So far, there are a grand total of five movie reviews on this page, with hopefully more to come in the future. Thanks for reading!
A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN (1992)In 1943, some of baseball's biggest stars (including Joe DiMaggio, Bob Feller and Ted Williams) go overseas to join the war effort. Baseball's owners consider shutting down the league until the war ends; one visionary executive gets the idea of starting up a professional baseball league for women. Davis is the best player in the league, and her younger sister (Petty) is a good pitcher. But though baseball may be a simple game to play, it becomes more complicated when you have to sell sex appeal as well.
At its best, this is a terrific example of how to make a funny, sexy baseball movie. It's not quite as racy as, say, Bull Durham; it is the 1940's, after all, and some of these women have husbands in the army, but it's as saucy as it needs to be. Davis is appealing and believable as a talented star player; Madonna adds some pizzazz without becoming the centre of attention, and she and O'Donnell make a good odd couple.
Their team is managed by former baseball star Jimmy Dugan, now an alcoholic who only wants to collect a paycheque, and sleeps through most of the games. It is, of course, a little hard to see Hanks as a player who hit 487 home runs (his character is very loosely based on former star Jimmie Foxx), but it doesn't matter because Hanks delivers an outstanding comic performance. He's very good as a pathetic, disgusting drunk — but he's even better when he starts to show an interest and actually manages. The scene where Hanks bawls out a player for crying ("There's no crying in baseball!") is as good a baseball scene as there is on film.
The subtext of the film is the growing feminist attitudes of the women while their husbands are away. Scout Lovitz (in a very funny role) is looking for good female baseball players, but rejects the ones who are ugly. Dottie and Kit stand up to him by refusing to play unless he changes his criteria. When Hanks utterly fails to perform his job as manager, the girls take over. The owners try to raise the appeal of the women by teaching them to act like ladies, but when that fails, the girls take public relations into their own hands by adding their own pizzazz to the game.
As is the case with most baseball films, this one shines most when it is about the game. As soon as the story becomes too involved with the sister rivalry, it begins to falter, and the plot becomes incredibly contrived. Dottie quits the team before the World Series... will she come back? Dottie faces Kit with the game on the line... will she get a hit? Kit is the last batter of the game... will she have a chance to overshadow her sister? In each case, the script offers no surprises.
For a film that asks us to celebrate the legacy of women's professional baseball, it gives us scant information about the league itself. No one expects a documentary, but the script goes out of its way to avoid the facts. All of the names have been changed — even Wrigley Field has been turned into "Harvey Field". All we know is that the girls were playing during the war — but we all know that Major League Baseball never shut down during this time, so when and where did these girls play? Spring, summer, fall? A little more context would have helped a lot.
The film also saps a lot of goodwill with the unnecessary prologue and excruciating, and sometimes embarrassing, epilogue. What should have been a crisp 90-minute film is instead dragged out for almost two hours. The final reunion is incredibly sappy, made worse by Hans Zimmer's overbearing music score.
When all is said and done, this is just a fluff job, an entertaining but empty treatment of what could have been a great film. There are lots of clichés mixed in with the jokes, but precious little heart and soul. The characters are strong, but would be stronger if the men in the film weren't so easily manipulated and pushed around. It's fun, but it could and should have been so much better.
Kevin Costner stars as Billy Chapel, a star pitcher who has spent his entire career with the Detroit Tigers, leading them to a World Series. Now, at age 40, his life has reached a crossroads; the team has been sold, and the new owners plan to trade him. His ex-girlfriend is moving to London, shattering his hopes that they might resume their relationship. His mentor, the Tigers' former owner, advises him to retire. Chapel takes the mound for the final game of the season, and perhaps his career, and flashes back on his life and career while pitching his greatest game.
Sam Raimi's directorial career began with the Evil Dead trilogy; you might think that he would bring a different perspective to the baseball genre, but it appears that he prepared for this film by watching The Natural several hundred times. If you liked The Natural, that might be okay; but if you prefer Bull Durham, you will be disheartened to know that once those wacky, oddball minor leaguers make the big leagues, they turn into really boring people.
The action on the field is frustratingly inconsistent. There are moments that will appeal to baseball fans, such as Chapel realizing for the first time in the 7th inning that he is throwing a perfect game, Chapel's manager in the ninth bouncing up and down on his toes, or the no-good slugger for the Yankees trying to break up the perfecto with a bunt. But the brotherly love that exists among all the players doesn't ring true. And the fact that an entire nine-inning game is played at Yankee Stadium without any cuss words from the players, managers or fans makes one wonder just who the target audience is.
