And somewhere there is laughing, and somewhere children shout, but there's no joy in flickville -- mighty Hollywood has struck out.
It's true: The American motion picture industry can re-create battles underwater, on ice or in space; it can re-create the day before yesterday or invent the century after the next. It can put you in a factory, a schoolroom, a Senate chamber or a maximum security prison. But it has never quite put you in a baseball game. In fact, it's not going too far to say there's never been a first-rate baseball picture.
That may change Friday, when "The Babe" opens, with John Goodman as the Bawlamer boy with the barrel chest and the DNA code that read "Born to play ball." Arthur Hiller, a fabled old pro, directed; and since ours is a slightly more truthful age, perhaps it will triumph over the formulaic biopic pieties as represented in an earlier edition, "The Babe Ruth Story," with William Bendix. But maybe not: For nearly 50 years, Hollywood has been cranking out films about baseball, and with but one or two minor exceptions, they aren't worth a gob of tobacco in the chalk lines. Using the number of movies listed under "Baseball" in "The Video Hound's Golden Retriever" (62) and dividing by the number of good baseball films (to be named later), I get an average of .048. Most American League pitchers could hit that if they were forced to bat!
"Bull Durham" you're saying? OK, maybe. It was almost a really good movie, but primarily just a good movie. And surely its great source of strength was that writer-director Ron Shelton was himself an ex-minor leaguer, and was able to bring a freshness and a realism to the project. But let's not forget that the baseball wasn't really the main thrust of the piece; baseball was to "Bull Durham" what World War I was to "A Farewell to Arms," namely a specific and well-imagined background to what was essentially an even more specific and even better-imagined love story.
Then there's "Field of Dreams." I don't know what reporters and headline writers in this town would have done in the past few months without "Field of Dreams" to draw upon as a metaphorical resource, but other than that handy-dandy help, I remain unmoved by one of the silliest baseball movies ever made. It was an orchestration of unearned epiphanies that managed to bumble its way to one grand moment of reconciliation between father and son beyond the pale of mere life and death, suggesting that which many deeper thinkers and pseudo-mystics have claimed to see in baseball: a ritual of renewal. As we learned the game from our fathers, we teach it to our sons, and in that way the generations are connected. Yeah, but . . . ZZZZZZZZZZZ.
In fact, if one surveys the film literature of baseball, one finds as dismal a cacophony as can be imagined. I've mentioned the grim "Babe Ruth Story." It's typical of the Hollywood garbage that passed for sports films in the '30s and '40s and well into the '50s. A shame, because the real Babe Ruth had a cameo part in another loathsome orchestration of pieties, "Pride of the Yankees," with no-field, no-hit Gary Cooper in the title role (he threw like a g--l), and the Babe had such a buoyant, blossoming personality, it's a shame he didn't get to play himself. But no. William Bendix, nobody's idea of a movie star or an athlete, a big soft blowhard without a shred of what must have been the one true Babe's exquisite hand-eye coordination or the spectacular concentration of reflexes nesting behind those mounds of slow-twitch muscles, had the title role. There's no danger in Bendix's Babe, no sense of the guts a hitter had to show going up against tight inside pitching with no helmet.
Few people saw games
They were giants in those days, and no movie caught their gigantism, presumably because no movie had to. Consider that through its inception to the mid-1950s, baseball was not seen by all that many human beings, being restricted merely to the attendance in major league (mostly northeastern) cities. The mass media were radio and graceful sportswriting; there was no television, and certainly no slow-motion replay, with its incredible capacity to penetrate and re-orchestrate the ballet on the field, to study each strained sinew, to follow the rotation of the ball. Thus filmmakers could get away with actors who threw like g--ls, because hardly anybody knew how real major leaguers threw.
But it wasn't just the relative obscurity of the true grace of major league baseball that kept most baseball pictures oafish for so long. The true milieu was missing, too. Imagine how violent and crude the major leagues must have been in those days, like infantry platoons or coal mine shifts: tough cookie white boys just a few years removed from the farms of the south, a basic rural heritage based on taciturnity, profanity, vast gobs of a plowman's tobacco in their cheeks, and sheer guts, racist as the day was long. Few of them could read, most lived for women and liquor. No wonder that the king of all he surveyed was a mean-spirited psycho going by the name of Ty Cobb, who would spit on you, punch you or beat you fair and square between the chalk lines, whichever amused him the most. Fights were common, no quarter asked, none given; imagine a league where everyone was a Jack Morris! But no movie came close to getting that.
Baseball was then, as now, something of a national metaphor, an image not of itself so much as of how we saw ourselves. Nobody looked squarely at things, not President Roosevelt's crippled legs or Humphrey Bogart's dentures. Thus in baseball we saw men playing a boy's games and pretended they were boys. Our movies emphasized this, turning them into fun-loving high jinksers, demanned, desavaged, dehumanized. The movies tended to be inspirational bios that turned jocks into saints like the two already mentioned or "The Monte Stratton Story," where Jimmy Stewart played a stubborn pitcher who blew off his own leg in a hunting accident, and managed to fight his way back to Class A ball.
