Nosh 83: ''Battle of the Sexes,' 'Rebel in the Rye' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER: Reviews of Battle of the Sexes and Rebel in the Rye

Battle of the Sexes

A time capsule for those who don’t recall the challenge tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs in the Houston Astrodome (Sept. 20, 1973), Battle of the Sexes lumbers along dutifully for its first hour. In 2001 an ABC-TV movie, When Billie Beat Bobby, had Helen Hunt as King and Ron Silver as Riggs. Now we’ve got Emma Stone as King, then 29, rising fast in a career that pushed female pro tennis into feminism. Steve Carell plays Riggs, at 55 way past his early prime (at 21, male singles winner at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open). Stone and Carell provide good facial matches, though she seems slight, almost girlish. In long shot, gifted players reproduce the action which led to King’s triumph (6-4, 6-3, 6-3). She got the $100,000 purse. Riggs, notoriously a gambler, likely profited from side-bets.

Director Valerie Feris and Jonathan Dayton stage obligatory wind-ups about the families, Billie Jean’s anchoring the new Virginia Slims tournaments, and male piggery from the old tennis elite and press (BJK is called “this little lady” and Howard Cosell praises her for playing like a man). No fella wore his hog bristles more keenly than Riggs, though that was often just porky bunting for his   hustle. Carell revels in every stunt, goad and gambit, and Elisabeth Shue not only looks terrific but is subtle as his wife, alternately patient and fed-up. There are plot conveniences. Did Bobby really show up at Billie Jean’s hotel to pitch the big “battle” on the very morning after the married King embraced her first lesbian love, a dewy hairdresser? She later came out as a gay icon, but Stone often seems trapped in the script’s netting of sexual and political points. As for tennis, well, Stone’s court action is on a par with her dippy-trippy dancing in La La Land.

Battle earns points for bringing back a remarkable sliver of the ’70s, when tennis had cultural edge. The match ended rather predictably: a superb young athlete had everything to prove, and she did, by exhausting and out-smarting a brash has-been who confused chutzpah with training. For the history lessons, this is Billie Jean’s movie. As entertainment it belongs, as in 1973, to Bobby. His new rival is the tennis outfit stylist for the Virginia Slims players, played by Alan Cumming as a queenly composite of Noel Coward and Project Runway’s Tim Gunn. He intones the final lesson, royally. 

Rebel in the Rye
J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye never had much of a chance with me, given that the young sourball hero, Holden Caulfield, says this on page two: “If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies. Don’t even mention them to me.” O.K., kid, but in my book you’ll never be William Holden. Now that the novel has sold over 60 million copies, and Salinger has been dead since 2010, we get the movie Rebel in the Rye (its literary wit is more like Dabble in the Wry).

Salinger biographer Kenneth Slawenski contributed to the script, a studious rummage through “Jerry” Salinger’s early writing ordeals and then the cultic fame that turned him into a fabled recluse. The details, 1939 to early ’50s, are credible, and Kevin Spacey is skillfully engaged as an early writing mentor, Whit Burnett. There’s something O’Neill about this scrappy idealist, as if extracted from Spacey’s work in The Iceman Cometh (Salinger’s first big love was Oona O’Neill, the playwright’s daughter, who married Chaplin).

As Salinger, British actor Nick Hoult has a small touch of Jack Nicholson, but perhaps maintaining a flat American accent limited him to about three facial expressions. None of the more adult figures add much drama, though Spacey is touching and Bernard White is appealing as Jerry’s Vedantic guru (still, “overcoming distractions” hardly sums up this great religious philosophy). It’s a movie in which the hero’s rich dad (Victor Garber) stiffly insults his son’s artistic dreams, but later, near the finish, confides that he had yearned to become a musician. Director Danny Strong is strong with the WWII scenes, yet Jerry’s combat trauma just sort of dribbles into his Vedantic meditations and his phobia about fame. Salinger now seems buried inside Caulfield. Holden may still live, yet not much in this movie. 
      

SALAD (A List)

Twelve Good Movies About Real Sports Figures (with lead subject, director, date): Olympia (Jesse Owens, Leni Riefenstahl, 1937), The Pride of the Yankees (Lou Gehrig, Sam Wood, 1942), Pumping Iron (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Butler/Fiore, 1977), Raging Bull (Jake LaMotta, Martin Scorsese, 1980), Cobb (Ty Cobb, Ron Shelton, 1994), When We Were Kings (Muhammad Ali, Leon Gast, 1996), The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg (Greenberg, Aviva Kempner, 1998), Ali (Muhammad Ali, Michael Mann, 2001), Riding Giants (Laird Hamilton, Stacy Peralta, 2004), Unforgiveable Blackness (Jack Johnson, Ken Burns, 2004), Senna (Ayrton Senna, Asif Kapedia, 2010) and Moneyball (Billy Beane, Bennett Miller, 2011). 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Standard popcorn chompers decided the Hollywood fate of Orson Welles at a March 17, 1942, Pomona preview of The Magnificent Ambersons. Most hated the dark, demanding film. RKO chief and Welles advocate George Schaefer was aghast, and a committee effort hacked the melancholy beauty, adding some weak inserts. Welles, on location in far-off Brazil, “simply assumed – as he had every right to – that he would have an opportunity to rework the film himself (and) cabled 37 pages of revisions …’I had no idea that (my enemies) would prevail.” The bad fix was in. (Quote from Barbara Leaming’s Orson Welles).

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Pam Grier’s apex role as Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997) had been a long time coming: “In Roger Corman’s Filipino quickies, with sweaty, under-clad women staging cat fights, Grier was the only one reading Stanislavsky on the set. Pam shaped her image, enjoyed doing stunts, asserted some independence. Violence was obligatory, but ‘my movies featured women claiming the right to fight back.’ Her innate dignity and force gave her leverage, despite promo like ‘A chick with drive who’ll take no jive!” (From the Pam Grier/Jackie Brown chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Villain Raymond Burr (top) watches his goons subdue Robert Mitchum (bottom) in His Kind of Woman (RKO, 1951; director John Farrow, cinematographer Harry J. Wild).

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