On Film
ASAHINA, ROBERT
On Screen SUMMER FUN AND GAMES by robert asahina P A?layers opens at Wimbledon's center court. Competing in the finals are Guillermo Vilas (played by himself) and an unknown upstart named Chris...
...Of the better known performers, Barbara Barrie is wryly funny as Dave's sympathetic mother...
...Players tries to be a provocative portrayal of the relationship between an older woman and a younger man, but the soap suds obliterate any psychological insights...
...His expectations have been raised...
...She regularly flies around the world at a moment's notice, casually wrecks a very expensive car and supports Chris at her villa in Mexico for weeks, moving him to great feats on and off the court—all with no clue to the source of her riches, unless you count (and who would...
...Cyril (Daniel Stern), a comic success at failing, hides his aspirations—including his ambition to go to college—behind self-conscious humor...
...In the rematch, Rocky Balboa improbably wins the heavyweight championship of the world...
...Some of the scenes are truly funny...
...A scene that would have been easy to ruin—the heart-to-heart talk between Dave and his father—is one of the best in the movie...
...Galdengirl...
...What do you think 1 am—a girl...
...Her secret soon comes out: Her father, a slightly mad doctor with a German accent and some peculiar views about "reshaping the race," has been pumping her full of hormones and conditioning her body and mind for years...
...the group hopes to cash in on her celebrity when, and if, she wins three gold medals at the 1980 Olympics...
...Susan Anton plays a sprinter being trained and supported by a consortium of investors, led by a promoter named Dryden (James Coburn...
...team in record times in the 100-, 200- and 400-meter dashes...
...Moocher (Jackie Earle Haley) slides into a teenage marriage with his high-school sweetheart...
...Most of the humorous lines are equally well-written...
...Thus what started as a slick but amusing, updated in-version of Pat and Mike ends with the spectacle of a woman reduced to keeping her man by making him a loser...
...He gets laid off from the meat-packing plant where his brother-in-law, Paulie (Burt Young), had found him a job...
...based on a novel by Peter Lear, offers a slightly more sophisticated—and cynical—view of the interaction among commerce, sports and sex...
...A JL...
...among the boys, Stern is particularly good as a gangly adolescent...
...Having met cute and with so much hostility between them, Hillary and Eddie are destined to fall in love...
...Moreover, while not an experienced actress (although she has appeared in a lot of cigar commercials), Anton is stunning to look at...
...I don't think I'm spoiling anything by revealing the ending, for Rocky II is so determined to be uplifting that it could hardly finish any other way, particularly after dragging its hero down to such depths...
...He skips to South America, leaving her only one asset—a boxer named Eddie "Kid Natural" Scanlon (Ryan O'Neal), who proves a liability in disguise...
...His dreams and disappointments, and those of his friends, climax in the Little 500, a bike race held annually on the Indiana campus...
...I don't like questions," she announces early on, so it takes a while before he and we learn that her name is Nicole and that she is inexplicably well off...
...J^fter Players, The Main Event, Goldengirl, and Rocky II, I thought I had seen enough sports movies to last me the rest of the summer...
...As for MacGraw—well, she was a successful model once . . . A more enjoyable—albeit considerably more perverse—entertainment about sex-role reversal is The Main Event, starring Barbara Streisand as Hillary Kramer, a perfume tycoon whose empire is wiped out overnight by an embezzling business manager...
...A rich European industrial magnate named, of all things, Marco (Maximilian Schell) has been paying hei board and room from alai ever since she abandoned the mundane thrills of "Greenwich, Vassar, the Art Students League, and numerous cocktail parties" for the excitement of what used to be called the Jet Set...
...He scores well on the college boards, but claims he doesn't want to be seen "with all those college kids...
...Long after we have begun to suspect the Awful Truth, Chris realizes she is a Kept Woman...
...The idea that love, not a financial arrangement, could keep the two of them together never seems to have entered Parent and Smith's minds...
...What follows is a comic battle of the sexes...
...During the climactic bout at the end of the movie, with Eddie ahead, Hillary realizes that he will be financially free of her if he wins—so she throws in the towel, stopping the fight...
...Otherwise the acting is good, Bill Conti's score is as rousing as before, and Stallone's directing is inoffensive (except during the gimmicky concluding bout...
...Rocky has made just enough money to get in over his head with a new car, house, wife (Adrian, played by Talia Shire), and eventually a baby as well...
...Predictably teary confrontations ensue...
...later, he is seen leading with his left (as a right-handed boxer would...
...Since he directed Bullitt, too, it is hardly noteworthy that the climactic bike race is excitingly done...
...the soft sculptures she creates in the studio that she keeps locked...
