TV Reviews : ‘Comrades of Summer’ Plays Ball on HBO

It’s no accident that “The Comrades of Summer” (on HBO tonight at 8) takes its name from that great baseball book about the Brooklyn Dodgers, “The Boys of Summer.”

However different these “Comrades” and “Boys” may be, this cross-cultural sports movie-- a what if bit of baseball glasnost --evokes the brash spirit of grown boys playing Abner Doubleday’s game because it’s fun.

A spunky Seattle Mariners player-manager (Joe Mantegna), desperate and disgraced, suddenly loses his job, his house and his endorsements. Attempting to jump-start his floundering career, he ventures to Russia to coach a bunch of ragamuffins and assorted athletic castoffs who make up the new Russian Republic’s 1992 Olympic baseball team.

The Russians won’t really field a baseball team this summer at Barcelona. But to show that this is not entirely a field of dreams an end-credit roll reports that the Angels this spring signed a left-handed pitcher from Siberia and that two other major league clubs brought aboard players from the old Soviet Union.

Shot partially on location in Moscow just weeks after last August’s aborted coup, the movie includes offhand references to the country’s turmoil, but one change that the filmmakers could not correct is the “CCCP” (for U.S.S.R.) stitched across the Russian players’ uniforms.

In fact, the movie’s affable clunkiness actually suggests a production keeping one step ahead of changing political events.

Mantegna is perfectly cast as a Gashouse Gang kind of scrappy jock, and Russian film star Natalya Negoda, as his romantic interest and Sports Ministry maven, layers the movie with a beguiling Russian accent that’s delightful and syrupy to the ear.

When the movie starts to flag, director Tommy Lee Wallace draws sharply from his supporting cast. Glowering Michael Lerner hyperventilates as the owner of the World Series champion Seattle Mariners (now you know the story’s fiction). John Fleck is terrific as a zany black market Russian entrepreneur who finesses balls, bats and gloves for the ill-equipped team, and bulky Eric Allan Kramer knocks out four-baggers, fence-wise and otherwise, as Boris the hulk.

Written with breezy humor by Robert Rodat and including measures of salty dugout expletives, the production, finally, is a collection of scratch singles that add up to a balmy summer diversion.