As is often the case with baseball films, the filmmakers can't resist turning ordinary plays on the field into cloying life lessons. The scene where the centre fielder is hit on the head with the fly ball is, by itself, all right. So is the scene where he makes a spectacular catch to preserve the perfect game. But the two of them put together is just sappy beyond belief.
The romance between Costner and Preston is pleasant enough, but there's not much under the surface. A chance meeting brings them together, then after a breakup, a contrived crisis brings them back together. The film would have been much better if it had instead looked back on the entire breadth of Chapel's career, and on the numerous women in his life. By putting all the focus on Preston, the script puts all of its eggs in one basket, but can never come up with a convincing, three-dimensional character.
Preston has all of the worst lines — like when she asks him if he will love her if her face was torn off, or when she asks if he likes dark meat pulled off of the chicken, or when she screams at a hospital staff, asking whether or not they like baseball. When her teenage daughter runs away, she pleads for his help on the phone; when he asks for her name, she replies "Freedom... just kidding, it's Heather", perhaps the most inauthentic piece of dialogue ever written.
Billy Chapel isn't exactly well-rounded, either, but that's okay, because he's just a professional ballplayer. He does have his moments — such as when he insists on his personal catcher (O'Reilly) starting the game, then glares at his manager when O'Reilly gets a hit — when he seems to be a me-first player who is contemptuous of anyone who disagrees when him. But this is not a script that cares to examine shades of character.
The script tries desperately to make the relationship appealing, but instead it is just contrived and cloying. The only meaty element of their relationship is after he suffers a devastating injury, and his rehabilitation drives them apart. It could be argued, perhaps, that the stunted dialogue and lack of chemistry merely serve Preston's assertion at the beginning of the movie, that she has known from the start that they weren't meant to be together. But that makes the soppy ending even more dishonest.
The use of Vin Scully and Steve Lyons doing play-by-play is fine, except for when Scully's commentary begins to sum up the circumstances of Chapel's entire life story, including the rumours of his impending retirement and the sale of the team. Since when did broadcasters have so much accurate information?
If the daughter's name had been "Freedom", it might have helped a film that has no surprises. We all expect that he will get the perfect game, will retire and will get the girl. And the film delivers, on cue.
As Damon Runyan explains in the opening credits, this is the story of Lou Gehrig. From his early years as a young boy growing up in a working class neighbourhood, to his days as a star athlete at Columbia University; then getting signed by the Yankees, becoming one of the best players in the league, and marrying Eleanor Twitchell. His story comes to a shocking end, however, when he is diagnosed with a rare, fatal disease. But despite this turn of events, Gehrig keeps his spirits up; as he tells the crowd at Yankee Stadium: "I consider myself the luckiest man alive."
This film has become a classic, partly because it was better than most other baseball films from the era; it also benefits from an irresistible story, from Gehrig's replacement of Wally Pipp at first base, to his streak of over 2000 consecutive games played, his storybook marriage, and the heartbreaking end to his career and his life. But the truth is, this film is pure cornball; how else can you describe a biography that features three separate appearances by the Keystone Kops?
One of the many failings of baseball films is that there isn't enough baseball in them. This film is a prime offender; a full half hour passes before Gehrig plays his first game in a Yankee uniform. He struggles with being raised in a working class family, with his extreme shyness, and with his mother's wish that he become an engineer like his uncle. The latter leads to a complicated ruse, in which he and his father try to fool his mother into thinking that he is attending Harvard while he plays baseball in Hartford; meanwhile, the clock is ticking, and the film ends up skipping over many of the triumphs of Lou's career.
Even after he joins the Yankees, there isn't a single authentic baseball scene in the entire movie. The script includes the legendary story of how both Gehrig and Ruth each promised to hit a home run for a sick boy in the hospital (in Gehrig's case, two home runs). Of course, the real story is different from what happens in the movie, but that's not the point; I understand that screenwriters sometimes have to alter the facts to fit the story. No one expects the events portrayed in this film to exactly match the historical record; Retrosheet was still unavailable in 1942.
The point is, that's all there is. The actual game on the field is an afterthought. The real Gehrig was one of the greatest playoff performers ever, but the only time we ever see him in competition in the World Series, he's more concerned with belting a homer for a little boy than with winning a game. A film biography can play with the facts, but it still has to capture the essence of who the person was. And this film completely fails to capture the essence of Gehrig, the ballplayer.
