[In the following review, Kroll favorably discusses Personal Best, contending that it not only "takes the world of track and field as a microcosm for the ecstacies and pains of self-striving," but also explores lesbianism as "a paradigm of authentic human intimacy."]

Robert Towne's splendid film Personal Best opens at the 1976 Olympic track tryouts at Eugene, Ore. In the first shot you're looking at a screen filled with blurred, sungold images. Then, slowly, the profiled face of Mariel Hemingway drops into the frame in sharp focus, two beads of sweat glistening at the tip of her nose and chin as she crouches at the start of the 100-meter hurdles. It's an image of beauty and concentration, which is what this original, compelling and no doubt controversial film is all about—the beauty of human beings focusing all their energy on excellence. Just as the recent Chariots of Fire did, Robert Towne's Personal Best takes the world of track and field as a microcosm for the ecstasies and pains of self-striving. And it dares, with great delicacy and insight, to show a loving sexual relationship between two young women, not as a statement about homosexuality but as a paradigm of authentic human intimacy.

Chris Cahill (Hemingway), a young track athlete, and Tory Skinner (Patrice Donnelly), a more advanced athlete, meet at the 1976 trials. Their sexual desire flows from the concern each feels for the other in a world where physical pain and psychic anxiety are the ingredients of self-development. One of the best things in this picture is its feeling for the wisdom of the body. The love scenes between Hemingway and Donnelly have the dignity of true sensuality. Hemingway and Donnelly are friends, lovers and competitors, and Towne traces their shifting relationship through the four years they work to make the 1980 Olympic team—the team that never got to Moscow.

You don't have to be a sports nut to enjoy the excitement and the kinetic drive of this story. The relationship between Hemingway and Donnelly is a casualty of relentless competitive intensity, fueled by the women's win-at-any-price coach, played with a kind of poignant machismo by Scott Glenn. Hemingway winds up with a man, a swimmer named Denny (Kenny Moore), and it's this heterosexual pair who play the film's central scene. Watching Hemingway work out in the weight-training room, Moore has a revelation as he sees a power that both enhances her femininity and becomes an inspiration to him.

The beautifully controlled humor of this scene reflects the wit, lyricism and dramatic sense shown by screenwriter Robert Towne in his first directorial venture. Towne gets an appealing humanity from all his players, not only the colt-like Hemingway but the many women athletes in the film and Kenny Moore, a former Olympic marathoner who is now a writer for Sports Illustrated. Most astonishing is the performance of Patrice Donnelly. A former Olympic hurdler, she not only has a ravishing physical grace but in her first acting role plays with unerring emotional truth and sensitivity.

Technically, Towne and his brilliant cinematographer Michael Chapman (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull) achieve many stunning scenes: the long-legged Hemingway in superslow motion seeming to soar forever over one hurdle; a montage of the women's shot put, in which all the competitors merge in an explosive burst of balletic power; the final 800-meter run that's the most excitingly filmed race since Leni Riefenstahl's controversial epic film of the 1936 "Nazi" Olympics in Berlin. This is an original movie, full of feeling, fire and thought.

Robert Towne made his reputation as the phantom script doctor, the man producers called in to do uncredited revisions on other writers' screenplays. His masterpiece in this respect was his rewrite of Bonnie and Clyde, which led to similar work on The Godfather and finally to his original screenplays for Chinatown (for which he won an Oscar) and Shampoo.

Personal Best is a personal project for him, a labor of love. "I have an absolutely blatant prejudice for women athletes," he says, "for their bodies, the way they move, their temperament. Just watching them check their sweat socks knocks me out."

For the leads in Personal Best he needed a rare combination of acting and athletic ability. When he found out that Mariel Hemingway (who played Woody Allen's teen-age lover in Manhattan) was a cross-country skier and trampoline expert, he persuaded her to go through the exhausting, yearlong workouts to prepare for the film. After trying out actresses like Sigourney Weaver for the other lead, he decided on Donnelly against the advice of Hollywood professionals who warned him that she was a great athlete who'd never be able to act.

Doing the love scenes with two straight, shy young women wasn't easy. "I'm going to try some things that will shame you and anger you," he told them. During rehearsal of a scene in which the two girls arm-wrestle one another, Towne yanked a towel away, leaving Donnelly to play the scene naked. Such methods did arouse anger. Towne would tell her, "You're used to having pain in workouts but if I give you psychic pain you rebel. It's the same thing—pain is your teacher in athletics and in art. You get roses for winning but the real tribute is to offer you not a rose but a thorn."

Towne is a lean, intense, bearded 47-year-old who has conquered chronic illness by physical conditioning. He expects some people to be upset by the sexual odyssey of his two heroines. "To me the story is about innocence, purity, growing up," he says. "My idea is that they're children, like my daughter, discovering who they are with their bodies. They learn to come to terms with someone else without violating their need to excel." Towne recalls an article the great Jesse Owens wrote, urging President Carter to modify the Olympics boycott to allow athletes to compete as "free individuals." "Owens said that the Olympics leads not to Moscow or Los Angeles or even to Athens. It leads to the best within ourselves."