As I wrote last week, with this column we're retiring the "New Movies" rubric and going back to calling this space "OnFilm."
It signals a subtle change in direction for this column. "New Movies" is (mostly) about movies currently in theaters or about to open. Now I plan to use this space as a kind of critic's notebook to write about movies and memory. To be transparent, a lot of what I'll be sharing in the weeks to come is the result of an outside project I'm working on, a book about movies and music and sports and how they intersect with our lives.
This project is leading me into some tender territory; the other day I was thinking about how one of the last movies my father ever saw in a theater was Barry Levinson's "The Natural" (1984) which stars Robert Redford and is based on Bernard Malamud's 1952 novel.
Redford, who was in his 40s at the time, plays Roy Hobbs, a once-promising baseball player who has his career derailed when, as a 19-year-old rookie, he's shot by a deranged woman in a hotel room, an echo of what happened to Eddie Waitkus, the first baseman for the Chicago Cubs who, in the midst of the 1949 season, was shot by a 19-year-old female stalker who lured him to her hotel room.
In "The Natural," it takes Hobbs 16 years to make it back to the majors. In real life, Waitkus played the next season and was named Comeback Player of the Year, though he apparently developed PTSD and underwent a severe personality change; where he was once warm and outgoing, he became paranoid and withdrawn.
Levinson changed Malamud's darker ending to give Hobbs a life-affirming Hollywood ending, but all in all "The Natural" is a fine movie, one that on some days I might prefer over Ron Shelton's "Bull Durham."
I wish I could say I went to see "The Natural" with my dad. But I was a young man; I went to movies at night with my friends or with a date. Toward the end of my father's life, when he was in and out of the hospital, he would sometimes go to matinees alone. "The Natural" came out in May 1984, a little more than a year before he died, but movies hung around longer in the theaters in those days. He probably saw in the spring or early summer of 1985.
IN HIS HOSPITAL ROOM
In any case, I distinctly remember it with him in his hospital room. I remember that on that day I brought him a copy of a book called "Balls," an account of the New York Yankee teams from the mid-'70s to the early '80s, ostensibly written by their erstwhile third baseman Graig Nettles. (Nettles had help from Peter Golenbock, who had written two previous books about the Yankees.) I dropped by the hospital in the early afternoon having run an early morning cop reporting shift and stopped by the Dairy Queen to get him a strawberry milkshake.
Technically, I was smuggling the shake to him -- he wasn't supposed to have outside food while he was in the hospital -- but everyone understood he was dying. They were just keeping him comfortable, with morphine dripping into his arm. They looked the other way if I brought milkshakes, or if some of his younger co-workers -- he worked for a company that manufactured devices that measured the flow of liquid through gas pipelines after he retired from the Air Force -- rolled joints for him to blow out the cracked window of his semi-private room.
My father had played minor league baseball and was an admirer of Nettles, who, after Brooks Robinson, was the best-fielding third baseman in the game at the time. But probably the real reason I brought him the book was to advertise that I had recently graduated to writing literary criticism. Gary West, a former college English professor who'd taken to writing about horse racing for the Shreveport Journal and who also served as the newspaper's de facto book editor, had noticed me and given me a small stack of review copies.
"Write about these if you want to," West told me. "Balls" was on the top of the stack. It was probably the first book I ever wrote about as a professional writer. (Though I should stress I didn't get paid anything extra for writing these reviews; it was volunteer work I did off the clock.)
I didn't mind. Writing reviews gave me reason to talk to and to be edited by West, the newspaper's subtlest and most erudite writer. (West, who's still active as a prominent turf writer today, would go on to write "Razoo at the Races: Diary of a Horseplayer," possibly the funniest book ever written about horse racing and its enthusiasts.)
HE LOVED 'THE NATURAL'
My father brought up "The Natural." He always hated when actors played ballplayers; it pained him to watch Anthony Perkins as Jimmy Piersall playing catch with Karl Malden in "Fear Strikes Out." He hated William Bendix in "The Babe Ruth Story," which came out in 1948, when he was 11 years old and still believed in magic. He disliked Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig in "The Pride of the Yankees," Sam Wood's 1942 hymn to strong silent masculinity.