The Lou-Eleanor romance, as portrayed in the movie, is based on the dubious assertion that Gehrig was a total clutz whom Eleanor found endearing. He first catches her attention by tripping over some bats, then later commits an error in the field because he's too busy watching Eleanor in the stands. Most American males can goof off on a ballfield to impress girls; once again, the film fails to give us any evidence of why Gehrig is in the big leagues, or of his competitive nature on the field.
On their first serious date, Eleanor and Lou attend a dance club, where a pair of ballroom dancers strut their stuff. And they do it for several minutes. The dancers are quite good, and the scene is aesthetically pleasing; in another movie, it might serve to illustrate the gulf between rich-girl Eleanor and working-class jock Lou. But an extended dance exhibition, in a movie that has precious few baseball scenes to begin with, can't help but seem out of place.
Off the field, Cooper looks good in the role of Gehrig; on the field, he runs and slides fairly well, but can't swing a bat to save himself. The rest of the supporting cast is OK with what they are given to work with. It's hard to judge to production values, given how little baseball is actually played; but the overbearing music score, which features endless orchestrations of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" is a bit much.
Some of Gehrig's Yankee teammates appear as themselves in the film; Babe Ruth and Bill Dickey are the only ones with major speaking parts. Ruth looks old and fat but still manages to strut his stuff well enough. Dickey gives a strong, thoughtful performance in a role that is much too small; he is the one Yankee who understands what Gehrig represents to the team, and stands behind him in his struggles. If only Cooper's Gehrig exuded the same kind of soft-spoken strength that Dickey does.
The film does serve as a time capsule, when straw hats were considered a trendy fashion accessory, and corny police officers were a constant source of comic relief. Moneyball fans might be interested to know that Gehrig's mother liked walks and had little time for the sacrifice bunt. But though it was highly acclaimed when released, the film has aged very poorly, and can't seriously be considered as a great baseball movie, or even the definitive version of the Gehrig story.
What happens when a councilman's son isn't good enough to play in a local baseball league? First, his father sues the league, which then allows him to field his own team. Second, he recruits a roster of misfits who aren't good enough to play on the other teams. Third, he hires an alcoholic ex-player named Buttermaker (Matthau) to coach the team. And when the Bears take the field for the first time... they're so bad that don't even record an out in their first game!
But then Buttermaker decides to take the job seriously, and teach the kids how to win and believe in themselves. And with the help of a girl pitcher with a good fastball (O'Neal) the Bears start winning some games — and are bad news for their opponents.
Ah, the original; how sweet it is that, after countless insufferable imitations, this one still stands above the crowd. Led by a fine cast of adults, and a likable cast of kids, this film manages to both entertain and teach a few life lessons, for both kids and adults.
There is not much that is funny about a drunken, irresponsible lout who is left in charge of young children. Thank goodness, then, for an actor like Walter Matthau who can not only make us laugh with his curmudgeonly behaviour, but can sell the idea that while Buttermaker is a failure at life, he carries with him enough life lessons that he can pass them on to the kids in a positive way. The script also sells the idea that playing sports teaches lessons that last a lifetime — Buttermaker's brain may be frazzled, but he can still effortlessly recite the lessons that he was taught as a young ballplayer.
Vic Morrow shines in the thankless role as the coach who is so committed to winning that he alienates his own son and forgets about having fun. The overzealous parent is still a serious problem in North America — witness the recent murder of one hockey dad by another — and the role has become a stereotype in the movies. But starting with his debut in The Blackboard Jungle, Morrow had a seething, controlled rage that he kept just under the surface of his character, and it's what makes this Ugly Dad more compelling than all the rest.
What is most surprising about this film is that it completely ignores the whole gender issue. The script could easily have had O'Neal chop her hair and pretend to be a boy, but instead she is just herself, and no one in the league raises an objection to a girl playing in a boys' league. Even Morrow seems to think that it is perfectly natural that a girl should be able to strike out all of his best players.
It is a missed opportunity that prevents the film from really being something special, but on the other hand, the writers were probably well advised to stick within their limits. The script remains remarkably focussed on its prime target — the adults — and never lets up. All of the adults manage to disappoint in one way or another, either by treating the kids badly or each other badly. The kids know when the adults are behaving badly — but as kids do, they have an infinite capacity to forgive.
The Bears themselves are an entertaining mix of 11-to-12 year olds; the roster includes a fat kid who eats chocolate bars without removing the wrapper, a short kid who picks fights with the entire seventh grade, a shy kid who eats his own boogers, a kid who loves Hank Aaron and is a wannabe Black Muslim, a stat geek who knows all the numbers, and so on. Though the script depends heavily on these misfits for laughs, it also has a solid grasp of the relationships between kids and adults. And the kids have a few authentic moments when trying to relate to each other.
