players (anthony harvey, 1979)

Quentin Tarantino thinks Players is unjustly maligned. It's pretty hard to find anyone else with something nice to say about the film, so let's give Quentin his say: "As a Hollywood tennis sports movie it’s pretty good.... Dean Paul Martin, in his only feature film lead, is pretty good as the tennis bum turned tennis star. His tennis is terrific, and while I didn’t necessarily need to see him star in anything else, as a tennis pro he’s pretty fucking convincing ... The film's best moments are Dean Paul Martin training with his coach, real life tennis giant Pancho Gonzales."

Where I come from, this is called "damning with faint praise". You've got a two-hour movie that's only "pretty good", with a star who you didn't need to ever see in a movie again, where the best scenes are a tennis player in training. Dean Paul Martin has something going for him: he was actually a tennis player, so the climactic match with Guillermo Vilas is believable in ways better movies like Challengers can only fake. But Martin isn't much of an actor, and he's paired with Ali MacGraw, about whom you could say at least her acting is the equal of Martin's. The romantic plot is old-fashioned in a predictable way, and I never cared about the lovebirds. It's fun to see tennis stars of the 1970s playing themselves, and the footage of Wimbledon will cause fans to swoon, but this is a bad movie. One thing people have praised is the score by Jerry Goldsmith, but I thought it was just as crappy as the rest of the movie. The most interesting thing about the film is the tragic story of Martin, whose father was Dean Martin. As a teenager, Dean Paul was part of the pop band Dino, Desi, & Billy, he grew into a talented tennis player, and was also a National Guard pilot who sadly died in a plane crash.