But he loved "The Natural," and praised Redford's Ted Williams-derived swing.
"That Redford, he was a ballplayer," he said. "That swing would work -- he's got some bat speed. He's fluid."
The Los Angeles Dodger pitching great Don Drysdale once told St. Louis sportswriter Bob Broeg that Redford was a "pretty good ballplayer." Redford referred to Drysdale as his "old teammate." So the story spread that Redford had played high school baseball with Drysdale. He'd gone to the University of Colorado on a baseball scholarship, only to drink his way off the team.
That was the boilerplate legend.
But about a decade ago, the Los Angeles Times checked the story out. Redford was a high school tennis player -- stories about him warming up Pancho Gonzales were true -- but he wasn't on his school's baseball team.
That doesn't mean he wasn't Drysdale's teammate on the sandlots or in American Legion ball or that the Colorado baseball coach didn't invite Redford to walk on the team. It doesn't mean that Redford wasn't a "pretty good ballplayer." (Bo Belinsky, the playboy pitcher who briefly starred for the Los Angeles Angels in the '60s, never played high school baseball either; he was a 16-year-old pool shark.) Only that the standard assumption was incorrect.
REDFORD WAS FLUID
Redford had bat speed. He was fluid. He looked like a hitter. And there are stories about him taking a few pitches out of the park during the filming of "The Natural."
Gary Cooper apparently had no interest in baseball before being cast in "'Pride of the Yankees." He had never swung a bat before. The story goes that, as a natural right-hander, he was unable to master a reasonable looking left-handed swing. To remedy this problem, Wood dressed him in a mirror-image Yankees uniform and had him swing from the right side of the plate. Cooper then ran to third base instead of first, with technicians flipping the print to make it appear Cooper was left-handed and running to first.
This story is accepted -- I've seen recent academic papers that take it as established fact. But like a lot of old legends we take as history, it isn't true. The story may have started with a column The Washington Post's sportswriter Shirley Povich wrote days before the movie opened.
Povich noted that while Lefty O'Doul -- a remarkable figure who was at various times in his career a star pitcher, batting champion, successful manager, innovative batting coach, and instrumental in popularizing baseball in Japan -- had signed on to coach Cooper to bat, catch and throw left-handed on screen, he had been unable to coach a credible performance out of him. So, Povich wrote, "everything you see Cooper doing left-handed in the picture, he's actually doing right-handed."
Everyone accepted Povich's assertions as fact, and it may have suited director Wood and producer Samuel Goldwyn to have the public think they'd achieved the effect through camera trickery. I suspect Povich -- and other writers who reported similar stories -- was doing the studio's bidding with his column. They wanted to advertise their technical ingenuity.
'CONSPIRACY THEORY'
But in 2013, Tom Shieber, the senior curator at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, published a long and convincing article on his Baseball Researcher (baseballresearcher.blogspot.com) blog that pointed out how difficult it would have been to convincingly carry out this kind of practical effect.
While the mirror-image uniform "[s]eems like a plausible way to solve the problem," Shieber writes, it's more like "a complicated conspiracy theory" where "every aspect of the plan would have to have been carefully planned out and perfectly executed."
Consider that "every other player in the shot would also have to don backwards uniforms," and that "the second baseman, third baseman, and shortstop would all have to be left-handers and wear gloves on their right hand." The producers would have to track down both a left-handed catcher and a left-handed catcher's mitt for him to wear.
Every shot would "have to be carefully set up so that, when reversed, there would be nothing to belie the trickery: no outfield advertising, no ballpark features that are non-symmetrical, etc."
Shieber points out he was only able to examine the final cut of the film. He didn't have access to any material that was cut, where the filmmakers might have tried flipping the image. And there is a brief sequence where the footage is flipped to make Cooper appear to be throwing left-handed. ("[Cooper] threw the ball like an old woman tossing a hot biscuit," O'Doul admitted.)
But most of the scenes where Cooper was required to throw were filmed using his stand-in, left-handed Babe Herman (who, like O'Doul, is one of the great forgotten characters of the game).
Looking at Gary Cooper's left-handed swing today, I'd say it's not that bad. It's not Gehrig's swing, but I've seen worse. But I'm not the baseball critic my father was.
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