The Screengrab : catwoman

Screengrab Salutes The Best & Worst Comic Book Movies Of All Time (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 21:30:00 GMT

The Worst:

CATWOMAN (2004)

Attacking Catwoman is almost too easy: it’s such an obvious, defenseless target, what with stinking up the box office like week-old kitty litter, damaging the careers of all responsible and winning Razzies for Worst Picture, Worst Screenplay, Worst Director (for “Pitof,” if that IS your real name) and Worst Actress for Halle Berry (whose Golden Raspberry acceptance speech alone very nearly redeemed both her performance AND her embarrassingly overwrought Oscar speech for Monster’s Ball, including gems like, “First of all, I want to thank Warner Bros. Thank you for putting me in a piece of shit, God-awful movie . . .it was just what my career needed”). But...nope, we’ll never be done kicking Catwoman, for oh, so many reasons. Geeks hated the flick (set in “Lake City” rather than Gotham) for heedlessly violating the sacred mythology of the source material, straight guys hated the way Berry dishonored the legacy of Kitt, Newmar, Meriwether and Pfeiffer by somehow making Catwoman (CATWOMAN!!!!!) distinctly unsexy, fashionistas hated the godawful costume, feminists hated the fact that while male superheroes were out saving the world, Berry’s crusader was investigating a frickin’ cosmetics company and right-thinking people everywhere coughed up hairballs of disgust to discover the whole tacky disaster somehow managed to cost 100 million dollars. But even worse is the nagging sense of how totally awesome a good Catwoman movie might have been...and how we’ll never, ever get to see it now. Thanks a bunch, Pitof.

FROM HELL (2001)

If you think Zack Snyder had a dense, intricate Alan Moore work on his hands when he set about adapting Watchmen, consider what the Hughes Brothers stepped into when they decided to bring Moore’s graphic novel From Hell to the screen. A speculative fiction based on the legend of Jack the Ripper, From Hell is an insanely detailed look at an alternate Victorian England and the massive conspiracy at its heart. It’s endlessly fascinating stuff, and the Hughes Brothers threw away just about all of it in order to make a nonsensical Se7en-style serial killer bloodbath. Johnny Depp is the police investigator, who is given opium-induced psychic powers here that he never possessed in the comics, while that great British actress Heather Graham plays the cockney prostitute he romances. The entire plot has been re-jiggered into a lame whodunit, thus jettisoning almost every unique aspect of Moore’s take on the Ripper story. It’s not shocking that such minutiae as the extensive tour of London’s Masonic architecture wouldn't make it to the screen, but keeping the Ripper's identity a secret throughout the movie only robs the story of its most interesting character. Worst of all, Hughes and Hughes don’t even bother trying to recreate the look of the comic – the whole sooty, early-Industrial vibe. From Hell looks like it was shot on the set of a Batman movie, which is probably what the brothers would have rather been doing in the first place.

BATMAN AND ROBIN (1997)

After the departure of Tim Burton and Michael Keaton, Warner Bros. put the Batman franchise in the unsteady, garish hands of director Joel Schumacher, who told everyone within earshot that he wanted to return to the "campy" tone of the old Adam West series, as if daring everyone in earshot to scream at him, "What're ya, high!?" Schumacher's first Batman movie, Batman Forever, which featured Tommy Lee Jones giving a performance that would have embarrassed Rip Taylor and Chris O'Donnell capering in his underoos and declaiming, "Holy twisted metal, Batman!", was one of the worst big-budget horrors ever, and damned if the old boy didn't manage to top it in his follow-up. Pre-release word on the movie was terrible, but Schumacher stubbornly continued to talk it up until his megaton bomb hit theater screens, inducing pain and suffering in all who had eyes that see. Schumacher reacted defensively at first -- "I had no idea that putting nipples on the Batsuit and Robin suit were [sic] going to spark international headlines," he pouted, in stubborn denial of the likelihood that people were trying to be nice and the nipples were the least objectionable thing about his movie. By then it was clear that, in the summer comic-book movie sweepstakes, the Caped Crusader had gotten his nuts crushed by Men in Black, a movie based on a comic little read by people outside the artist's and writer's immediate families.