The kids are at that awkward age where they are too old to be cute, but are too young to be considered teenagers. They are all social outcasts who, in their own way, are also trying to deal with the arrival of puberty. But they're still young enough that a girl can play with the boys, and some of them are developing slower than others. The oldest ones (O'Neal and Haley) take an cursory interest in the opposite sex, but their relationship doesn't amount to more than riding a bike together.
This film was followed by two inferior sequels, a television show, and countless imitations. None have been able to mix outstanding adult actors like Walter Matthau and Vic Morrow with outstanding young talents like Tatum O'Neal and Jackie Earl Haley. Mix in a script that is funny, smart and often gross at the same time, and a genuine love for Little League baseball, and the result is a winner.
Two former hippies settle down, have a daughter and buy a farm in Iowa. At age 36, Costner is already having an early midlife crisis, fearing that he's going to turn into his father, a man with no dreams or ambitions. Then, a disembodied voice tells him to build a baseball diamond in his cornfield, so that the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson — his father's favourite player — can play again. Costner builds it, Jackson returns, and all is well — except that the farm is almost bankrupt, and the voice is giving Costner new, quizzical instructions.
On one level, this is a story about family. There is, of course, the teary reunion between Ray and his father, which should bring tears to even hardened male audiences. But there's also his relationship with his young daughter, whom he treats like a boy; they don't seem to talk about anything except baseball (she also wins his approval when she tells the players she doesn't mind their foul language). Ray and his feisty wife have made the transition from flower children to yuppies with a child and a mortgage, yet have retained their idiosyncracies and have yet to kill each other.
On another level, the film is about faith. A voice tells Costner to ruin his crops and build a ball field — and he does. He tells his wife that he knows what "Ease his pain" means, and she accepts his explanation, despite an absence of hard evidence. Terence Mann agrees to drive cross country with a man who tries to kidnap him. Ray must believe that people will drive to Iowa and pay to watch baseball, saving his farm.
Along the way, Ray's faith is shaken by several obstacles. He takes Mann to a ballgame, and receives the final message — which Mann claims to have missed; it appears that Ray has come all that way for nothing. When he encounters the ghost of Doc Graham, Ray is sure that the old man is supposed to come with him. But Doc Graham refuses to go. But once again, unexpectedly, Ray turns out to be right in his convictions.
(In one of the film's best moments, Jackson asks if the ballfield is Heaven. "No," replies Ray. "It's Iowa." Though the film certainly has lofty ambitions, it never loses its cheeky, and refreshing, sense of humour.)
And of course, the film is also about dreams. The five main male characters all dream of being something, but end up becoming something else. Doc Graham was satisfied with the direction his life took; John Kinsella, the ballplayer who never was, and Joe Jackson, the great who was cut down in hs prime, were not. Ray and Terence are both grasping at the chance to do something special with their lives before it is too late.
But what really makes this film one of the truly great baseball movies, is that more than anything else it is about baseball. Everybody is linked together, somehow, by their love of baseball. There are details everywhere; when throwing batting practice to Shoeless Joe, Ray remembers that Jackson was a low-ball hitter. When he picks up young Archie Graham hitchhiking, Ray recalls that players used to travel the midwest, looking for a team to play with — as his father did.
It is astonishing how well the script knows its audience (as opposed to many baseball films that don't know who they're trying to appeal to). In the first playing sequence in the film, Joe Jackson shags flies while Ray bats the ball. They don't speak to each other — one instinctively picks up a bat, while the other takes the field. Jackson stares in wonder at the lights that come on at night — he played before the days of night baseball. Ray recalls the great feel and smell of a leather glove and ball — the ways that playing baseball affects all the senses are universal.
It doesn't get all the details right, of course; the real Jackson hit left-handed, and he certainly lived long enough to see night baseball. But none of the errors get in the way of the story.
In addition to dreams and fantasy, another recurring theme, one that helps keep the script grounded in reality, is the importance of money. Building the ballfield costs Ray money — so much so that he risks losing the farm. Jackson, while detailing his love for the game, says that he would have played for nothing; Ray counters that night baseball was introduced so that the owners could make more money.
When Ray tries to find the reclusive Mann, he finds little help — and eventually is forced to bribe a gas attendant for the information. In the final scene, Ray must choose between reality and fantasy — the ballfield or the bankbook; only his daughter, as only children can, sees the way that both can be reconciled.