Racquet 1979

15 Jul 2023 by Charles Tatum

You'd think a sex comedy centering around a tennis club would score a few laughs. You thought wrong. Perennial game show host Bert Convy is good as Tommy, a former Wimbledon champion who now gives lessons to fat old ladies like Mrs. Kaufman (Dorothy Konrad). He gives Leslie (Edie Adams) her lessons in the sack, taking part in some embarrassing sexual fantasies. After being shown a house in Beverly Hills with a tennis court by horny realtor Miss Baxter (Susan Tyrrell), Tommy decides to open a tennis school so he can be his own boss. His current boss, Charlie (Bobby Riggs, who couldn't act his way out of a moist sweatband), is nice enough but Tommy wants to be in charge. Lots of different "screwball" incidents occur. Tommy is still in bed with Leslie when her husband (Phil Silvers) comes home. Tommy is robbed, runs from the cops, and has a run-in with a couple of drag queens before being rescued by Leslie's houseguest Melissa (Katherine Moffatt). She treats Tommy like meat, and insults Tommy's platonic roommate Bambi (Tanya Roberts). Old flame Monica (Lynda Day George) returns to town, and Tommy tries to woo her while sleeping with the older women for seed money for the school. Will he choose love over meaningless sex? Three guesses. For all the females in this film, there is almost no nudity. Convy takes his shirt off more than anyone else. The screenwriters take Tommy from one goofy situation to another, but none of the laughs score. This is dumb stuff. Director Winters makes the best of his helicopter rental, as there are more flying shots here than in the invasion scene of "Apocalypse Now." Winters also likes musical montages, since he drags three of them out to pad the running time. Real life tennis pros Elie Nastase, Bjorn Borg, and the aforementioned Bobby Riggs appear. Nastase is lucky, he is in some tournament stock footage, but Riggs and Borg get lines. They should have stuck to the court. Despite Convy's charisma, and the fact that this may be the only time you hear him swear onscreen, "Racquet" is one loser comedy.