DAREDEVIL (2003)

With X-Men and Spider-Man having solidified its status as king of the superhero-film hill, Marvel must have thought itself invincible, because only hubris could possibly explain the comic giant’s decision to okay Mark Steven Johnson’s take on Daredevil, the blind lawyer who combats crime at night. From the cheesy tone, to Johnson’s habit of turning his camera on extreme angles, to the miscasting of Ben Affleck, to the soft-core love scene featuring Daredevil and Jennifer Garner’s sexy assassin Elektra, Daredevil is a fiasco through and through, turning its hero into a second-rate Batman whose every extraordinary leap, jump and twirl is the byproduct of lame CGI. Johnson shoots every action sequence with maximum spasticity, setting his fights in rain and strobe lights and editing them to ribbons. Stuck headlining this misbegotten adaptation, Affleck vainly attempts to act tortured by flashing a variety of grimaces, all while an overacting Colin Farrell attempts to devour any scenery in sight as the hysterically corny villain Bullseye.

THE SPIRIT (2008)

With The Dark Knight proving in 2008 that it was possible to make a truly great superhero movie, it was actually kind of a relief to have Frank Miller remind us that same year that it was still possibly to make a truly rank one. Miller himself is one of the greatest comic artists and writers the industry has ever seen; though his work has been spotty in recent years, in the 1980s, he put out a fistful of some of the greatest superhero stories in the history of the medium. As a director, though, he’s a hell of a banjo player. Utilizing the same tricks he relied on in Sin City, but with a notably weaker cast and a downright rotten script, he took the Spirit – a venerable crimefighting character created by the beloved Will Eisner – and stuck him in a movie that would have to be twice as good as it is to be an embarrassment. Sidled with an incoherent screenplay, a tone-deaf sense of mood and pacing, a lot of wasted femmes fatale, and Samuel Jackson in one of the most deranged (and not in a good way) villain roles in recent memory, The Spirit would have been a disaster regardless, but the final nail in the coffin was the casting of charisma-free nobody Gabriel Macht in the lead role. Macht brought a Twinkie-heavy sense of anti-gravity to the Spirit the likes of which we haven’t seen since a young fellow named Klinton Spilsbury donned the mask of the Lone Ranger in his first, and last, motion picture role. Miller’s lucky he built up so much credibility in his comics career, because movies as crappy as The Spirit have ruined lesser men.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five & Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager, Leonard Pierce

Set Your DVR!: October 20 - October 28, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

What a great time of year for movies! If you're a fan of vintage horror, that is. Here's the DVR-worthy flicks on cable in the upcoming week.

Mon, Oct 20:

1:30/2:30 pm: The Haunting on TCM. Again, this is the 1963 Robert Wise version.

Tues, Oct 21:

11/12 am: Rio Grande on TCM. Classic John Wayne/John Ford Western.

8:45/9:45 pm: The Public Enemy on TCM. Buncha dirty rats doin' low-down dirty-rat bidness.

Wed Oct 22:

6:45/7:45 am: Batman on AMC. The 1966 version. Shark repellent, my friends. Need I say more?

8:20/9:20 am: George Washington on IFC (repeat at 2:35/3:35 pm). I'm not always going to repeat prior recommendations, but man, I like this movie.

3:30/4:30 pm: The Enchanted Cottage on TCM. I've never seen this, but it is apparently a much-loved, hard-to-see romance between an injured soldier and a lady who isn't much to look at. Unreleased on DVD.

6:15/7:15 pm: Last Days on IFC (repeat 10/23 at 2:00 am).

7/8 pm: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) on TCM. This is the one with Charles Laughton.

Thur, Oct 23:

Start the day (or previous night) with a Val Lewton film festival on TCM!

12:45/1:45 am: Cat People on TCM. The first collaboration between director Jacques Tourneur and producer Val Lewton (the king of no-budget atmospheric eerieness). Not exactly horror, but not exactly anything else.

2/3 am: I Walked With A Zombie on TCM. Not just a killer Roky Erickson song, this is another Tourneur/Lewton collaboration.

3:15/4:15 am: Isle of the Dead on TCM. Val Lewton production starring Boris Karloff.

4:30/5:30 am: The Body Snatcher on TCM. Val Lewton production starring Boris Karloff AND Bela Lugosi, directed by Robert Wise, and based on a Robert Louis Stevenson short story, of all things.

