Cinema: Quick Cuts

THE WORLD'S GREATEST ATHLETE. In Carl Reiner's antic Where's Poppa? (1970), a football coach from a large Southern university admitted to recruiting his teams by kidnaping nine-year-olds and training them mercilessly until they came of competition age. One longs for the inspired insanity of such a notion during this slack and dreary comedy from Walt Disney studios. The idea here is that the coach of a smalltown college (John Amos) and his cretinous assistant (Tim Conway) stumble on a kind of peroxide Tarzan (Jan-Michael Vincent) and import him from Africa to bring athletic glory to the campus. The jokes are either...

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