Television's impact
When television finally hit the nation's pastime, it all but blew the "baseball movie" out of existence. You couldn't show stars throwing patty balls and call it baseball when anybody could turn on a tube and watch Sandy Koufax or Warren Spahn blow a hot one over the inside corner at 105 miles per hour. Therefore, in the '50s we find but a few, mostly goofy comedies, like Ray Milland's college professor who manages to build the perfect spitter chemically, and manages to win some big games in "It Happens Every Spring." Similarly, "Damn Yankees," based on Douglass Wallop's book "The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant," was a lard-thighed musical with the ever-charismatic Tab Hunter sporting about as the result of a Faustian deal that turns a lowly insurance salesman into a fleet young batting stud for a year's taste of glory as he tries to lift the dismal Washington Senators into a pennant against the fearsome New York Yankees. On a slightly more pathological cant, Anthony Perkins played Jimmy Piersall in "Fear Strikes Out," but it was another story of uplift and triumph over disability.
As far as I can tell, the first reasonably decent evocation of baseball as culture and ballplayers as humans arrived in the early '70s, in John Hancock's version of the Mark Harris novel, "Bang the Drum Slowly." This was the first movie to suggest that some ballplayers were a little on the dumb side (Robert De Niro as a doomed third-string catcher who just barely manages to get his act together even as a fatal disease is shutting him down). It's a little precious in its insistence that all ballplayers be Damon Runyonesque characters, complete to elaborate grammatical constructions, but the actors were chosen for their physical grace, so the ballplaying sequences didn't seem as utterly preposterous as they had in the past. It also evoked a theme common to athletic lyricism, which is the transience of the flesh, no matter how ripe with talent. It recalled Housman's "To an Athlete Dying Young," or Rodin's "The Dying Gaul," gaining tragic power by juxtaposing the seething dynamism of the young men with the premature passing of one of their own.
The "big" baseball movie of the '80s chose another path to baseball's heart. This was the Barry Levinson-Robert Redford version of Bernard Malamud's great novel, "The Natural," which told a baseball story as drawn through a prism of Arthurian legend, with a Sir Percival and his wonder-sword on a hunt for the holy grail, namely a pennant. Yet what made the novel so relentlessly memorable -- its sense of inexorable tragedy -- is exactly what they "fixed" when they made it into a movie. Of course, in the book, Roy strikes out, in a Wagnerian finale that recalls both the deaths of Arthur and the mightiest whiff of them all, Casey's legendary swipe that parted the atmosphere for a hundred miles but left the pill in the catcher's mitt.
But . . . Robert Redford, striking out? You gotta be kidding. When Redford uncorked a two-out, two-strike swipe, he got nothing but ball and sent that sucker into the lights, so that sparks fell like rose petals as he ran the bases in slow mo. I hated it. Say it ain't so, Bob. And tell me also, please: What's the point of buying "Hamlet" if the prince lives in the end?
John Sayles found in baseball a metaphor not for mythic wellsprings of legend and story, but for the capitalist exploitation of workers by greedy owners. He brought this to the screen in "Eight Men Out," an account of the Chicago Black Sox scandal of 1919. On the good side, Sayles tried to re-create the tough farm-boy culture of early baseball in a way no film before or since had, with a legion of illiterate rube players. But the movie turned swiftly to a poster: In this parable of economic reality, greedy millionaire Charles Comiskey refuses to honor the pledges he's made to the team and in some case conspires against them: Their response is to agree to throw the World Series. The tragic figure is Shoeless Joe Jackson, the sport's true "natural," whose performance in the 1919 Series is statistically beyond reproach, but who was banned forever on the suspicion of collusion. But the movie just wasn't very good. None of the characters cracked to life, the story was so dense it became meaningless, and like most politically correct documents, it foundered on a sea of earnestness.
The last big picture
Which brings us to "Major League," the last big baseball picture. This one at least had the budget to fill a stadium with people, so that in the background of the seventh game of the World Series, there weren't empty bleachers. But if the bleachers were full, the script was largely empty. Tom Berenger imitated Kevin Costner's tough old pro act from "Bull Durham," and the players were all libidinous alcoholics. But underneath it was really just a John R. Tunis novel with dirty words and a little cleavage: It was still about a miracle team that always got the big hit just when it needed it.
Which brings us to the key question: Who needs baseball movies when you've got baseball? When I stepped through a gate last Monday and caught my first glimmer of Oriole Park at Camden Yards spread out
before me like an immovable feast, saw the warehouse basting in the late sun, the nuclear-emerald density of the green of the field, saw the swarm of fans, felt the music in the air, and best of all faced a new season where anything was truly possible and no scriptwriter or hot young director would pull the strings, the last thing I wanted to do was think about the artificiality of the movies. Baseball is somehow real in a way the movies can never be. We go to it because it's real, and that's why we honor its heroes; we know that movies are phony, and that's why we never honor its heroes.
I think I got it right, but you could look it up.