothie Friedrich Bismark (Bert Convy)². He’s now the kind of guy who can persuade a psychotic teammate (Brian Dennehy) from dropping a hapless girl from the roof by simply telling him he’s perfect no matter what he does. And his appetite for self-improvement is infecting the rest of the team, including the owner (Robert Preston), who engages in the creeping and crawling therapies of Movagenics “to get in line with gravity” (to the point of redesigning his entire office) and demands Billy Clyde undergo a Pelf session (courtesy of Lotte Lenya in her final film appearance), basically a take-off of Rolfing. But as Barbara Jane and Shake’s relationship turns to marriage, Billy Clyde discovers he also has feelings for his pal’s wife-to-be, and sets out to gently scupper their impending nuptials.

If you’re wondering what this plot has to do with the novel, then you’re not alone. Ritchie brought in screenwriter Walter Bernstein to essentially toss out everything but the character names (and I have no idea why Pickett changed to Puckett) and make what Jenkins referred to as “a remake of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.” Jenkins ended up being largely ambivalent about the movie “adaptation” of his book – “I should probably say I didn’t hate the movie as much as I simply got tired of looking for Semi-Tough on the screen” – and basically chalked it up. When your debut novel buys you a sixteenth-floor, six-bedroom penthouse on Park Avenue, it’s easy to be sanguine. And it’s not like fans of the book haven’t bleated enough on his behalf over the years.

As for Ritchie, he saw Semi-Tough not as a sports movie but a romantic comedy, more in the vein of The Philadelphia Story (1940) with a dash of Lubitsch³ or Wilder: a headstrong woman has to choose between a couple of guys and inevitably opts for the wrong one before the inevitable happy ending. To add spice to the proceedings, Ritchie and Bernstein took aim at Werner Erhard’s cultish self-improvement workshops, ostensibly modelled after Zen Buddhism, but closer in reality to prolonged sensory deprivation. Where Erhard’s programme denied participants food, sleep, and interaction, Friedrich Bismark launches his weekend ordeal by calling everyone “assholes” for believing anything: “Believing is shit! Being is where it’s at.” As for what “it” actually is, well, you know it when you see it, and if you get it, you get it, but if you don’t get it, then it probably gets you. Ahem. Also, if you need to go to the toilet, you’re shit out of luck, unless you’re Billy Clyde, who has a Motorman’s Friend tucked in his boot.

The resulting movie should be a mess, and it kind of is. Semi-Tough is actually at its worst when it’s trying to be the novel, especially in the opening reels. Reynolds has his own inimitable charm, and gets away with some of the early ironic bigotry, but New York-born Clayburgh – as great as she is⁴ – struggles at first with her Texan floozy of a character and Kristofferson may be a great singer-songwriter, but he is nobody’s idea of a comic leading man and always – to my mind, anyway – lacked chemistry with his leading ladies.⁵ This is partly the point, of course – Shake is the wrong guy for Barbara Jane – but it's difficult to understand what exactly she sees in him other than a six-pack and a Texan drawl. When the movie tries to paint this trio as inseparable pals, it falters: each character seems too much in their own movie to give much thought, never mind friendship, to the others. And the constant slurs may have been funny coming out of an eleven-year-old’s mouth, but they become tiresome when we’re dealing with adults.

As the film progresses, however, it seems to find its groove. Or rather, Reynolds and Clayburgh find their groove; Kristofferson’s character only seems to collapse in on himself. The scene with Billy Clyde making amends with (and the moves on) the wary football groupie Earlene (Mary Jo Catlett)⁶ is sensitively played, and Billy Clyde and Barbara Jane’s recurring rounds of liar’s poker allow for some cute moments. Contrasting and complementing this central fledgling romance is the broader comedy, courtesy of The Music Man himself, Robert Preston (never bad), the rough collection of teammates including Brian Dennehy’s frankly terrifying T.J., Roger E. Mosley’s “Puddin’” Patterson and Ron Silver as Russian kicker Vlada Kostov⁷, as well as Bert Convy’s Bismark who, when he’s not berating his followers, is taking tax shelter advice from a local priest.