...Competing in the finals are Guillermo Vilas (played by himself) and an unknown upstart named Chris Christensen (Dean-Paul Martin...
...Although he hopes for a better life, he agonizes over betraying the one led by his friends...
...he should realize where his true talents lie...
...when they finally hop into bed, Hillary's awkward attempts to play the aggressor are almost worth the price of admission...
...Himself a graduate of Indiana and a past winner of the Little 500, Tesich is also a skilled playwright (his play The Carpenters was recently staged on PBS), and is able to transform his own experiences into art without lapsing into sentimentality...
...their match is intercut with flashbacks of Chris' dramatic rise from two-bit hustler to title contender...
...The result is a small but genuine artistic achievement...
...For the most part, though, Yate has let an intelligent screenplay speak for itself...
...Dryden is able to suspend his financial and sexual intci csts in the beautiful blonde athlete long enough to be suspicious about her incredible performances...
...Breaking Away does suffer a few lapses...
...Tesich's dialogue conveys all their awkwardness and the gulf between them as well as the bonds that unite them without belaboring the point...
...Now we have Rocky II, which is—sad to say—considerably less inspiring...
...All the same, I dragged myself to one more—and it was a very pleasant surprise...
...In fact, the self-conscious effort to reproduce the emotional impact of the original is the undoing of the sequel...
...We've come a long way from Pavlov's dogs," Dryden intones gravely...
...Martin, it turns out, is a real professional tennis player (with the Phoenix Racquets...
...And there are some annoying discrepancies as well...
...And the direction by Peter Yate is subtle and careful—not quite what one would have expected from his most recent films, The Deep and Mother, Jugs and Speed...
...Unfortunately, he can't make a living any other way...
...Falling in love with a sorority girl, he is so ashamed of his blue-collar background that he pretends to be a foreigner...
...We then follow Rocky's downward slide after that big bout with Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers), his hospitalization and slow recovery, and the steady corruption of his previous existence...
...The most annoying thing about The Main Event, however, is the sexual politics...
...Hillary quickly learns that her former manager originally bought the ovci the-hill fighter's contract as a tax shelter...
...Nevertheless, it is an intelligently directed (by Joseph Sargent) summertime entertainment, especially for armchair athletes like me, who would rather sit in air-conditioned comfort than exercise in the sun and heat...
...The largely unknown cast give excellent performances...
...Set in Bloomington, Indiana, Breaking Away is the story of four local boys, just out of high school, whose growing pains are exacerbated by age-old town/gown conflicts...
...So he finally decides to fight again, despite Adrian's protest and the advice of his doctors, who are concerned about the damage done to his right eye by Creed...
...Nonetheless, Steve Tesich's script is modest in its aims, sensitive to the nuances of college-town life, and carefully balanced between the humor and pathos of teenage successes and failures...
...The boys are occasionally too class-conscious, Dave's romantic frustrations are sometimes a bit too predictable, and Dave's dad (Paul Doo-ley) is often merely one more well-meaning, ineffectual American father...
...He is eager to become an international bike racer, yet rides mostly by himself...
...Still, Gail Parent and Andrew Smith's script has more than a few leaden lines, as when Eddie objects to Hillary's management: "You're treating me like an object...
...He fails comically, and miserably, when he tries acting in commercials...
...Two years ago, Sylvester Stallone's Rocky became a box-office smash because of its inspirational message that a loser could overcome impossible odds and achieve some measure of dignity through hard work and a lot of "heart...
...But since Eddie now represents her only source of income, she is determined to make him pay back the money that was invested in his failed ring career...
...The sequel does start off well—with the last part of the fight sequence that was the climax of the first movie...
...Indeed, the only interesting part of this film is the tennis match itself...
...The climb starts, according to Arnold Schulman's absurd screenplay, when Chris, fresh out of college, meets a mysterious older woman (Ali Mac-Graw...
...Dave (Dennis Christopher) is the brightest, most sensitive—and thus the most torn—of the group...
...Even though Creed is anxious for a rematch—the champion has been accused of carrying the challenger in their fight—Rocky is no longer content with the life of a boxer...
...Mike (Dennis Quaid), the one-time star quarterback who could not get a college scholarship, now faces a future without cheering crowds and vents his unhappiness by brawling with the fraternity boys he deeply resents and by speeding his battered car around the campus of the University of Indiana...
...In one scene, for example, Eddie is shown writing with his left hand...
...With no listed track cxperience, she qualifies for the U .S...
...In short, Breaking A way has the ring of truth...
...Goldengirl is silly, of course...
Vol. 62 • July 1979 • No. 14
