Pride of the Yankees, The (1942)
Director: Sam Wood
Starring: Gary Cooper, Teresa Wright
Honors:
The United States had been drawn into the conflict of World
War II for less than a year and was in need of heroes to share the American
spirit throughout the land while citizens were attempting to contribute to the
war effort. In the summer of 1942 one of Hollywood’s answers to the need of a
hero was portraying one of the nation’s most popular sports idols who shared an
ideal that doing your best and caring your family brings out greatness. Just a
year after the New York Yankee great Lou Gehrig’s death the man would idolized
in a biographical motion picture feature that impacted audiences with still fresh
memories of Gehrig on their minds.
The Pride of the
Yankees is a sports biographical feature portraying the life story of Lou
Gehrig from a loving son of immigrants to an adored baseball star whose tragic
illness prematurely ended his career. Lou Gehrig (Gary Cooper) was a Columbia
University student whose exceptional ball playing led him to playing for the
New York Yankees, becoming one of the most widely loved players in the game’s
history. The film covers various aspects of Gehrig’s life including his strong
relationship with his mother (portrayed by Elsa Janssen), his romance with his
devoted wife Eleanor (Teresa Wright), his rise to baseball superstar status,
and the conclusion of his career due to a rare, incurable disease which would bear
his name. The film’s finale focuses on Gehrig’s well-known “the luckiest man on
the face of the earth” speech at Yankee Stadium as his goodbye to the sport
that made him an American icon.
The picture is an over-simplified, over-glorifying, and
over-Hollywood-ized movie that quickly covers the highlighted, book
report-style retelling of Lou Gehrig’s life story that is almost too sugary to
be palatable. However, at the same time it is enduring as it encompasses a tale
of a the blue collar man that became a hero to many fans of baseball and
American ideals the nation over. The film would roll out of theaters in just
over a year’s time after the death of Lou Gehrig the previous summer, which
surely played a role in the impact with audiences of its day. For later
generations The Pride of the Yankees
remains a solid sports movie for immortalizing a real man that appeared to be
as honest and virtuous as a mythological hero of legend, with this motion
picture as a shrine.
Most sports movies suffer from unrealistic representations
of athletics by nonphysical actors, poor acting by performers that cannot connect
with these characters, and the overly melodramatic plots tied into them. This
film is not really all too different. Conversely this film does not focus on a
player winning the “big game” as its plot, rather it centers on the
relationship of Gehrig with his family as well as his legend in this sport that
encompassed the American spirit.
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| Two performance that garnered Academy Award nominations. |
Gary Cooper was not even a fan of baseball when approached
for the role of Gehrig. For an actor that was not fond of the sport, let alone
even able to play it he would need much coaching in order to make his baseball
mannerisms to come close enough to mimic the ability to swing a bat or throw a
ball. To further add to the difficulty of his performance Cooper as right
handed, as opposed to Gehrig being left handed, which took extra effort on
Cooper’s part left to play with his weaker side in order to sell playing as Lou
Gehrig . Movie legend states that director Sam Wood had Cooper wear a backwards
uniform so that Cooper can perform his baseball actions as a righty and have editors
reversed the action to achieve the look that Cooper was playing as a lefty, but
modern records tend to refute this claim. Cooper’s playing would do well enough
to not stand out from his dramatic performance, for which he would nominated
for Best Actor that year.
Teresa Wright appears as the playful, compassionate, and ever
loving wife of Lou Gehrig, Eleanor. In just her third major motion picture
Wright’s emotional performance would garner her an unprecedented third Academy
Award nomination. Although she would not win in the category of Best Actress
for her performance here in The Pride of
the Yankees, she did leave the ceremony with the statue for Best Supporting
Actress thanks to her work in Mrs.
Miniver that same year.
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| Babe Ruth portrays himself in the feature. |
The Pride of the
Yankees does suffer from the overly spruced up feel of a glorifying
biographical film, yet the feature remains so charming that it appears to
polish out the unfortunate lacking points of the picture. Many aspects add to
the general appeal that makes this feature stand up despite the cliché filled
vessel that this film provides. It is because ofthe love the general public had
for the recently fallen icon of Lou Gehrig, and the enduring performances of
Cooper and Wright, the wonderful supporting appearance by the likes of actors Walter
Brennan as the scout that found Gehrig and Elsa Janssen as Lou’s mother that all
converge to make this film so appealing to American audiences. There are even
memorable cameos by real life baseball figures within the film including the
incomparable superstar Babe Ruth that allow this movie to hold up it
respectability and add fun to baseball fanatics who paid their ticket to the
theater to see such a sports picture.
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| L.A.'s Wrigley Field stands in as Yankees Stadium as Cooper prepares for Gehrig's speech. |
With the aid of timing in conjuncture with Gehrig being
fresh in the minds of the public and the wanting of an American hero on the
silver screen The Pride of the Yankees
would be a significant success with the public despite general critics
recognizing the overly simplified motion picture that it might actually be. At
that year’s Academy Awards the feature was nominated astonishingly in eleven
categories, including for Best Picture of the year. Daniel Mandell would take
home the prize for Best Editing, the lone win for the film, as his ability to
splice in stock footage of major league games with Sam Wood directed shots of
Cooper’s playing. Furthermore his assembly of the final speech by Cooper furthermore
proved effective for the overall success of the feature.
Despite all of the film’s inaccuracies, clichés, and overall
sugar-coated story The Pride of the
Yankees remains one of the more well received sports films in cinema
history. Sure, better sports films have been produced since, but this feature
captures Gehrig in a gleaming capsule in a manner of how the public and
baseball fans desire to remember him. Gehrig was a blue collar baseball hero
and it was his work ethic and devotion that made his career’s sad conclusion so
tragic. Audiences can relive this American sports legend and what has been
deemed “The Gettysburg Address of Baseball” by simply viewing this picture in
remembrance of him. This film will live on more as a shrine than as a piece of
cinematic elegance or achievement, but film can sometimes just be that because that
is what the audience wanted at that time.
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