Baseball Movies

 

Last week we all went to the show and saw “42.”  It wasn’t half bad.

The problem with baseball movies is that actors usually don’t make good ballplayers.  By that, I mean Gary Cooper in “Pride of the Yankees.”  Has anyone ever looked worse swinging a bat?  Talent-wise, there’s high school pitcher Charlie Sheen in “Eight Men Out” and…well, that’s about it.

            To compensate, baseball movies typically employ close ups of the actor throwing, catching or hitting.  It’s throw, cut to another camera or swing, cut to another camera rather than one long action shot; nobody wants to see a ball fall to the earth after travelling all of 20 feet.  As a moviegoer, you buy your ticket and hope for the best.

            That said, I like “The Natural” for its supporting cast—Robert Duvall, Kim Basinger, Wilford Brimley, Robert Prosky, Richard Farnsworth, Darren McGavin; that’s a sum a lot bigger than the parts of Robert Redford and Glenn Close.  I like “Field of Dreams” because, first of all, it’s the White Sox.  Then, there’s Iowa with its yeoman farmers and Grant Wood scenery.  There’s also the story, of a son getting to play catch with his father on a field shorn of its corn.  My own father started working at the age of 13 and kept going until his death 74 years later.  After I dropped out of law school, he lined up a job for me picking orders at a wire warehouse.  I loaded his delivery truck once, but we never played a game of catch together.

            Clare, of course, loves “A League of Their Own” because it shows women playing baseball.  And she liked “42” because of its subject.  Whenever she could in grade school, my daughter would do a report of some sort on Jackie Robinson.  Since we’re not black, I have to assume there were other reasons.

            We went to Dyersville Iowa, site of “Field of Dreams,” the summer before Clare went into seventh grade.  The corn was as green and tall as in the movie, the sky as blue.  I took the pitcher’s mound to face a very young Shoeless Joe Jackson, Jackie Robinson, Racine Belle from the All American Girls Professional Baseball League.  Any or all of them nearly took my head off with a line drive up the middle.  Later, we walked out to where the outfield meets the corn to have our pictures taken.

            Anyway, “42” told a good story, and I was especially impressed by how they green-screened Ebbets and Forbes Field(s).  Alas, there doesn’t seem to be a way to recreate Branch Rickey, even with another pool of Jackie Robinsons out there waiting to play.