Susan Sarandon Night

TCM is running a night of Susan Sarandon movies tonight. The night kicks off with another showing of Atlantic City at 8:00 PM, a film I'm always looking forward to, although as it turns out I've already done a post on it back in 2020. It aired on TCM in the very early days of this blog, when TCM got the rights to some Paramount films from after the batch that were sold off to Universal, and then didn't air for ages. In any case, the second film tonight is Bull Durham at 10:00 PM, and since that one's been on my DVR since this year's 31 Days of Oscar, I watched it specifically to put up this post.

The movie takes its name from the baseball team in Durham, NC, a minor-league team at what was at the time the lowest level of the minors affiliated with Major League teams, known as Single A. (Thanks to a reorganization and reaffiliation in the late 1990s, the team is now in Triple-A, the level just below Major League.) Generally, this is the sort of place that would get high turnover as most of the players are young one who are either going to be moving up or who don't realize they're never going to make it to the majors and finally going to give up the dream after a couple of seasons bouncing around. One of the up-and-comers is pitcher Ebby LaLoosh (Tim Robbins). He's got a really fast pitch, but no control over location and no sense of how to deal strategically with hitters.

That strategy is something that catchers normally deal with in conjunction with pitchers, which is you see catchers signalling pitches with pitchers sometimes calling them up. The organization realizes it needs a catcher who can show LaLoosh, given the nickname "Nuke" by his manager Skip (Trey Wilson), and in that regard it's demoted journeyman catcher Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) to Durham. Crash made it to the majors once, and had a three-week stint there, but he's really never going to make it again and ought to know better. In fact, he's close to setting the record for most home runs by a player in the minor leagues, which is something one probably ought not want since it means you're spending a lot of time in the minors.

Meanwhile, there's Annie (Susan Sarandon), who has a connection with the team in part because of her family's having funded the stadium in part decades earlier. Annie also has a thing where she's going to take a player under her wing each year, although in her parlance that means sexually. We get the impresion that Crash would be right for her, but Nuke is just so much more exciting because he's young and studly and exciting with his craziness. Crash also doesn't really want to put up with this nonsense, which is why Annie eventually picks Nuke.

Thrown into all of this is the usual motley crew of off-beat tropes that populate baseball films: the Jesus freak, the Latin player with a crazy girlfriend, and so on. They all try to come together as a team, but the start of the season isn't very successful until Nuke's pitching picks up, at which point the team goes on a long winning streak. However, there's always the looming likelihood that Nuke is going to get good enough that the organization is going to move him up to a higher level, something that naturally does happen toward the end of the movie.

Bull Durham is generally considered a sports movie for obvious reasons, although it's just as much about the interpersonal relationships, with the team's on-field performance really being in the background compared to other sports movies. As such, the actors playing the three main characters do a good job with the love triangle material that just happens to be set against a baseball backdrop. The stock baseball player character part is something I found myself caring rather less about, to be honest.

A quarter century before Oh, God!

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for a bit is the 1951 MGM version of Angels in the Outfield. It's getting another airing on TCM, somewhat surprisingly not as part of a day of baseball movies considering that baseball season is right about here. That airing is tomorrow, March 28, at 1:45 PM.

The movie was filmed in part on location in Pittsburgh, at the old Forbes Field which I think went away in 1970 for Three Rivers Stadium, one of those dual-use monstrosities which has since been demolished itself and replaced with purpose-built stadia for baseball and football. The Pirates were a perennially poor team, and the version here is even worse, with a good portion of the blame being given to manager Guffy McGovern (Paul Douglas). They're so bad that the newspaper is putting a bunch of its writers, including the women's editor Jennifer Paige (Janet Leigh) on the story to try to figure out what's ailing the team. This, even though she doesn't know anything about baseball.

