From: The Racketeer 10, December 1994
Tennis in the Movies
by Malcolm Turner
As winter draws on and club players turn into couch potatoes, Malcolm Turner suggests that you can enjoy tennis indoors without breaking into a sweat.
SPORT in film is generally well represented, particularly boxing (Kid Galahad to Raging Bull), baseball (The Pride of the Yankees to Field of Dreams), and even soccer (The Arsenal Stadium Mystery to, well, Escape to Victory). If you discount instructional videos, however, tennis is harder to come by. Perhaps it's the format, perhaps tennis players just don't inspire respect the same way as, say, boxers. But there is tennis in the movies; you just have to look that bit harder.
An early example of a film using a tennis match to create suspense is Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. Farley Granger, as a fairly unlikely tennis star, has to win the U. S. Open in time to catch a train and collect some damning evidence to prevent himself being framed for his wife's murder. Stirring, stuff: wooden rackets, grass courts and players wearing P.E. kit and plimsolls. What will endear the hero to MPTC players is the fact he appears never to practice!
Unsurprisingly, tennis lends itself particularly well to comedy. Jacques Tati created a very funny tennis sequence in Monsieur Hulot's Holiday. Even Tom and Jerry get in on the act in a film called Tennis Champs. Tennis also crops up in the Woody Allen classic, Annie Hall, played on a rooftop court in New York.
In its own right, Tennis appears rarely to have been the subject of films. In 1951, Hard, Fast and Beautiful was a film about a mother pushing her daughter into a tennis career. More concerned with off-court happenings, its movie significance is that it was directed by its star, Ida Lupino, one of the few women directors in Hollywood at the time.
More embarrassing (and, therefore, more fun to watch) is Players, made in 1979. Essentially a soap opera with a tennis setting, it actually features cameos from some of the leading players of the era, including a role for Pancho Gonzalez. Unsurprisingly, this film seems to have disappeared without trace, but it is worth checking late night TV schedules just in case.
The weirdest tennis sequence in a film is probably in Antonioni's classic 60s pop art thriller, Blow Up, in which David Hemmings plays tennis. Without a ball.
Perhaps the best tennis sequence for the dedicated club player appears in School for Scoundrels, a cosy 50s British comedy in which Alistair Sim coaches Ian Carmichael in the art of one-upmanship, so that nice Ian can gain his revenge on dastardly Terry-Thomas. Every bit of gamesmanship is there, with a few creative variations besides. And Ian Carmichael gets the girl.
So, put your feet up, reach for the remote control and enjoy your tennis.