With his eternal grin and the look of I can't believe they're letting me do this, football legend Joe Namath enters the world of motion pictures, and if it had been at MGM, the lion would have roared the end. He actually does get one of the funniest openings I've ever seen in a movie, walking through a supermarket and getting away with taking out bread, cold cuts, cheese and mustard and making a sandwich which he eats as he walks around and pretends to shop. He then asks one of the clerks wear the danish are, goes over and has that for dessert. The next time we see him, he's on a motorcycle, somewhere in the desert with two other bikers, stopping to aid Ann-Margaret whose limousine is broken down. The two other bikers try to molest her while he's trying to fix the engine, and it's only because of his cleverness that she isn't raped. It's a suspicious start to a story of cyclist and motorcycle races, but there really isn't that much story, and certainly not much of it is memorable.
As Ann-Margret celebrated a decade in film, she had this and an Oscar-nominated role in "Carnal Knowledge", and she's one of the few bright lights in this piece of celluloid that came and went and has only attracted a cult audience. She's an upper crust fashion reporter who has a sense of the rebel in her, and she is obviously attracted to Namath from the start. Perhaps they share the same taste in pantyhose. But indeed, his acting is full of runs, and the snag is that he was ever even offered more than one movie in the first place.
William Smith is a good villain and columnist Shirley Eder has a cameo as the woman giving out numbers at the bike race. The other characters involved in the story range from snooty and uppity to trashy and crass. The two women who provide much of the one-liners are certainly not in Ann-Margret's echelonof talent although Jennifer Billingsley did make her mark in these type of B drive in films. As for the other woman, only one line that Ann-Margret says can describe her performance, How do you turn her off?"
There's lots of music in the background that will distract you from the idiotic story, but for serious film connoisseurs, even those with a taste of the bizarre, will be grateful when this is over.
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