Word: kristofferson
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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...
...gets precious little help, too, as Kristofferson sleepwalks through the movie. Which is another part of a problem--Billy Clyde and Shake no longer play for New York, but Miami. Their apartment is some set designer's idea of what a football player's dream home is like in New York, however, and it even has a pinball machine. No shotguns, but a lot of what look like Magritte prints on the walls. Kristofferson is not a worldly-wise country boy but a tuned-out meditation freak. There might be a few people down there somewhere who meditate--Tom Landry...
...remake The Philadelphia Story with Too Tall Jones; given the frenetic wedding scene at the end that sounds plausible, and it might not have been a bad idea if he could have brought it off. Correspondingly, Reynolds looks to have borrowed at least a little from Cary Grant; when Kristofferson and Clayburgh shut the door, Reynolds acts dejected, kicks at air, throws himself down on a couch, and puts on a record. As Gene Autry comes on singing, "Back in the saddle again..." he pirouettes madly across the room to turn it off--that scene alone may be worth...
...same. Billy Clyde Puckett (Burt Reynolds) is still a natively shrewd running back with a gift for putting on people who think they're smarter than he is because they don't 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...
Right now Kris is grooving on Rita's Higher and Higher fame. No longer are the marquees likely to read KRIS KRISTOFFERSON, FEATURING RITA COOLIDGE. Even though he has been through it all himself-the crowds, the lights, the adulation-he knows as well as anyone when to seize an advantage. Says he: "Because Rita has a hit, it would be crazy not to go out now. It is not the time to lag behind. It is the time to work...