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The question is whether the game is worth the candle, thus Jacques Tourneur's wry European eye on American sports and marriage. Trajectory of the star quarterback (Victor Mature), "King Football" one moment and "King Cripple" the next. "Maybe I'm in trouble and don't know what it is," the insurance company has a name for it, "diastolic murmurs." His wife (Lizabeth Scott) is a decorator with more ambition than talent and no time for losers, looking for a moneyed client and therefore catnip for the seasoned manipulator (Art Baker). "What do I have to do to make an impression?" "Exhale." The chum (Sonny Tufts) scoops up the coaching job, the team owner (Lloyd Nolan) has his eyes on the playoffs, the secretary (Lucille Ball) cloaks her yearning in acerbity. Athletes and mistresses, the business of bodies. "Be careful. You're only an amateur, playing a game with professionals." The gridiron is seen mainly from a distance, a geometric arena studied in the projection room, Tourneur's attentiveness lies in the relationships around it. Boxed screens and wire netting are compositional elements in locker rooms, where the washed-up player (Gordon Jones) is the spent flesh in the metallic welter. Soirées are sketched not with Minnellian movement but as a series of saturnine spaces, sitting in the corner is the melancholy model (June Bright) next seen as a newspaper headline following a suicide, cf. Antonioni's Le Amiche. The weak-hearted lug can only listen to the lovelorn wiseacre while passed out in a tavern's darkened back room, "to be buried under the goal posts" is the fate barely avoided. Marital solidity is sealed with a slap or two but the last word belongs to the cynical photographer (Paul Stewart), "yeah, yeah." The masculine-feminine element is further examined by Anderson (This Sporting Life) and Stone (Any Given Sunday). With Jack Paar, Jeff Donnell, Don Beddoe, Charles Lang, and Jim Backus. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |