Gary Cooper in Pride of the Yankees

Cooper Stars as Yankee Great Lou Gehrig in Classic Film Biography

Nov 20, 2008 Barry M. Grey

For decades, Pride of the Yankees was the template for sports movie biographies - a perfect blend of casting, story, script and performance.

This shamelessly sentimental film ostensibly tells the true story of Lou Gehrig, the great Yankee first baseman. But in fact, the film really is a love story disguised as a baseball movie.

Scenarists Paul Gallico, Herman Mankiewicz and Jo Swerling knew that sports films don’t generally appeal to female audiences. So Gehrig’s dramatic story on the diamond takes a back seat to his off-field story.

We meet Gehrig as the doted-on only child of immigrants; we witness the relationship with his overbearing mother and henpecked father; his years at Columbia University; how he contrives to hide his baseball aspirations from a mother who wants him to be an engineer; his rise with the Yankees; Gehrig’s romance of, and marriage to, Chicago debutante Eleanor Twitchell; her behind-the-backstop support – this was the film that made the pasting of baseball-related scrapbooks a movie cliche; Gehrig’s warm relationship with reporters; and finally his bittersweet Yankee Stadium farewell.

Gary Cooper is Lou Gehrig

Gary Cooper was born to play the Yankee star. As an actor, the bucolic Cooper was pretty much a one-trick pony. But Cooper as Gehrig is the perfect marriage of role and actor, with Cooper’s trademark aw-shucks persona fitting the real Gehrig’s humility like a first baseman’s glove.

Indeed the only problem Cooper encountered involved the baseball scenes themselves. Cooper was right-handed, unlike lefty Lou Gehrig. So director Sam Wood filmed Cooper batting right-handed; when he’d get a “hit,” Cooper took off running down the third base line. In post production, they flipped the image so it appeared Cooper was batting left-handed and racing to first.

Teresa Wright is Eleanor Twitchell

One of the most underrated actresses of the 1940s, Teresa Wright brought equal measures of charm, inner strength and delicate beauty to key roles in classics including Mrs. Miniver, Shadow of a Doubt and The Best Years of Our Lives. But as Eleanor Twitchell Gehrig, Wright crafts one of her best performances. Playing perfectly off Cooper’s studied awkwardness, she is alternately bemused, gently mocking, sweet, spirited and endearing.

Consider the range of emotions Wright is called on to demonstrate. When Cooper trips on a gaggle of baseball bats, she laughs uproariously, but not meanly, and nicknames him “Tanglefoot”; when Cooper appears in the dead of night to propose marriage, the look in her eye tells us everything; when she intuits that he is dying, she must subtly cue the audience that she knows – while hiding that recognition from the man she loves. Wright gets as many meaningful moments in the film as Cooper, and this helps make Pride of the Yankees the truly great film it is, a moving love story that just happens to also be about baseball.

Eleven Oscar Nominations

It’s not surprising Cooper, Wright and the screenwriters were among the film’s 11 Oscar nominations. But due to stiff Oscar competition that year, Pride of the Yankees only earned one Academy Award – for Daniel Mandell’s editing.

Oddly, two of the film’s great character actors weren’t even nominated. As competing sports writers, Walter Brennan and Dan Duryea shine in this film. Brennan gets the meatier role, as the journalist who “discovers” Gehrig, promotes him relentlessly, and is present for most critical moments in Gehrig’s life. In a telling scene set at the Mayo Clinic, Brennan’s character even learns of the diagnosis (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, now routinely called “Lou Gehrig’s Disease") even before Gehrig’s wife. And Duryea sheds his usual villainous persona to play a likable cynic and perfect foil for Brennan.

The remarkable final scene distills everything we’ve seen in the preceding two hours. It features the real Babe Ruth (playing himself throughout the film), other Yankee greats and, of course, the remarkable Yankee Stadium farewell speech reproduced nearly verbatim.

In the 21st century, we are the lucky ones to have this great film available forever, as a source of inspiration about love and the human spirit.

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Gary Cooper in Pride of the Yankees (1942)