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.”
As a boy, with an eye on nothing but baseball, Gehrig lovingly buys into his mother’s dream for him to become an engineer. When the Yankees spot his talent and sign him up, she initially orders him to abandon the frivolity of the field in exchange for a more serious career.
But she relents when she sees his prowess with the bat and the love and respect he commands from players and fans.
But there’s more to Gehrig than ball and bat. His confidante, sports writer Sam Blake (Walter Brennan), sums him up to another writer who believes Gehrig’s too good to be true.
No front-page scandals, no daffy excitements, no horn-piping in the spotlight…He lives for his job. He gets a lot of fun out of it. And 50 million other people get a lot of fun out of him, watching him do something better than anybody else.
What made Gehrig special? His natural flair for power-hitting and home runs, which Wood celebrates through a montage of games, photographs, press clippings, and a trophy-crowded shelf. But Wood lavishes screen time on Gehrig’s doting parents too, who instilled in him virtues he came to be known for: discipline, restraint, self-respect.
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Babe Ruth and a few real-life baseball stars play themselves, even if Wood doesn’t do their characters justice. They’re not layered enough to be meaningful, serving merely to show solidarity to their real-life buddy Gehrig by showing up on screen.
Disease
Wood uses a solemn six-minute segment, in two parts, bereft of music, to show Gehrig’s tragic transformation.The first is a locker-room event where he confronts the horror of losing muscular control. In a profound close-up, Cooper portrays self-doubt, humiliation, and fear that the one thing he can do well, is slipping from his grasp.
The second is a big game, where his fading power over his limbs overwhelms his compulsion to pick up the bat again. The announcer shouts to stadium crowds that Gehrig’s been replaced.
Up in the press box, a commentator known for mocking him in his early years, says respectfully of his uninterrupted run, “2,130 games, 14 years!”
As Gehrig walks off the field, the giant stands form a poignant backdrop. Down in the player-benches, he bows his head in resignation. The New York Yankees logo on his cap stares at you, mute witness to his extraordinary sporting journey.
Wood takes time to depict Gehrig’s playful courtship of Eleanor (Teresa Wright), who later becomes his beloved wife. Wood’s execution does seem contrived or childish in parts, but it’s no trivial subplot. It’s central to Gehrig, the man.
In her autobiographical book, “My Luke and I,” Mrs. Gehrig, who never remarried, wrote, “I would not have traded two minutes of my life with that man, for 40 years with another.”
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