Love Set

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

PLAYERS

Directed by Anthony Harvey

Screenplay by Arnold Schulman

Unseeded, the young player has arrived at the Wimbledon finals, where he faces Guillermo Vilas. Something is wrong, however. The camera keeps cutting to the empty chair next to his coach (Pancho Gonzalez, playing himself and, very nicely too). Obviously someone terribly important in the kid's life is missing, and Vilas blows him out in the first two sets. How the lad (Dean-Paul Martin) got to Wimbledon, and the reason for his sudden loss of poise, is told in a series of flashbacks intercut with the unfolding drama of the big match.

Players is really two pictures. The final match goes five sets, with tie breakers, and it is wonderful, the most believable sports footage one can recall in a fictional feature. (Actually, Wimbledon was shot by a second-unit sports specialist, Rimas Vainorius.) The flashback material is so bad that you get the feeling the projectionist may have carelessly scrambled the reels of a double feature. Some of the training sequences will interest tennis hackers curious to know what it would be like to take lessons from Gonzalez. It must also be said that Dean-Paul Martin, Dino's son, has the contemporary jock style-- cool, mean, and yet innocent-- down well; he has played some professional tennis and learned something from the experience.

It is the love story that is laughable. The young man is enamored of Ali MacGraw, who is as pretty an older woman as she was a younger woman and, regrettably, is the same hopeless actress she has always been. It would require talent of a high order to make her role believable, however. She is supposed to be an international tycoon's kept woman. Unfortunately he keeps her very far away-- in Mexico, while he is on a yacht off Monte Carlo. When he calls, she jumps, and all this abrupt, unexplained commuting takes its toll on Martin. A decent director (rather than the inept Anthony Harvey) might have spared her some of her most embarrassing moments, either with some lively, distracting staging or by simply calling "Cut" sooner.

It would be unfair to such suspense as the film builds to reveal whether or not she returns from her last summons to Monte in order to reclaim her Centre Court seat, and whether or not Dean-Paul pulls out of his swoon in time to pull out his match.

The question this picture poses is whether enough tennis fans will put up with the romantic nonsense and whether enough romantics will sit through the tennis sequences to form a profitable audience for Players. It may be that the movie's commercial fate rests with those perverse souls who are always looking for good bad movies to snicker over. For them, Director Harvey is surely a treasured auteur, and this one of his finest, in terminable hours.

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