5:45/6:45 am: Shattered Glass on IFC. Some people missed this 2003 film in which Hayden Christiansen plays a character who is - get this - supposed to be wooden. Based on the true events around the fantasist Stephen Glass's deception of The New Republic

7:35/8:35 am: Manderlay on IFC (repeat at 1:35/2:35 pm). Lars von Trier's follow-up to Dogville is about a Southern plantation in the 1930s that has never freed its slaves. Do you like von Trier? Then you'll probably like this.

2:15/3:15 pm: D.O.A. on TCM. Film noir classic.

UPDATE: 8 pm (not sure of the time zone): Red Sun on Retroplex (free on Comcast Digital). This is a Western starring Charles Bronson, Ursula Andress, Alain Delon, and Toshiro Mifune. Whoa! Thanks to Janet for the hat tip.

Fri, Oct 24:

4:15/5:15 am: Manderlay on IFC (repeat).

Sat, Oct 25:

2:45/3:45 am: 200 Motels on TCM. Frank Zappa's wacky movie. Are you a fan of Zappa? No? Then you'll hate it. Unreleased on DVD.

5:15/6:15 am: The Curse of Frankenstein on AMC. Classic Frankenstein movie starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

7/8 am: Kiru on IFC (repeat at 1:50/2:50 pm). Samurai comedy! Yep.

8/9 am: Night of the Living Dead on SCIFI. Oh, you know this one already? You must have brains. Braaaaaaains.

11:30 pm/12:30 am: Catwoman on OXYGEN. Perhaps the scariest movie of the Halloween season. This movie has Halle Berry in the lead! (BWA-HA-HA!) And she’s trying to be sexy/sultry/non-robotic! (AAAAAAAH!) Actually, this is far too scary for anyone to view.

Sun, Oct 26:

12:45/1:45 am: The Honeymoon Killers on TCM. Brilliant and utterly repellent movie based on the true story of the Lonely Hearts Killers, who preyed on divorced women in the late 40s. Between this and Mad Men, you get the feeling that the mid-20th century wasn't such a great time to be an independent women.

7/8 am: The Ghost of Yotsuya on IFC. Ghosts! Samurais! Spurned Wives! Revenge!

10:00/11:00 am: The Flower of Evil on IFC. Directed by the Hitchcock-influenced Claude Chabrol. I haven't seen this one, but I run hot and cold on Chabrol movies.

1/2 pm: Kiss of Death on FMC. Fantastic film noir.

2:30/3:30 pm: An American Werewolf in London on AMC. This isn't a great movie, but it has a few great - I'd go as far as "iconic" - scenes, most notably David Naughton's transformation into the title monster. Does AMC cut for content? I often skip movies showing on AMC because I hate watching commercials during films. And I don't know if the movies are running uncut with commercials or cut down for size. Let me know in comments if you have a better idea about what AMC is doing.

Mon, Oct 27 (ze spillover from Sunday):

1:30/2:30 am: Vampyr: Der Traum des Allan Grey on TCM. Now this is a great movie, Dreyer’s 1932 vampire epic. One of the greatest vampire movies ever made, in fact, up there with Nosferatu. I don't know how it will look in this cut, but I believe that time and neglect have left all existing prints somewhat faded.

3/4 am: Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte on AMC. Horror film starring Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Joseph Cotten, and Agnes Moorehead. Sounds like a recipe for overheated Southern goth to me, but it's pretty highly rated, so what do I know?

11 am/12 pm: An American Werewolf in London on AMC. Repeat.

Sharon Stone Loses Ground in the Race for Mother of the Year

Phil Nugent — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 18:00:00 GMT

With her movie career basically on permanent hiatus, Sharon Stone continues to maintain her hold on the world's attention as some species of gossip-blogger freak. Stone has just wrapped up her lastest sideshow, the child custody hearings centered on Roan, the eight-year-old boy who Stone and her former husband, newspaperman Phil Bronstein, adopted during their six-year marriage. Stone lost her bid to have her son move in with her in Los Angeles, in part because of the judge's determination that she "appears to overreact to many medical issues involving Roan", and that her "overreactions" to nonexistent problems is a "painfully real" problem for the boy. Stone apparently became convinced that Roan had a spinal problem and couldn't be talked out of seeking treatment for it by doctors who assured her that Roan was perfectly healthy. Of course, delusions of spinal meningitis are one thing, but the tidbit from the proceedings that's really gotten people excited is the news that Stone, as the court delicately put it, "suggested that Roan should have Botox injections in his feet to resolve a problem he had with foot odor. As father appropriately noted, the simple and common sense approach of making sure Roan wore socks with his shoes and used foot deodorant corrected the odour problem without the need for any invasive procedure on this young child." One website claims that Stone was heard to say of her little one's pungent stumps, "If you smelled Roan's feet, you'd lose faith in God." Wait a minute, are we sure we're not talking about my mother? (To fully appreciate the impact of Stone's comments, keep in mind that she was apparently able to hang onto her faith in God even after seeing herself in the rushes for Catwoman.

