MOVIE REVIEW : ‘GLORY DAYS’ IS SATURATED WITH SOCCER

“Those Glory, Glory Days” (Beverly Center Cineplex) is a film you wish you’d liked more, both because it’s a loving depiction of one of life’s grander passions--sports fanhood--and because it has such a fetching twist.

The fans here are a quartet of young girls: “Danny,” Toni, Tub and Jailbird--firm partisans of England’s Tottenham soccer team in the early ‘60s, the ripe, full years of that team’s greatest glory. The story follows them in their devotedly cracked rituals--chewing a wad of gum discarded by a Tottenham player, caressing chunks of turf on which their heroes have trod--and their desperate efforts to get tickets for the sold-out cup match. (In between, we watch the dissolution, through infidelity, of Danny’s resolutely bourgeois family.)

The script is full of sports arcana--understandably so, since its author, Julie Welch, is currently soccer reporter for London’s Observer, and it’s based on her girlhood adventures with her best friends. Tottenham stalwarts all, this quartet--unshakably loyal, and all with crushes on team star Danny Blanchflower. (Blanchflower, after whom the young Julia names herself, is an actual British soccer immortal and appears here as himself: an aging veteran who’s kind to her on her first reporting assignment.)

You’d expect “Glory, Glory Days” to be a delight--especially since it’s been produced by the unfailingly tasteful David Puttnam, as part of his “First Love” series. And, perhaps for some, it will be. It has cute moments--the girls themselves (especially Zoe Nathenson as Julia/Danny and Sara Sugarman as Toni) have some delightfully pseudo- macho byplay--and the film, directed by Philip Saville, has a full, luscious look: basement Fellini filtered through Clive Donner or John Schlesinger. Like all of Puttnam’s TV shows, it has an unusual sheen. The sets are detailed; little seems cheap or perfunctory.

But there’s something off-putting about its tone, its rhythm--something that seems to infect all the scenes and performances.

Welch is a clever writer and Saville has a comic style of sorts, but the dominant mood here is forced levity. Everything is pushed up too high, and after a while, you get cramps from the way your ribs are being nudged. This bumptious jocularity emerges in the first scene, when Julia--now a soccer reporter--is patronized and all but ousted from the stadium’s journalists section, mistaken for somebody’s girlfriend. A cutting comment on soccer-scribe sexism, maybe--but you keep wondering why, on her first assignment, she keeps shoving and clambering over her colleagues as if they were coatracks while loudly demanding a phone (pretty brash for a rookie). Or why she doesn’t simply mention to someone, anyone, that she’s not anyone’s mistress but is a reporter.

It may be Saville’s full-throated, overripe direction as much as Welch’s sometimes overcoy writing, but the whole movie begins to seem like mild satire delivered fortissimo. The girls often give the impression of four little Benny Hills dressed up as Pamela Franklin or Rita Tushingham. A shame, because every once in a while, when the movie isn’t poking and prodding you, a moment or two of real enthusiasm and affection seeps through.