It's baseball season! This year, we celebrate by watching Fear Strikes Out, the 1957 story of troubled outfielder Jimmy Piersall.
Last year at this time, we ventured to the cinematic ballpark to catch a largely lightweight team, managed by bulky blowhard Paul Douglas (Angels In The Outfield), and featuring that eggheaded ace Ray Milland (It Happens Every Spring).
That team also fielded stalwart amputee Jimmy Stewart (The Stratton Story), whose melodramatic adventures suggested something darker than the genial clubhouse atmosphere created by his aforementioned teammates.
This year, we celebrate the opening of the baseball season in observation of an even more troubled character, movie-ball's densest, in fact: that paranoid, pipe-cleaner of a player Anthony Perkins, in 1957's Fear Strikes Out.
Fear is, as every fan with an interest in the sport knows, the account of a complicated episode in the career of Jimmy Piersall, a .272 lifetime hitter whose 17 year career was interrupted by a public breakdown.
Piersall's problems had deep roots, though this film, in true fifties fashion, sticks with the strictly Freudian explanation: the unreasonable demands of a pushy parent. It's an oversimplication that was all the rage in those James Dean-dominated days, and unfortunately, robs Piersall's story of diversity and dimension as much as the fleet-footed Piersall robbed opposing hitters of line drives.
On the plus side, it was also the golden era of The Method, and Anthony Perkins and Karl Malden, as Piersall's punishing paterfamilias, do their Actors' Studio all to bring some genuine pop to a light-hitting script.
The result is, fittingly I suppose, a less than stable affair: half formulaic baseball picture, half existential teenage angst film. Call it Rebel Without An MVP Award. Still, for all of its flaws (have we failed to mention the over eager, obstrusive score?), it remained the only attempt at psychological portraiture in baseball films until Tommy Lee Jones tackled the role of Ty Cobb some forty years later.
The film was produced and directed by the team of Alan Pakula and Robert Mulligan, who a few short years later, would craft a far better film, To Kill A Mockingbird, in the same mold: victim rescued from oppressor by kindly professional (in Fear's case, a pipe-smoking psychiatrist who is no Atticus Finch.)
Fear Strikes Out was largely applauded in its day, but the feeling was that yet another genre, like the evolution that the Western was undergoing at the time, had been violated by the growing mania for psychology and realism. Hence, it was back to minors for moviedom's ballplayers, where they would toil in relative obscurity until the Bull Durham-inspired craze of the late eighties.
Game called on account of darkness.