Other bloggers have offered, in the place of fearless investigative journalism, cruel and snarky comments of a nature that just make us here at the Screengrab reach for the smelling salts, lest we swoon before copy them down here so we can share them with out own appalled readership. One blogger has even gone so far as to offer a long-distance diagnosis that Stone might suffer from Munchausen syndrome by proxy, rare and scary psychological disorder that compels parents to detect and even inflict illnesses on their children for the sake of the attention it gets them, adding, "Phil Bronstein must be thanking his lucky stars that he left with his man berries still in the tree." This may or may not be a veiled reference to what may have been the high point of the Stone-Bronstein marriage, at least for those of us on the outside gawking through the protective glass: the fabled moment back in 2001 when, with baby Roan in tow, the happy couple went to the zoo for a summit meeting that Stone had arranged for her reptile-happy husband with a Komodo dragon, which proceeded to try to eat his foot. (Bronstein had removed his tennis shoes after the zoo keeper expressed concern that the creature might mistake them for the white rats that are a staple of his diet when no movie star's husband is around.) We've all learned a lot from Stone and Bronstein's marriage. The most important lesson I've learned is that if I'm ever introduced to a Komodo dragon, I should not wear my kilt.

Warner Brother Tries To Give The Distinguished Competition A Boost

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Despite the fact that The Dark Knight has made roughly eighty-five kerjillion dollars on its way to breaking nearly every box office record since the dawn of motion photography, DC Comics -- and, by extention, their parent company Warner Brothers -- is widely perceived as the big loser in the battle of superhero movies. Much as Marvel Comics did in the early '60s, Marvel Films -- the people responsible for Iron Man, Spider-Man and the X-Men franchise -- has largely trounced what it used to call its "Distinguished Competition". Although both companies have turned their franchise characters into successful movies, Marvel's have generally been seen as more successful, more entertaining, more true to their comic book origins, and most of all, easier to get made. While DC continues to farm its characters out to various studios, Marvel has consolidated its filmmaking power into its studio arm, ensuring a production continuity that provides another curious parallel to the '60s, when the more coherent continuity of Marvel's comics appealed to readers.

This is a situation that Warner Brothers, who's been making movies even longer than DC has been making comics, is eager to change. In an article in the latest Variety, Warner execs and DC bigwigs alike discuss what's being done to avoid the sort of missteps that have led to their being thought of as the second-tier player in superhero films. From greenlighting unprofitable tripe like Catwoman to dragging its feet on potential blockbusters like Wonder Woman and Justice League, DC's film development players have made a number of high-profile mistakes (let's not even speak of the botch-job that was the making and marketing of Superman Returns) that have led them to be seen as failures despite having put out the biggest blockbuster in four decades.

DC development executives Jeff Robinov (production vice-president) and Gregory Noveck (senior VP of creative affairs) describe their recent meetings with Warner Brothers head Alan Horn in terms of a visit to the woodshed with an angry dad. Horn doesn't deny it: "If you do it wrong," he says of developing sucessful films from the billion-dollar DC empire, "you're dead, you're out of there." In a line that will bring power-mad smiles to the faces of geeks everywhere, Robinov talks about no wanting to piss off the Comic-Con contingent, and speaks of the difficulty of making a good film while keeping the fanboys happy. "There's a massive interest and knowledge in the comic book industry, and it takes time to understand the characters and the history, where they've intersected with each other and what their worlds are," says Robinov, who probably spent high school going outdoors and dating girls, in the understatement of the year, "That's part of the education that we're going through." It's an education that Horn no doubt hopes won't prove too costly.

