Requiem for a Quarterback

The most improbable bestseller of 1967 was Paper Lion, in which that professional amateur, George Plimpton, gave a Mittyesque account of his preseason tryout with the Detroit Lions' football team. Now comes an instant replay of Plimpton's adventure, presumably aimed at the millions of armchair quarterbacks who spend every Sunday afternoon in the fall glued to the pro games on TV. As a film, unfortunately, Paper Lion has all the interest of a five-yard penalty; it sadly lacks both the charm and sensitivity of the original.

The first of the film's difficulties is that it seems to be twice removed from reality. Plimpton's sly, unobtrusive narration allowed the reader to feel for himself the manifold agonies of the professional athlete: the pain of learning how to merge head with helmet, the humiliation of fumbling a handoff, the confusion of trying to study a playbook crammed with inscrutable diagrams. The movie gives Alan Alda the doubly difficult task of playing the role of Plimpton the sophisticated writer who is playing the role of Plimpton the ten-thumbed quarterback. Alda looks enough like George--and is clearly no better as an athlete--but his performance conveys little of the book's vicarious terrors. The film depends for its humor on a sequence of listless sight gags: Alda sprawling on his face during calisthenics; Alda jamming his fingers on the snap from the center; Alda lobbing a wobbly pass into a conveniently placed waterbucket.

Broad Backs. Though an unabashed paean to the mystique of pro football, the movie performs a mild disservice to the athletes themselves. Plimpton wrote of football players as sensitive people, worried about injuries and the challenge of younger, faster rookies, fearful of the day when the team could no longer use them, always inwardly satisfied by the crisp precision of a well-executed play. The Lions, playing themselves with obvious relish in the film, live up to the unfortunate image that the public expects--cretinous, backslapping behemoths.

In one memorable scene, the plot is actually overlooked, and Paper Lion attains brief beauty as a documentary on pro football. For ten silent minutes, the Lions prepare for a preseason exhibition game with the St. Louis Cardinals. With the unsmiling dignity of bullfighters, the players in the dressing room tape up their scarred knees and ribs, drop their false teeth and rings into a trainer's cigar box, suddenly smash their shoulder pads in explosive bursts against a tile wall. The game itself is a vivid swirl of colors and curses, as the sweating players pound out their fury against the enemy, then sit alone, gasping and retching on the bench. When Alda final ly takes the field to re-enact Plimpton's quarterbacking blunders, he becomes an unwelcome intruder, making a simple game out of a serious ritual filled with thunder and grace.

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