OPV: The Pride of the Yankees (1942)

Film: The Pride of the Yankees (1942)

Stars: Gary Cooper, Teresa Wright, Babe Ruth, Walter Brennan, Dan Duryea, Elsa Janssen

Director: Sam Wood

Oscar History: 11 nominations/1 win (Best Picture, Actor-Gary Cooper, Actress-Teresa Wright, Art Direction, Cinematography, Special Effects, Film Editing*, Score, Sound, Motion Picture Story, Adapted Screenplay)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Gary Cooper: click here to learn more about Mr. Cooper (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last week we talked about how Gary Cooper became a star with The Virginian, but this week we're going to talk a little about how he became a legend.  Cooper is an odd conundrum for modern cinephiles, partially because as an actor he (despite two Oscars) isn't everyone's cup of tea.  The stoic handsomeness was frequently miscast, and while he has his legendary roles (specifically High Noon), much of his legendary years in Hollywood are forgotten or haven't aged as well.  But from the mid-1930's (when he did Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and won his first Oscar nomination) to the mid-1940's Cooper was about as untouchable as you could get in Hollywood, and frequently took on the role of outsized hero.  He did this while having a very colorful personal life (which we're going to explore more fully next week) bedding half the women in Hollywood.  One of the legendary roles that Cooper undertook during this time was of Lou Gehrig who had died the year before from the disease that was eventually named after him in The Pride of the Yankees.  That's the movie we're covering today.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is a relatively traditional biopic focusing on Lou Gehrig's (Cooper) life, the son of German immigrants who wanted a better future for him, but one through education.  However, Gehrig's incredible talent for baseball becomes too impossible to deny as the film progresses, and he's recruited to the New York Yankees, where he become a star to rival Babe Ruth (played, somehow, by the real-life Ruth who had been retired for seven years at this time & had to lose a significant amount of weight before he could play himself).  He also falls in love with a woman named Eleanor (Wright), who is the sweet girl next door who has to fight his domineering mother until Lou steps in.  After an unparalleled career in baseball, Gehrig was diagnosed with what we now know is ALS (aka Lou Gehrig's Disease), and must step down from baseball as he will be unable to be alive much longer after retiring, and the movie ends with him retiring with the famous "I'm the luckiest man on the face of the earth" speech which is what you instantly know this movie from even if you've never seen it.

In 1942, Lou Gehrig would've been as famous as LeBron James would be today, and so weirdly the film focuses relatively little on his baseball feats, which are impressive, save for his incredible consecutive games played streak that Cal Ripken broke in 1995 (fun personal fact-one of the only sports memories I have with my dad, as I was not a sport-watching child, was watching Cal Ripken break that record on the tiny 13-inch TV in our basement, as my dad insisted my brother & I watch it as it was a record that would stand forever).  This decision is a mistake-Gehrig's life was pretty picturesque, at least from what we see in the movie, and given the real-life Ruth is playing himself here, they totally skip over the two legend's complicated relationship with one another (including allegations that Ruth slept with Gehrig's wife before she married Gehrig).  Even by the definition of a biopic of this era, this movie is incredibly vanilla, bordering on propaganda to Gehrig's memory.

That said, I loved the last fifteen minutes of this movie, and it made me wish the rest of the movie had earned them.  There's something so beautiful about what Cooper does with Gehrig, knowing he's dying, and both the little boy (who earlier in the film was said he wouldn't walk again) going up to a stoic Gehrig & saying he did, in fact, walk, and then the farewell speech...it's a beautiful ending, and feels like a lovely testament to the way that we all have to, eventually, play our last game.

The film won 11 Oscar nominations, making it one of the only remaining films that has received 11+ Oscar nominations that I've never seen (just Gandhi and Becket can out do it on my missing OVP titles list).  Cooper is too old for this part, and feels too mundane up until those last fifteen minutes when he (pardon the expression) knocks it out of the park.  Teresa Wright's Best Actress nomination is weird, both because she's given nothing to do and because there were better options that year (hello-Carole Lombard in To Be or Not to Be!).  The story concept is arguably better than the tepid screenplay, but neither are breaking much new ground, and while I liked the sound in the last ten minutes, there's nothing noteworthy about the rest of the film.  The art direction is standard-fare...you never actually feel like you're at Yankee Stadium in the movie, but just a sound stage.  The editing is arguably the film's best element, which is what it won its Oscar for, because it does do a decent job of showing the passage of time, but it's nothing compared to something like Citizen Kane or Now, Voyager that year.  The cinematography is noteworthy because of the lighting effects that were used to try to de-age Gary Cooper...which barely work.  This is true of the Special Effects, which is a truly weird nomination because other than some matte screens behind Cooper, there's nothing special about these effects other than the lighting.  There are apocryphal stories that Cooper (who was right-handed in real life, unlike the famous southpaw Gehrig), had to have trick photography to recreate certain baseball scenes, which would be impressive for the time, but research indicates that at best happened in one brief scene, and not most of the baseball scenes where Cooper learned to bat as a lefty.