Hey, how about that? A whole post about superhero movies, and no mention of Watchmen! I may get out of this year alive after all...

Halle Berry Loses Her Mind

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Forget all the controversy about Robert Downey’s blackface turn in Tropic Thunder. Halle Berry believes she’s got at least one more hysterical Oscar speech in her, and since Catwoman somehow didn’t get the job done, she’s following one of the tried-and-true paths to award season glory: mental illness.

No, we’re not referring to her announced plan to shave her head on camera in the romantic comedy Nappily Ever After, although that may earn her some bonus points if she goes through with it. ("I still struggle with this hair issue," she said. "I'm going to get the lesson on film, and hopefully other women will get it, too.") It’s her next project that sounds like a crazy cocktail of Sybil, Fight Club and American History X.

Variety reports that Berry will star in the psychological thriller Frankie and Alice, which “follows a young woman struggling with multiple personality disorder and torn between who she is and a racist Caucasian alter-personality that preys upon her mind.” Folks, this could be a camp classic for the ages. We can only hope Berry’s alternate personalities are visualized onscreen – not because it would be a great directorial decision (no director has been named so far), but just to see what sort of outcry might develop over the prospect of Berry in whiteface. And if her racist alter ego is a skinhead, well, shaving her head shouldn’t be a problem, right?

The Screengrab Top Ten: The Baseball Movie All-Stars, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Spring is here! Okay, not in my apartment, but I've read that it's here, some places, apparently, and with it, the return of what's left of baseball, the American game. Sports in general, and baseball in particular, have a spotty history in the movies. I think I've been reading that sports movies are box-office poison since before I'd ever seen a sports movie and maybe before I had any clear grasp of the concept of "box-office poison." (Then I saw a trailer for Catwoman.) But anything that inspires the kind of passion, excitement, despair, and apoplexy that baseball inspires in its hardcore adherents has got to inspire some great characters. Here's a bullpen's worth of them.

Ty Cobb (Tommy Lee Jones), COBB (1994)

In this poorly received and actually rather amazing movie, Jones gives a fine, fire-breathing performance as a man who, perhaps more than any other figure in the history of his sport, gives fans cause to weigh the value of his contribution to the game against the less positive effects of having had to share a planet with him. In his prime, Cobb competed as if he thought that the members of the losing team, and the less productive half of the winning team, would be rounded up after the game and beaten to death with sticks; seen in his comfortable, lonely old age, he's still a man who can only relate to the world as something to be fought, but crowds will no longer pay to see him fight on the baseball field and most people would rather not get close enough to fight him off the field, not even for ready money. Most of the movie is set in the early 1960s, when Cobb hired a sportswriter with the sportswriterly name of Al Stump (played here by Robert Wuhl) to ghostwrite his memoir, promised to let him tell the truth, and then bullied him into composing a sanitized version called My Life in Baseball. More than thirty years later, in conjunction with the movie, Stump published a more honest version of his encounter with the monster, Cobb: A Biography. Stump died a year to the month after the movie and book came out. One hopes that during that last year of his life, his dreams were a bit more peaceful.

Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon), BULL DURHAM (1988)

It's easy to love baseball if you're a hot prospect riding a greased rail to the show. It's another entirely when you're a woman living a going-nowhere life in a minor league town. Most female baseball fans in this position would be content to be groupies, frequenting the games and keeping the players company. But Annie Savoy, played by Susan Sarandon, is another case entirely- a true devotee of the game who has as much passion for baseball as any character (male or female) ever to grace the silver screen. As she states at the beginning of the film, ""I believe in the Church of Baseball." And she takes her faith seriously, singling out a promising player with a chance to make it to the big leagues, and providing him with spiritual guidance- and yes, sex- for an entire season. Her methods (reading poetry in bed, making her men wear women's underwear under their uniforms, and so on) may be unorthodox, but they seem to work. As she says, "there's never been a ballplayer slept with me who didn't have the best year of his career." In the season chronicled in Bull Durham, her man of choice is young pitcher "Nuke" Laloosh (Tim Robbins), an undisciplined kid with a killer fastball, and he gets the full Annie Savoy treatment. Yet despite her monogamous-for-a-season principles, she's thrown for a loop when she comes face to face with her male counterpart, journeyman catcher "Crash" Davis (Kevin Costner), a veteran who's been brought in to teach Nuke some lessons of his own. Crash's experiences have given him a hardened shell, but deep down he's just as much of an idealist about baseball as Annie is, and his presence in the film only underlines how pure Annie's love for the game truly is. At the end of the season, Crash is gone and Annie is still in Durham, but they will always worship at the same altar.

