The Screengrab : lou gehrig

The Screengrab Top Ten: The Baseball Movie All-Stars, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Lou Gehrig (Gary Cooper), THE PRIDE OF THE YANKEES (1942)

Some of the most memorable depictions of famous baseball players in movies have undercut the boy's-book images of childlike saints in cleats by showing the darker and more neurotic sides of driven professional athletes, but everyone with an informed opinion on the matter seems to agree that Lou Gehrig really was what a great ball player was supposed to be: hard-working, clean-living, decent, and somehow not even boring because of it, maybe because in the context of the Murderers' Row of the Babe Ruth-era Yankees, his boy scout qualities kind of gave him curiosity value. Like most celebrity biopics of the old studio era, especially ones made about athletes, this movie substitutes corn for depth or factual accuracy, and it has its snoozy side. But Gary Cooper's delivery of Gehrig's legendary farewell speech puts it at the top of the pile for male weepies.

Elmer Kane (Joe E. Brown), ELMER THE GREAT (1933)

"Imagine a cross-roads apple-knocker like that high-hatting the Chicago Cubs!, sneers the great talent scout Bull McWade, having traveled all they way (by horse-drawn sleigh apparently) to the little town of Gentryville, Indiaina, in order to welcome minor league wunderkind Elmer Kane into the majors. But, enigmatically, the swaggering, cossetted man-child will have nothing to do him, hiding in his room until the man leaves, and it is safe for him to descend for another of his endless ritualized breakfasts (towards the end of the gargantuan meal, asked by his housekeeper if he wants a slice of apple pie, he says, "Well, bring it on in and I'll flirt with it!"), where he reveals nothing either to his unbelieving brother (the great Sterling Holloway) other than boasting that his not joining the team will mean the Cubs will have no chance to win the "World Serious" that year, or dispensing xenophobic homilies to his dim ("Who's Babe Ruth?") doting mother (Emma Dunn), such as, "I hate places that I ain 't never seen!""

Inevitably it's love that keeps the poor sap trapped in Hicksvillle. He's fallen long and hard for his boss, the lovely Patricia Ellis, the women who runs the dry good store down the street . And he's lucky enough that she realizes the only way to loosen this barnacle is with a quick scrape of the brush; she rejects him as soon as he painfully mumbles out his feelings, then fires him, and in the cold fury of her apparent rejection he takes up the contract for the major leagues and heads out broken-hearted for fame and fortune. Elmer Kane , like many of Brown's characters, can have the tendency to set modern audience's teeth on edge, with the overbearing, know-it-allrube on the outside, barely covering up a world of ignorance and naiviete on the inside. Talented enough at baseball to lead his team to victory, but at the same time too dumb to know the difference between a sun lamp and microphone; hero to millions but also able to fall into the grips of organized crime boss because he thought he was "playing for fun" at the dice table, he often comes across as dim and otherworldly as an American Kasper Hauser. And if in the end if it's hard not to cheer for him when inevitably brings in that finally, muddy home run, and wins the pennant for the Cubs, you get the feeling that you still wouldn't really want to invite him over for breakfast after the game.

Nicky Rogan (Michael Keaton), GAME 6 (2005)

Life couldn't be much better for Red Sox fans these days, what with two world championships in four years and even the much-maligned Bill Buckner getting a hero's welcome for throwing out the first pitch at this week's Fenway Park home opener. The image of the tormented Sawx fan has pretty much passed into mythology by now, so the Don DeLillo scripted Game 6, which takes us back to the fateful night that "little roller up along first" dribbled between Buckner's legs in the 1986 World Series, is more of a quaint time capsule than was probably intended. Still, baseball brings out the best in DeLillo as anyone who read the dazzling "Pafko at the Wall" segment of the otherwise turgid Underworld knows, and it brings out the best in Michael Keaton, too. As playwright Nicky Rogan, whose latest effort is opening the same night as the pivotal Game 6, Keaton has his best role in years; he captures the feverish intensity of the true believer who sees the Red Sox as metaphor for all that's tragic in life, yet still can't take his eyes off them.

Morris Buttermaker (Walter Matthau), THE BAD NEWS BEARS (1976)

Sure, it's a good thing for kids to have larger-than-life role models, like Reggie Jackson or Aquaman. But it can't hurt to develop a more attainable view of adulthood, which is where Morris Buttermaker, the manager of the Bad News Bears, comes in. (And with all due respect to Billy Bob Thornton, who essayed the role in the 2005 Richard Linklater remake, and Jack Warden, who took it to the small screen in a short-live 1979 series, the definitive Buttermaker is the original: Walter Matthau.) A failed minor leaguer turned swimming pool cleaner, perpetually disheveled and hungover, owner of a crappy car and so hard up for cash he takes a job coaching kids he can't stand--these are recognizable qualities of a man in full. He gets a bail bondsman to sponsor the team uniforms, he lets the kids drink beer in the dugout, and his idea of an inspirational speech is "Tanner almost got a base hit in the fourth inning." It is often said that baseball is a game of failure, in that even the best player makes an out in six out of ten tries. If that's the case, then what better manager for our nine? Two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate? Buttermaker!

Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen), THE NAKED GUN (1988)

We can't have a ballgame without an umpire, so we might as well pick one who can double as our national anthem singer. I've long maintained that the original Naked Gun movie (from the files of Police Squad!, natch) was the last shining moment for Leslie Nielsen, comic actor, because it's the last movie he made before he realized he was supposed to be funny and started mugging like crazy instead of maintaining his serene deadpan. Here is one of his finest moments, a slapstick sendup of every arrogant ump who ever decided he was the show all the fans came to see. Unfortunately, this clip doesn't include his equally sublime butchering of "The Star-Spangled Banner" in the guise of opera singer Enrico Pallazzo, nor the repeated bad calls he makes in order to delay the game and prevent the assassination of Queen Elizabeth, but you probably know it all by heart anyway.

--Robert Gomez, Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak

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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

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Location, Location, Location: Yankee Stadium

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 18:30:00 GMT

If you didn’t wake up at 5:00 EST this morning and turn on ESPN2, you may not be aware that baseball season has begun. (The Oakland A’s and Boston Red Sox played their season opener in Japan’s Tokyo Dome, which accounts for the rather unorthodox start time.) This will be the final season for Yankee Stadium (a new version of same is scheduled to open across the street in 2009), so it only seems appropriate to commemorate Opening Day with a look at the cinematic history of the House That Ruth Built.

According to our crack research staff, Yankee Stadium’s earliest screen appearance came in Harold Lloyd’s 1928 feature Speedy. In his final silent film, Lloyd plays a cabbie who races Babe Ruth to the Stadium and stays to watch in the game, in which Ruth swats one of his then-record 60 home runs for the season. Not to be outdone, Buster Keaton appeared that same year in The Cameraman, in which he played a one-man game at the otherwise deserted stadium:

Fourteen years later, another sort of one-man show became the most famous scene to be shot at Yankee Stadium, as Gary Cooper re-enacted Lou Gehrig’s famous farewell address in Pride of the Yankees:

It’s hard to top that one as far as baseball monologues go, but Kevin Costner gave it a shot in 1999's For the Love of the Game, in which he played an aging pitcher attempting to complete a perfect game from the Yankee Stadium mound. With John C. Reilly as his catcher, how can he lose?

And finally we have this romantic moment from Anger Management, featuring the incomparable emoting of Rudy Giuliani. If only every American voter had seen this clip, his presidential campaign might still be alive today.