The Pride of the Yankees

The life of Lou Gehrig, first baseman for the New York Yankees: the son of immigrants studying at Columbia, the record built from two thousand consecutive games, and the illness that would carry his name arriving in his mid-thirties. The film is not interested in baseball. It is interested in the farewell: its whole weight gathers in the speech he made at the stadium in 1939. Gehrig declares himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth, and the film is constructed around that sentence. The form is classical studio biography: marriage scenes, the clubhouse, crowds. Little game footage, a great deal of human story. The production's best-known story is a technical trick: Gary Cooper was right-handed and Gehrig batted left. For years it was said the film was reversed, which is why the lettering on the uniform reads as a mirror image; later examination indicates this was done only for the throwing scenes and that the batting was filmed normally. Babe Ruth appears as himself. Sam Wood directed, with Teresa Wright as his wife Eleanor. Who it is for: viewers who like sports biography and classical Hollywood melodrama. Who it is not for: anyone wanting the technique of the game. The film gives little room to the sport and its emotional accents are heavy by modern standards.