Jennifer goes to a game and discovers that Guffy is incredibly irascible and prone to harsh language, which we of course don't hear since there was a Production Code. (Instead, special effects are used to obscure whatever dialogue is used when Guffy is chewing out his players or the umpires. Also blaming the manager is the sports reporter who handles the radio broadcasts of the games, Fred Bayles (Keenan Wynn). For this, Fred gets fired and becomes an even more ardent opponent of Guffy's.

One day after a game, Guffy is alone out on the field when he hears a voice coming out of nowhere. That voice (voiced by James Whitmore), claims to be an angel, chiding Guffy for his bad language among other things. Indeed, heaven has decided that the Pirates are going to continue to be lousy cellar dwellers until Guffy changes his ways. Unsurprisingly, Guffy doesn't believe that this voice is that of an angel, so the angel responds by sending a bolt of lightning down even though there's only like one cloud in the sky. So Guffy does believe it's an angel, not that he's going to tell anybody considering the obvious fact that nobody's going to believe him.

Amazingly, the team does start doing better. And then one day the nuns from the girls' orphanage (played by Spring Byington and Ellen Corby) take a group of girls to the ball game. One of them, Bridget, excitedly declares that she can see angels! The nuns don't believe her since they can't see the angels. But Jennifer overhears the story from an attendant at the field, and writes it since it's an obvious human interest story. That makes the whole angels thing a national story, although again nobody really believes that there are angels guiding the team, do they? Except maybe Guffy and Bridget. Jennifer, by this time, starts becoming a bit of friends with Guffy as he's been reforming himself in rather strange ways like reading Shakespeare so he can chew the umpires out in Shakespearean language. He even thinks about adopting Bridget, although he realizes that's not really going to happen since they don't normally let single men adopt orphaned girls. You can guess where that part of the story is going, of course.

Matters hit a head when Guffy gets hit in the forehead by a line drive during a game. Concussed, he confesses after the game that there really have been angels helping him. Obviously, nobody believes this any more than they believed Bridget. In the case of a little girl, it's harmless, but when it's the team manager, there's a rather more pressing issue. It leads to an investigation, with Commissioner Hapgood (Lewis Stone) brought in. Guffy causes a ruckus, and that leads the angels to decide jsut before the big game that they're no longer going to help Guffy and the Pirates.

Angels in the Outfield has a lot of the tropes that are common to the more family-friendly sports movies, so it's not to difficult to see what's going to be happening. But it's done with the sort of earnest charm that old Hollywood had, and, thanks to the professionalism of stars like Paul Douglas, Angels in the Outfield actually works.

Bang the Drum Slowly

Tonight's prime-time lineup on TCM is baseball movies that were nominated for at least one Oscar. Wouldn't you know it, but one of the movies in the lineup has been sitting on my DVR. That movie is Bang the Drum Slowly, tonight at midnight. So as is always the case, I watched it in order to be able to do this review on it.

Michael Moriarty stars as Henry Wiggen, star pitcher for the New York Monarchs baseball team. Some pitchers, especially left-handed starters and knuckleballers, seem to wind up with "personal" catchers in that the combination of the two players works better than putting the pitcher with the nominally "better" catcher. Henry has a catcher who also happens to be his best friend, Bruce Pearson (Robert De Niro). However, as the movie opens, we learn that Henry is picking Bruce up from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN: Bruce is terminally ill with Hodgkin's disease. Henry takes Bruce back to Bruce's family home in the South, although it's not to die, just to meet Bruce's family and introduce us to a made-up card game some of the ballplayers like to play that's really just an excuse to find a mark to take that guy's money from.

Henry is in a contract dispute with his team, so he gives his manager, Dutch Schnell (Vincent Gardenia), an ultimatum: I want my best friend Bruce to be signed to the team along with me, and I want the contracts to be structured in such a way that if you get rid of him or send him to the minors, you have to do the same with me. Now, this presents a serious problem in that at this point of the movie Bruce isn't really presented as Henry's personal catcher in the sense that Bruce could play every fifth day when Henry starts, allowing the regular catcher to take a breather since catcher is one of the more demanding positions physically. Bruce, in fact, is the sort of ballplayer who in a normal world would have topped out in the minors, and rarely gets to start.

