Play ball! While you're at it, play DVD - and enjoy these classic baseball movies.
Classic Baseball Movies
June, maintains the New Yorker's Roger Angell, is when baseball really starts.
And indeed it has - but for those of you who, like myself, can't get enough, take heart: a veritable bullpen of classic baseball movies is ready to be inserted into your viewing line-up.
Movies about baseball flourished in the late forties and early fifties; the gentility of the sport was most conducive to that short and sweet era between the heyday of film noir and the full emergence of the Elia Kazan school. (A second great wave followed in the late eighties.)
You'll note, too, the shared conventions of these films: heaps of sentiment, quick-and-dirty production values, and a gentle, if mechanical humor.
<b<Angels in the Outfield - 1951
Thought Bull Durham was the first baseball movie with a female narrator? Try this one, wherein prim journalist Janet Leigh recounts the tale of a salty manager - perennial lummox Paul Douglas - coerced by heavenly forces into cleaning up his act in exchange for wins. Call it Christian claptrap, call it imitation Capra; there's still more than enough in it for the average baseball nut, including cameos by Joe DiMaggio and Ty Cobb, and rare glimpses of Pittsburgh's now demolished Forbes Field.
It Happens Every Spring - 1949
Ray Milland, perhaps the only actor aside from Cary Grant capable of making fuddy-duddiness debonair, stars in this Thurberesque tale of a chemistry teacher who invents a formula than can repel wood. He badgers his way on to the St Louis Cardinals, and promptly brings them to the World Series, all the while attempting to keep his newfound career a secret. It's a charming, well-crafted fairy tale that hops along like a well-smacked grounder.
The Stratton Story - 1949
While they lacked the explosiveness of Tracy-Hepburn, the just-as-frequent pairing of June Allyson and James Stewart was of equal value. If the dynamic they were assigned became familiar fast - the dutiful wife supporting her professionally tormented husband - they always played it with genuineness and ease. It's at its most evident in this men's weeper about Monty Stratton, the lanky Texan who twice won 15 games for the Chicago White Sox, only to lose a leg in a hunting accident. Sam Wood was given the directing duties on this one, based on the grand success he had with a previous baseball bio, Pride of the Yankees.
So, when the last baseball broadcast is over and your ears are no longer privy to the magical cry of Play ball!, play DVD.
