Leatherheads

George Clooney is the professional footballer in an era where American professional football was a struggling and poor second to the highly popular amateur College football. John Krasinski is the amateur star and Great War hero who is lured into the professional ranks. Renee Zellweger is the wisecracking journalist, a la Mae West, who can hold her own in a man's world and who sets out to discredit the popular Krasinski.

The film has the design and style of 1930's romantic comedies right down to the use of the Universal Pictures stylised introduction of the era. The styling extends to sepia tones and the echoes of newsreels. The screenplay is a cut above what is usually offered nowadays. It's a pretty smart comedy.

I'm not certain how this film would be viewed by those too young to understand the connections with a bygone era but the film brought back many memories for me of the smart talking American movies that, along with Westerns, were a regular feature of Saturday and Sunday afternoon early television in Australia.