The Whammer (Joe Don Baker), THE NATURAL (1984)

This Robert Redford movie mostly makes a hash of the Bernard Malamud novel on which it's based, but it does have the niftiest film portrait ever of Babe Ruth, a monumental figure whose onscreen portrayers have included John Goodman, William Bendix, and, in the Lou Gehrig biopic The Pride of the Yankees, Babe Ruth. As in the book, he's called simply "the Whammer", as if it would be a blasphemous insult to refer to this celebrity demigod by the mere name his mama gave him. Joe Don Baker, who may have been the third least likely American actor to be cast as a great baseball player (after John Goodman and William Bendix), tears into the role as if it were what he'd been practicing for when he spent all that time swinging a homemade bat upside the heads of misguided lawbreakers in Walking Tall. Swaggering around the fairgrounds with a crowd of reporters at his heels and a babe in his line of sight, he captures the self-satisfied, bullying entitlement that many have attributed to the actual Babe, along with the magnetic, childlike delight in himself that made them love him anyway. Redford, in the title role, is supposed to be the new kid on the block, a country naif who's so green and self-assured that he doesn't know better than to regard himself as the old pro's equal. Getting a load of this idjit, the Whammer regards him with a sadistic, teasing dismay--as well he might, given that Baker and Redford were actually only born six months apart.

Charlie Snow (Richard Pryor), THE BINGO LONG TRAVELING ALL-STARS AND MOTOR KINGS (1976)

For the first half of the twentieth century, America's national pastime had a little problem: most of the nation wasn't allowed to play it. Not professionally, not in the big leagues, where the racial barriers overseen by the first Commissioner of Baseball, Kennesaw Mountain Landis, held so firm that they didn't budge even during World War II, when crowds turned out to watch the short-lived women's leagues play. (For more, see A League of Their Own, or rather don't, because it sucks.) Bingo Long, which stars Billy Dee Williams as a pitcher-manager of a barnstorming all-black team during the pre-segregation period, is perhaps the only Hollywood movie to take as its subject the baseball of the Negro Leagues, and the mixed feelings experienced by those stars who had the chance to delight audiences with their superb play and showmanship but sometimes felt degraded both by being excluded from white baseball and by the clowning that their fans came to expect. (It also captures the mixed feelings experienced by the Negro Leaguers when the color bar dropped and the all-black teams died off.) Pryor has one of his better movie parts in the supporting role of Charlie, a player who schemes to break into the big leagues by posing as a Cuban (named "Carlos Nevada") and then, after that doesn't pan out, as a Native American. For his later hustle, he adopts a Mohawk haircut, just like Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver, which was released a few months earlier. We would further explore the long-hidden connections between this engaging light period comedy and Scorsese's febrile urban masterpiece, except that there aren't any.

Ring Lardner (John Sayles), EIGHT MEN OUT (1988)

John Sayles has often allowed as how he takes acting roles in the movies he writes and directs because that makes for one less actor he has to pay, but in the right role, his cameos are sometimes the best thing in his movies. Here he found the role of his lifetime in the saturnine, long-faced sportswriter, casually wisecracking his way to a permanent place in American letters. Though it's the Chicago newspaperman Hugh Fullerton (played here by Studs Terkel) who actually breaks the story of the Black Sox scandal, it's his sidekick Lardner, glumly observing the chicanery and nodding in recognition of the crass absurdity of it all, who gives the proceedings a carefully judged moral weight that modern-day observers of the baseball scene will look for in their sports pages in vain. In his show-stopping big number, he entertains the crooked, self-hating ballplayers by performing, a capella and to tune of "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles", a little song of his own composition that begins, "I'm forever blowing ball games..." and ends with the (inaccurate) line, "And the gamblers treat me fair." All the while, the players can only sit there in self-incriminating silence, though there's no mistaking how much they wish they could kill him, or maybe kill themselves. Maybe a little from column A and a little from column B.

--Paul Clark, Phil Nugent

Click here for Part 2!