And then never mind the fact that Bruce is dying, and that neither Henry nor Bruce are about to tell the team this. Also never mind the fact that the intake physical that certainly every player gets before being signed doesn't seem to have found anything wrong with Bruce. Indeed, Bruce is terrified that the team is going to find out he's terminally ill, since one of the symptoms is going to be some sort of attack reminiscent what poor Bette Davis got in Dark Victory, although not one attack like that. Cancer doesn't work that way. In any case, Bruce does get one of these episodes in the hotel room, and Henry has to call for a doctor, at which point it becomes pretty damn clear that there's something wrong with Bruce although the few people who do figure out something is seriously off are going to keep it a secret as much as they can.

The season goes on, and Bruce still doesn't seem to be getting that much worse, although the movie has a bizarre ending in that Bruce goes missing (well, back home) for the postseason, asking Henry to send him a box score. Wouldn't Bruce stay with the team? If they make the playoffs, wouldn't the contracts require Bruce to be on the playoff roster as well as Henry?

But, then, Bang the Drum Slowly isn't really about baseball per se. Instead, it's one of those movies that uses baseball as a backdrop to be more of a character study of the relationship between Henry and Bruce. Reviewers who can focus on that have generally tended to find Bang the Drum Slowly quite a good movie. I'm sorry to say I don't quite agree with that, as the movie is interminably slow and for me rather full of plot holes. Still, enough people like it that this is one you're definitely going to want to watch and judge for yourself.

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.

I guess you had to be there

Another movie that was one of my "blind spots" is one that showed up a few months back when TCM ran their miniseries Two For One, with a bunch of movie types picking double features. That miniseries is being rerun, so we're getting all of those movies again. Having taped several, you'll be getting more over the next few months, just like with One Touch of Venus a few weeks back. This time, the movie in question is The Bad News Bears, tonight at 10:00 PM.

Walter Matthau plays Morris Buttermaker, a heavy drinker who lives in the suburbs of Los Angeles and now has a business cleaning swimming pools. But as the movie opens, he's in his car just outside a baseball field, when a man comes up to him. That man, Bob Whitewood (Ben Piazza), is a local city councillor and has a son he insists is a great baseball player. However, for whatever reason his son and a bunch of lousy baseball players weren't able to join the local Little League until Whitewood threatened legal action. Bob is hiring Morris to be the coach of this ragtag team of players no other team wanted, and is willing to pay well for it.

Morris, in the past, had been a professional baseball player, or so he claims. He only got as far as the minor leagues in the years following World War II, and has stories to tell anyone who will listen. Or at least, anyone who can be forced to listen, which he now has with a bunch of young kids. However, trying to make baseball players out of them isn't going to be easy.

The team is filled with stereotypes, such as the butterball catcher, or the nerdy and shy kids who know that they aren't very good and are OK with sitting on the bench, or the ethnic types. They more or less get along, but basically have no real baseball ability. And Coach Buttermaker nearly turns them off when he first tries molding them into players by harsh practices. They lose their first game not even by the mercy rule, but by having to quit because they can't get anybody out in the top of the first inning.

However, Morris fathered a child out of wedlock, and as part of being an absentee parent, he helped the kid learn to throw a curveball. That kid, Amanda (Tatum O'Neal) is the right age to be on a Little League team, so Dad tries to reconnect with his daughter. Deep down inside, she's always wanted that but doesn't want to show Dad how badly she wanted it. She's also able to convince bad-boy Kelly (Jackie Earle Haley) to join the team.

At this point, the team starts winning, and may just make it to the championship game against the Yankees, who are coached by Roy Turner (Vic Morrow), the sports parent from hell who is, if anything, even more of a taskmaster than Morris.

