Sam Wood’s movie tribute to the iconic New York Yankee’s first baseman Lou Gehrig (1903-1941), who succumbed to ALS just one year prior of the movie’s release, epitomizes the template of a rousing Hollywood biopic, finding commonality to connect with its audience but largely leaving what makes its subject worthy of such a deferential treatment untapped.
As a movie about a baseball player, the story largely skirts over Gehrig’s extraordinary professional expertise, all we are told is that he is talented, there is no field-day toiling, physical exertion on show. The truth is, the whole visualization of umpteen baseball matches is presented in a discrete and desultory fashion that any chance to convert a new baseball fan is nigh, and Cooper, not only squarely too old for the role - a 40-something to imitate a college undergraduate looks rather silly now, he is also ill-equipped to play a baseball player, there is no zest in his bat-wielding, another reason why the film tries to conceal this weak point by toning down the fieldwork.
So, Wood and his scribes instead, focus on Gehrig’s private lives, domestic bliss in particular, the bond with his parents, a good-natured father (Stössel) and a loving but martinet mother (Janssen) who is bent on that Lou should become an engineer, followed by his romance and marriage with Eleanor (Wright). Overcoming the initial squabble over the mother-daughter-in-law discord, the story sails to a tremendously touching homestretch, when the couple must contend against the death knell, by putting on a strong face while biting back tears (or not, in the case of the weaker sex), culminates in Lou’s famous “The luckiest man on the face of the earth” farewell speech at Yankee Stadium in 1939, Cooper’s delivery is well-adjusted to match Lou’s understated but earnest gratefulness. By and large, he acquires an acumen to play Lou with a moderated anonymity laced with a schoolboy bashfulness that is quite pleasing and more inclined to reflect the real Lou’s temperament than build up a heroic image, an afterglow Oscar-nomination is a nice reward.
A gamely emotive Wright also cops an Oscar nomination (a borderline leading role), but it is her turn in William Wyler’s MRS. MINIVER (1942) wins her an Oscar the same year in the supporting actress category, and she also keeps a record of earning 3 Oscar nominations from her very first 3 movie roles; among the rest of the cast, treble Oscar-winner Brennan, playing sportswriter Sam Blake, has a whale of time quibbling with rival writer Hank Hanneman (Duryea), and Janssen spiritedly enlivens the switcheroo from a Teutonic sports-disparager to a seasoned baseball zealot.
For all its patriotic ideology of singing the hymn to the almighty American dream especially when WWII was raging on, THE PRIDE OF THE YANKEES is a somehow retrospectively banal, but satisfactorily populist mood-booster, like its good-humored pranks, everything becomes anodyne when kismet plays the archvillain.
referential entries: Wood’s FOR THOM THE BELL TOLLS (1943, 7.4/10); Billy Wilder’s THE FORTUNE COOKIE (1966, 7.4/10).
