Word: bookman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Burt Reynolds is the white running-back hero, Billy Clyde Puckett, Kris Kristofferson is his buddy, split end Shake Tiller, and Jill Clayburgh is the girl of their dreams, Miss Barbara Jane Bookman, a Phyllis George clone who looks to have maybe been Sigma Chi Sweetheart of 1962 at Ole Miss. And before this proceeds any further, the discriminating moviegoer should know that while Semi-Tough is at times an honestly funny film, it is also maddeningly sexist...
...starring Burt Reynolds be any other way? This is unfair; Reynolds saves Semi-Tough, and the fault lies not with him but with Ritchie. Sunbelt attitudes toward women are hard to define; what you tend to forget is that Scarlett O'Hara was one tough old bitch. Barbara Jane Bookman, secure in her looks and her money, might have to take a lot of grief from her stud football-playing buddies, but by God, she should give as good as she gets, and the film never captures the uneasy jocularity that is a necessary part of sexual tension...
...supporting cast is fine, considering what they had to work with. Robert Preston as Big Ed Bookman is a blustering, stupendously stupid man; as played, the millionaire owner of a pro football team probably couldn't pass a driver's test. He has his moments--asking God in the Super Bowl if since he's a sinner, God is going to fuck him. Clint Murchison of the Cowboys has probably done that, albeit silently. It would be nice if owners were that dumb; the throwback owner of the Giants, Wellington Mara, probably is but not the Murchisons, Hunts, and Robbies...
...talk in a Southwest Conference drawl. His roommate and lifelong good buddy, Shake Tiller (Kris Kristofferson), is still a sticky-fingered end and an earnest naïf. They are still involved, more as pals than as lovers (though that, in time, develops) with Barbara Jane Bookman (Jill Clayburgh). She is a version of that most delicious of Hemingway's conceits-the intelligent and entirely feminine woman who is capable of being a man's man when the occasion warrants...
...Lois Bookman Campbell, Calif...