Not Rated | 2 h 8 min | Drama, Biopic | 1943
One of Hollywood’s all-time greats, Gary Cooper, was born in 1901. One of America’s all-time baseball greats, Lou Gehrig, was born just two years later, in 1903.
Both loved the outdoors; Gehrig, hitting his heart out as first baseman for the Yankees, and Cooper, stunt-riding, and hunting and fishing. In photographs, as young men, they looked uncannily alike.
In reality, they couldn’t be more different, presenting producers with at least a few challenges when casting Cooper to star in their biopic on Gehrig. Gehrig stood about 5 feet 9 inches tall, Cooper 6 feet 2 inches. Gehrig was left-handed, Cooper right-handed. Yet, once Cooper stepped onto the screen, he simply became Gehrig.
The year 2023 marks the 120th anniversary of Gehrig’s birth and the founding of the New York Yankees. It’s also the 100th anniversary of the opening of the Yankee stadium, where Gehrig later bade goodbye to baseball in a touching speech saying, inexplicably, how he considered himself “the luckiest man.”
Why inexplicably? Gehrig’s promising career was cut short cruelly, when he died at the age of 37. He succumbed to a neurodegenerative disease that the medical world knew so little about and that’s since been called “Lou Gehrig’s disease.”
Homage to a Hero
Released just after Gehrig died, the film’s opening credits make no secret of his death, including a brief text of homage to a man who, even in his prime, was a lesson in simplicity and modesty to America’s youth.A man who faced death with valor and fortitude, leaving behind a legacy of courage that should inspire not just sportsmen, but “all men.”
