jamesrupert2014 Review of The Comrades of Summer

The Comrades of Summer (1992 TV Movie)

Predictable but amusing sports 'underdog' fable*

[7/10 · 17 March 2023]

After a career ending accident, baseball player/manager Sparky Smith (Joe Mantegna) ends up in Moscow coaching the nascent Soviet Olympic baseball team, only to find out that his players are an ill-equipped, underfunded, and unenthusiastic grab-bag of rejects from other sports. The film follows a typical 'sports movie' trajectory: Act 1 is the 'fish out of water' shtick, as Sparky struggles with Russian culture and athletic priorities, Act 2 finds the team coalescing, learning mutual respect, and facing their first challenge as the threat of disbandment hangs over them, and Act 3 is the 'big game' (or series in this case) where everything has to come together despite insurmountable odds. Superimposed on this is an obligatory awkward romance as Sparky pursues Tanya (Natalya Negoda), a beautiful Soviet sports functionary who, needless-to-say, initially wants nothing romantic to do with the pushy American capitalist and, not unexpectedly, there's a montage midway to show how rapidly the team is coming together. None of this predictability takes away from the fun. The cast is fine, especially John Fleck as Milov, the Russian hustler who masterfully plays the black-market to obtain the sports-kit that the government fails to provide (how Sparky's Walkman was eventually traded for an entire baseball backstop, including installation (plus two Walkmen) is quite funny). The film is full of good-natured digs at sports management, professional athletes and their hangers-on, cultural and linguistic misunderstandings (Tanya has a book of inaccurate American idioms written in Moscow) and the post-glasnost Russian 'line-up' economy, and ends on the expected 'feel-good' note (or notes, the writer seemed to want to tack on a number of cliched final scenes). The film was a low-budget affair made for HBO and the 'late Soviet' era it depicts is long gone, but I found it to be a surprisingly entertaining entry into the 'sports comedy' canon. *Aka 'The Balls of Summer' but 'The Comrades of Summer' is the title under which I found the film on You-Tube.