The Bad News Bears has become a classic over the half-century since it was released. To be honest, however, it left me rather colder than most fans. I'd guess part of that is the fact that I never did Little League, or much in the way of youth sports in general. Part of it is that I would have been a few years too young for the movie, as well as not growing up in the sort of suburb that populated this movie or a lot of the teen movies of the 1980s. And the characters were to me not the most sympathetic.

But a lot of people love The Bad News Bears, so you may love it too if you watch it.

The Pride of the Yankees

We're into the baseball playoffs now, and I don't think that I've done a post on a baseball movie in a while, so it's time to watch one that I recorded during 31 Days of Oscar: The Pride of the Yankees.

The Pride of the Yankees is, actually, a bit tough to do a good full-length post on, in part because most people are already going to know the story. Lou Gehrig (played here by Gary Cooper) was the son of German immigrants who found baseball as a kid and played professionally after college, eventually making it to the big leagues on the big team of the day, the New York Yankees. When he made it into the lineup, he didn't give up his spot, playing every game for nearly 14 seasons, until... he was diagnosed with ALS, which is still commonly referred to in the US as "Lou Gehrig's disease".

Complicating matters is that apparently Gehrig wasn't the most exciting person. Not that I mean this in a bad way; it's more that he was clean enough that he didn't get himself involved in the sorts of things that made, say, his teammate Babe Ruth (who plays himself) a larger-than-life figure. (Or, in a later Yankees generation, someone like Mickey Mantle.) In short, Gehrig's life seems relatively cinematically boring. There's no real plot conflict here of the sort that might drive other Hollywood biopics.

So the scriptwriters have to try to create something, which here is a conflict between baseball and family, if you will. A young Gehrig is seen finding a sandlot game at the opening of the film, and we pretty quickly get to Gehrig's college days at Columbia. His parents (played by Elsa Janssen and Ludwig Stossel), like a lot of immigrant parents, want him to go into something professional, much like his unseen uncle Otto did, becoming an engineer. Mom for the longest time can't understand why her son loves baseball.

There's another conflict, which isn't really that much of one, involving Gehrig's devotion to his mother and the fact that, well, he's going to grow up and find a woman to be his wife. That woman is Eleanor Twitchell (Teresa Wright), a Chicago socialite who first sees Gehrig when he's in town to play the White Sox. He trips over a bat and she calls him "Tanglefoot". They eventually meet again and ultimately get married, with Eleanor scrapbooking Lou's career. After his retirement and young death, she would preserve and safeguard his legacy until her own death; she never had children and never remarried.

If you haven't noticed, there's actually precious little baseball action in the movie, as a lot of it is done with montages and shots of pennants with the different American League cities on them. There's also a subplot about two sportswriters with opposite views of how to cover the players. Sam (Walter Brennan) is more protective of Lou and one of his best non-baseball friends, while Hank (Dan Duryea), while not an iconoclast, doesn't seem to want to be a hagiographer.

The acting in The Pride of the Yankees is all well done; the problem with the movie is that there's just not a dynamic story to be told from the material. And certainly not one that runs over two hours. Still, The Pride of the Yankees is a beloved movie, probably in part because of Gehrig's tragic story. So definitely it's worth a watch.

Eight Men Out

Another of the movies that I've had on my DVR for a while is Eight Men Out. I see that it's going to be on Cinemax tomorrow at 7:15 AM (or three hours later if you only have the west coast feed), so I recently sat down to watch it in order to be able to do a review here.

Baseball films have always been popular in Hollywood, so our non-American readers may already know a little bit about the Black Sox scandal that forms the basis of this movie. In 1919, the Chicago White Sox were generally considered to be the best team in Major League Baseball. But their owner, Charles Comiskey (Clifton James), had a reputation for paying his players extremely poorly, at a time when team owners held all the power in baseball. (Free agency wouldn't become a thing for another 50 years.) This caused resentment among the players, such as star pitcher Eddie Cicotte (David Strathairn), who was held out of five starts allegedly to rest him for the World Series, but in Cicotte's view not to get to the magic number of 30 wins which would have activated a $10,000 bonus in his contract.

