Another of the movies that had been sitting on my DVR for a while that I only recently got around to watching is one that brought back together the leads from one of the brighter comedies of the earlier 1970s. The movie in question is The Main Event. It's got another airing on TCM, tomorrow (May 18) at 7:45 AM.
Barbra Streisand stars as Hillary Kramer. Although the movie was released in 1979, Kramer seems more in keeping with with yuppie business types you'd see in 1980s movies. Hillary is the owner of a perfume company and has a great nose for what makes a good perfume to the point that she's become quite successful and lives a high-flying life full-up on business appointments as well as things like an aerobics class in what seems like a studio right next to her office.
One day, Hillary gets a call from her lawyer, David (Paul Sand), who also happens to be her ex-husband. He says it's important, although he keeps getting pushed off by Hillary since she's got so much business to transact. But his news is indeed important. It seems as though, unbeknownst to Hillary, her accountant has been embezzling money and has now absconded with that money to South America to evade extradition. Hillary, despite being successful at making perfume, doesn't seem so good at accountancy, and doesn't understand until David puts together piles of assets and liabilities, with the liability pile outweighing the assets.
Hillary is going to be forced to sell the company, and for some odd reason considering her great nose, she's also forced into signing a non-compete clause that not only means the end of her employment with the company she owned, but also keeps her out of the perfume business for two years. The only "asset" she has, if you will, involves a contract owning the rights to a boxer. But that contract was more for the purpose of being a tax write-off. Said boxer hasn't fought in years.
Hillary goes to the gym to find the boxer in question, Eddie "Kid Natural" Scanlon (Ryan O'Neal). Eddie has seen the money from Hillary as a way to make a modest living, and has even been able to use it to open a driving school. But his part of the contract requires fighting at least twice a year, and he hasn't done that since getting disqualified from the Pan Am Games for getting in a scuffle outside the ring with opponent Hector Mantilla. Hillary needs the money that Kid Natural would bring in from fighting, so she calls in the contract. Either fight, or she'll be able to take over the driving school.
Not that Kid Natural is the greatest of fighters; worse is that with nothing else to do, and needing to keep an eye on her contract, Hillary decides to take a rather more active role in managing Kid. It's the sort of relationship that's going to have the two at each other's throats, at least until it suddenly doesn't, which you know is going to happen in this sort of a movie since it's not a drama. Eventually, promoter Gough (James Gregory) is able to complete negotiations for the big fight everybody's been waiting for: the fight between Kid Natural and Mantilla that never happened at the Pan Am Games.
As you can see from the title of this post, I compared The Main Event to For Pete's Sake, one of Streisand's comedies from a few years earlier. That's not the one that co-starred Ryan O'Neal; instead, I found myself thinking of some genre similarities between the two movies. The Main Event really gave me vibes of the sort of thing that Hollywood could have churned out in the years before World War II as a fun little B movie, either from the rom-com angle or the boxing angle.
Fast forward almost 40 years however, and The Main Event comes up as something that doesn't quite sparkle the way those old B movies do. A large part of it is that it's material that works better as a B movie and not designed for someone like Streisand who was by this time a huge star. More specifically regarding Streisand, a little bit of her goes a long way, and there's a lot of Streisand here. Not that The Main Event is a bad movie; it's more that it would have worked better conceived as something smaller.
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