Pride of the Yankees Movie Review (1942)

When I was growing up in a Connecticut suburb of New York City in the 1950s and early 1960s, I really had no choice but to be a fan of the NY Yankees. The Dodgers and Giants had abandoned NY in the late 1950s, and the hapless Mets didn't begin their existence until 1962. I went to Yankee Stadium at least twice a year beginning in 1959; it was the high point of my summer. I recall nervously watching the skies the evening before a game (we would always go to Sunday doubleheaders--two games for the price of one--and sit in the "Mezzanine" Seats for $2.50) and nervously asking my father whether the dark clouds were rain clouds. He told me they were dark because the sky was dark; indeed, none of the games for which we had tickets was ever rained out.

Accompanying my pleasure at going to Yankee games was my father's insistence that I watch his favorite baseball movie. Entitled It Happens Every Spring (1949), it tells the story of a college physics professor who designed a resin which, when applied to the ball, made it unhittable. He then changed his name to "King Kelly," became a major league pitcher, and eventually led his team to a world series victory before suffering a career-ending injury when he caught a line drive in his (bare) pitching hand. Obviously, his stuff had "worn off" by that time. It was a story of ambition, technological skill, luck, and finally a return to "Normal" life after a dizzying and riveting run.

One of the movies I never saw as a child (for whatever reason) was the 1942 baseball romance movie, Pride of the Yankees. Starring a debonair Gary Cooper as the quiet and forceful Yankee slugger Lou Gehrig, and the beautiful Teresa Wright as his wife Eleanor (both of them were nominated for best actor/actress in a leading role), Pride of the Yankees purports to tell the "Lou Gehrig" story the year after the Yankee slugger and Iron Man had died from ALS in 1941 at age 37 (almost 38). The irony of Gehrig's short life was immense. He played in a record 2,130 consecutive games from 1925-1939 and was considered a most formidable power by opposing pitchers before being unable to continue to play early in May 1939. The rapidly-progressing disease, which is now named after Gehrig, claimed him early in June 1941. When the Yankees knew that his career was over, they announced a July 4, 1939 tribute to him, at which time he spoke his most famous line, "Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth." One of the virtues of the movie is that it has live footage from that event, with actual appearances by Babe Ruth and others who took part in the celebration.

Thinking About Pride of the Yankees

What made Pride of the Yankees significant for me was the context in which I saw it, as well as the content of the movie itself. I saw it with people who averaged about 80 years of age at "movie night" at the Classic Residence by Hyatt in Palo Alto, CA--where I was visiting my mother last week. The person who made sure they got the movie was Stan, a member of the Movie subcommittee of the Residence Life committee. There may be executive committees and health committees and other "big name" committees, but for my money it is the movie committee which is the most powerful one at that place. In any case, most of the people at the event remember Gehrig actually uttering those 1939 lines--where else could you see a movie like that??

But the appeal of the movie, of course, was its content. Filmed shortly after Gehrig's death and immediately after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Pride of the Yankees tells a story of loyalty, romance, courage and perseverance in the face of declining health. We meet Lou Gehrig of Manhattan, son of German immigrants who want him to become an "engineer" like his uncle Otto (actually, Otto was an architect). Lou, however, wants eventually to pursue another path. He is unassumingly great and humble, an eager and subservient pledge of his Columbia fraternity, a deferential younger player for the Yankees beginning in 1923 when "The Babe" was the unquestioned star, a faithful and caring husband of Eleanor, whom he met while the team was in Chicago and, most of all, a loyal teammate and patient sufferer with his ALS. He is, in fact, a great role model for American boys who will soon be sent off to the two-headed War in the Pacific and in Europe, a war which was, upon close study of it, the most daunting war which this country has been called upon to fight (with the possible exception of the Civil War). The movie succeeds not only because it becomes a "role model" movie but because it also tugs the heart strings in a number of ways. It is a tale of love discovered, of love threatened, and of love triumphant.

Limitations of the Movie

Though the movie continues to entertain today for the reasons given, it is shot through with "period piece" elements which, in my judgment, add to its effectiveness. It is SO "40s," for example, because it completely ignores the significant estrangement that existed between Ruth and Gehrig for the last few years of Ruth's career and the final years of Gehrig's (Ruth, born in 1895, eight years before Gehrig, had left the Yankees in 1934). It also portrays character in rather simple, monochromatic terms. Gehrig's mother, for exampe, is a domineering, insistent German mother, while Eleanor is a beautiful, supportive, long-suffering wife. What I found the most "40s," however, was the way that the doctors were presented in the movie. They concluded (actually on Gehrig's 36th birthday) that he had a terminal condition, but in the movie they not only refused to tell his wife, but were reluctant to let Gehrig in on the medical realities. This may capture one of the sad but true realities about our American medical past--that it was not considered either ethical or helpful to tell the truth of one's medical condition to loved ones of dying patients or to the patient himself. It made me wonder what medical myths still dominate our national consciousness.

Conclusion

Despite the fact that this was meant to be more of an edificatory than historical treatment of Gehrig's life (another example is the failure to mention two of the short-term Yankee managers in the late 1920s/early 1930s under whom Gehrig played), it succeeds. It succeeds primarily because it knows how to strum the deep chords of the human heart--by playing on romance, ambition, parental pressure, finding one's heart's desire, the thrill of great success and the agony of loss. As such the movie will always be a great entertainment piece, even though I think there must be a better baseball move in someone out there. But Pride of the Yankees provides a template on how to make even a better movie. It would have romance and character and humor and sadness, to be sure. But it would also be more grounded in history and more realistic, too. Romance and realism are compatible--and our age is crying for both.

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