With things like that going on, another of the team's players, first baseman Chick Gandil (Michael Rooker), met with representatives from gangster Arnold Rothstein (Michael Lerner), who ran a gambling syndicate. Rothstein was willing to offer players a substantial sum of money in exchange for deliberately playing badly and throwing the World Series, with Rothstein making a killing on the wagering. Eventually, eight players did take part in the conspiracy, although there has long been debate on how much certain of the players were involved. Third baseman Buck Weaver (John Cusack), for example, knew about the fix but claimed not to have tried to make any deliberate mistakes; he would get in trouble for not coming public with his knowledge until after the Series. More controversial was Shoeless Joe Jackson (D.B. Sweeney), one of the best players in the game at the time; he was most likely illiterate and gave into pressure to take money, although as with Weaver how much he did during the Series games is disputed.

Meanwhile, manager Kid Gleason (John Mahoney), a former player himself, knew fully well that there was always a threat of gamblers trying to influence games, while a cadre of players on the team, led by college graduate Eddie Collins (Bill Irwin), hated people like Gandil and were assiduously clean.

And so we get to the Series, and as you can probably guess, the White Sox lose it five games to three. However, some of the bad playing on the part of those who were in on the fix was pretty apparent right from the get-go, leading sportswriters to wonder openly whether anybody was trying to throw games. After the Series, the information comes out, which leads to a trial in which the eight accused players are tried collectively. It also leads to pressure to have one person in complete charge of baseball. The owners hired federal judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis (John Anderson) to fill that position, which he only accepted on the grounds that he had a lifetime contract and complete control over the sport. And he really did mean complete, ruling the Major Leagues with an iron fist. Even the owners chafed under his control of the game, until they could get a commissioner who would be their mouthpiece in more recent years starting with Bud Selig. The eight players who knew about the fix were banned for life, although Weaver and Jackson maintained ther innocence.

Eight Men Out is a pretty good telling of the events, although if the movie has one big problem, it's that it really spends too much time on the actual games, with the trial and eventual banning of the players seeming almost like an afterthought. Still, Eight Men Out is definitely an interesting movie and one that's worth watching even by people who aren't fans of baseball. One doesn't really need to know the sport to follow what's going on in the movie.

It Happened in Flatbush

Lloyd Nolan brightened up a lot of movies in supporting roles. The rare occasions he did get to be a lead were mostly in the B movie series as the detective Michael Shayne. One other movie with Nolan in the lead is It Happened in Flatbush. FXM is running it tomorrow at 8:45 AM, and again on Saturday at 4:35 AM.

Brooklyn's baseball team (not called the Dodgers although Ebbets Field was used for establishing shots) is lousy again, to the point that the current manager has up and quit in the middle of the season. The owner, Mac McAvoy (Sara Allgood) is looking for a new manager, and she has just the person in mind. However, she's going to have to go looking for that man....

Frank Maguire (Lloyd Nolan) is in the independent minor leagues, managing a no-name team of no-name players when McAvoy shocks the players by entering the locker room. She's looking for Maguire because she has fond memories of him, and wants to give him a chance to redeem himself. Maguire, for his part, isn't so certain he wants to go back to Brooklyn. Seven years earlier, in a pennant race, he committed an error that cost the team a title, earning him the nickname Butterfingers and the opprobrium of all the Brooklyn fans.

Still, Maguire does take the job. But when he gets to Brooklyn, he finds out that McAvoy has died, bequeathing the team to a consortium of family members, headed by McAvoy's niece Kathryn (Carole Landis). She's an heiress from one of McAvoy's siblings, living as a socialite in Manhattan and knowing next to nothing about either Brooklyn or baseball. She'd just as happily go with the rest of the family and sell the team, but press agent Sam Sloan (William Frawley) convinces them to hold put for at least the rest of the season.