And this is where perhaps, dear reader, I briefly jump the shark. Because for all its tonal wildness, I think there’s something classically theatrical about Semi-Tough in the sense that it uses stock comic types in broad satire in a way that hasn’t been totally obvious in Ritchie’s work thus far.⁸ Of course the love triangle is an old concept, just like the buffoonish rich father figure, but so is the satire of the privileged, not least in Bismark’s Tartuffe-like guru. Even the denouement – the jilted bride and subsequent brawl – is the stuff of farce and, unlike previous Ritchie films, Semi-Tough sports an unambiguously romantic happy ending. In this respect, it’s an easier film to appreciate after the fact, once all the craziness is out of the way and the structure is more obvious, as an oddly cohesive piece of work.

Semi-Tough represents the evolution of Ritchie as a director: while there is the odd moment of semi-documentary work, most notably in the few football scenes, he seems to be moving away from his quasi-realistic style into a more formal, fluid Hollywood aesthetic. Some critics, like James Monaco in American Film Now (1984), noted it as the first time Ritchie spoke “in a professional voice,” and that Semi-Tough represented a move away from his more personal films. This isn’t entirely true - as we’ll see next time, Ritchie hadn’t quite jettisoned either his documentary style or the concept of a personal film – but it did show that Ritchie was more than capable of handling the kind of Hollywood comedy that would become his stock-in-trade during the 1980s, with Wildcats (1986) returning to the world of (high school) American football and The Couch Trip (1988) attempting to satirise the insanity of professional psychiatry.⁹

Semi-Tough ended up being another reasonably successful film for Ritchie, buoyed no doubt by the star power of Reynolds. It also divided critics, who tended to focus on the Werner Erhard digs. So it goes with topical satire: some may feel it’s unfair or underhanded, others that the subject is an easy target. But concentrating on the self-improvement schtick is to ignore what is otherwise a fun, occasionally charming and sometimes brash romantic comedy. At first glance, Semi-Tough’s self-help satire may seem horribly dated today (as a fellow 1977 release, I may seem horribly dated myself), but anyone believing we’re more sophisticated need only look at the shelves of any airport bookstore to see Friedrich Bismark’s “there is only being” bullshit reflected right back at them.

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Next up: Infuriatingly, there is no tagline for next time, so I’ll make one up. Ahem-hem. “Carradine! Vitti! In The Ultimate Cannes Game!” How’s that? Good.

1. Fans of ‘70s cinema will know Bouton from his role as the dastardly Terry Lennox in Altman’s version of The Long Goodbye. Never one to back down from criticism, Bouton’s sequel to Ball Four was the wonderfully titled I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally.

2. The handful of you who saw me waxing Stefon-like about the the series opener of Murder, She Wrote on Notes might be interested to know Convy turns up in that two-parter as a down-on-his-luck off-Broadway composer. He is similarly skeevy. And his hair is exactly the same.

3. “Oh, you mean like Design for Living?” Yes, okay, fine. Except they remain as a throuple in that film (and play, don’t forget the play).

4. And she is great. Always. Here at Under the Influence, we will brook no criticism of Ms Clayburgh. Any attempts will be met with swift, some might say unusually violent, rebuke.

5. To clarify, I like Kristofferson in some movies and I’ll even go mildly to bat for him in Heaven’s Gate, but watching him act always prompts the question: “Was no one else available?”

6. Spongebob Squarepants fans rejoice, for ‘tis Mrs Puff in the flesh! For those older (like me), she’ll always be Pearl in Diff’rent Strokes.

7. Dennehy I’ve always found terrifying, probably because the first thing I saw him in was the John Wayne Gacy TV movie, To Catch a Killer (1992). Mosley is so good in this, I wondered where I’d seen him before, but drew a blank - I guess it’s probably Magnum P.I.. And Ron Silver’s appearance is mercifully brief: I’ve always found him a singularly unpleasant actor, but that might be because of his roles and his dodgy politics more than anything else.

8. I can hear the esteemed Rebekah King shouting at me to stay in my lane. Which is scary, because I’m pretty sure she knows ancient magic.

9. I have revisited neither of these films. I have fond if fuzzy memories of The Couch Trip, but I dread to think how it plays today.