The Jackie Robinson Story

We've got a third straight day of someone in TCM's Summer Under the Stars who has a movie on my DVR that I haven't blogged about before. This time that star is Ruby Dee, and her film is The Jackie Robinson Story, which concludes Dee's day early tomorrow at 4:15 AM.

For any non-Americans who don't know Jackie Robinson (playing himself here) is the baseball player who began the desegregation of baseball by becoming the first black player allowed to play Major League baseball, for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. This was at the time a controversial decision since it was bound to bring out the bigotry in a substantial proportion of the white population. (Note that at the time, MLB didn't extend south of Washington DC, so it was only in spring training that players had to go to the traditional south, although there was still a lot of bigotry and even segregation in the north.)

The movie starts off well before this, with Jackie Robinson as a kid in the late 1920s, growing into a young man who shows an aptitude for all sorts of sports, eventually getting a partial athletic scholarship to play at UCLA in the late 1930s. He's in love with Rae (Ruby Dee), but also worries about life after college and the difficulties black people face in the wider professional world: how is he going to support a wife?

After getting drafted into the Army and then getting out, Jackie is able to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers' minor league team based in Montreal, where he shows himself to be a baseball player of the caliber to make it to the majors. But of course, as the 1946 season opens, there still hasn't been a black player in the majors, a fact well-known to everybody, especially the Dodgers' general manager, Branch Rickey (Minor Watson). Rickey is insistent on breaking the color barrier, just needing somebody who can handle the bigotry that he knows is going to come that player's way, and thinks he's found it in Jackie Robinson.

Now, of course we all know how history plays out, which is that Robinson was on the Brooklyn Dodgers' roster in 1947 and eventually became a top-level player, so as our movie ends we get a more or less happy ending, with Robinson giving a speech before Congress on race relations that makes him sound hopeful for the future and puts him squarely in the gradualist camp of "black people should be model citizens" as opposed to the more more militant "equality by any means" group.

If all of the above sounds like a superficial plot summary, well, that's because the movie itself comes across as fairly superficial, like pretty much most other movies I've seen where the subject is playing himself. Most recently on this blog that was football player Elroy Hirsch in Crazylegs, although it goes back at least as far as Babe Ruth in Headin' Home. Robinson isn't much of an actor, and the rest of the cast was not well served by the material. I read once somewhere that Ruby Dee said she didn't get to meet the real-life Rae Robinson until the last day of shooting, which bothered her since once she met Rae she finally had a good idea of what to bring to the role. Not that it's a very big role that would stretch any actress.

On the whole, The Jackie Robinson Story feels almost like a vanity project, albeit one that's trying to make an important social message. It's an interesting little time capsule, but not a particuarly good film.