Two things happen. One is that Maguire and Kathryn begin to fall in love. The other is that Maguire shakes things up in the locker room to the point that the team starts winning. But that winning comes at a bit of a price as Maguire's focus on the team causes him to miss a date with Kathryn, who promptly falls out of love with him and is perfectly willing to sell the team out from under him again.

Amazingly, the result is that things suddenly start to go south for Maguire and the team just as the critical final three-game series against the Cardinals is about to begin. Maguire is willing to leave the team for no good reason, and when he does come back to the team, he's somehow unable to manage the team properly unless Kathryn is in the stands. But with this being a feel-good movie released early in the USA's involvement in World War II, it's quite easy to figure out how the movie is going to end.

Nolan and Landis do the best they can with the material, but in the end it's fairly slight and lets them down. Baseball fans may be interested in some of the vintage footage of Ebbets Field, but they'll also be interested (or cringing) in spotting all the baseball-related plot holes, with the most egregious being the climax ignoring that Brooklyn would bat in the bottom of the ninth inning if St. Louis does score the tying run.

In the end, It Happened in Flatbush is utterly pedestrian material that you might want to watch once if you're a Lloyd Nolan or Carole Landis completist, but it's nothing particularly memorable. Judge for yourself, however. The movie has been released to DVD courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme.

The Winning Team

With rumblings going on about when the baseball season is finally going to begin after all the state governors' cower in place orders, I recently watched The Winning Team, which was on the TCM schedule back in March when the baseball season was originally scheduled to begin.

The story is a biopic, more or less of Grover Cleveland Alexander, one of the great pitchers of the pre-All-Star Game era. Ronald Reagan plays the pitcher, who at the start of the movie is in his early 20s, working as a lineman out in his native Nebraska. But his baseball prowess is also well-known, as he's asked to pitch for the locals against a barnstorming team.

This produces all sorts of problems. Grover loves to pitch, and the team needs him, but he's also got a girlfriend Aimee Arrants (Doris Day) whom he's about to ask to marry him; the ultimate plan is to buy a farm and settle down. But having to go to town to pitch is going to make him miss his dinner with Aimee and really piss off her Dad. The game also brings Grover to the attention of professional baseball scouts.

Eventually, Grover is offered a tryout and a minor league contract, and he hopes to be able to make enough money to buy that farm and settle down. However, during one game he gets hit in the head by a batted ball, which it is feared will leave him blind. Instead, it "only" leaves him with double vision, which is still bad enough and clearly going to prevent him from pitching, until by miracle his pitching improves.

He starts his Major League career with the Philadelphia Phillies, taking time off to serve in World War I, which is another disaster when he suffers from a mustard gas attack and winds up with epilepsy (not actually called that in the movie). When he suffers an attack during a game, he turns to drink, which sends his career into a downward spiral, although he gets a chance to redeem himself when his old friend Rogers Hornsby (Frank Lovejoy) wants him on the St. Louis Cardinals, who are part of the 1926 pennant chase.

OK, some of what is portrayed in The Winning Team is what happened more or less, while some is badly moved around and some made up for dramatic effect. As I understand it, Alexander was already an alcoholic before World War I, although that wouldn't have made for as good a movie. His move to St. Louis is also handled differently (in reality, Alexander was sold on waivers and the barnstorming we see actually occurred in the 1930s). And the 1926 World Series ended differently in real life.

Still, Ronald Reagan is appealing enough, even if he's way to old for the part in the first half of the movie. (Alexander was 39 during the 1926 World Series and in his early 1920s during the beginning; Reagan was 41.) Doris Day shows she can handle drama, and the supporting actors all do a creditable job. Watch for a very young Russ Tamblyn (during his days credited as Rusty) as Grover's kid brother.

Even with its historical inaccuracies, The Winning Team is worth a watch as an example of the studio system's production of biopics. It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.