The Pride of the Yankees Reviews

All the clisés, but here's is an important for everybody hit, full of the warmth of american institutions, baseball, migrant dreams, even public relations (good ol Brennan), people of all kinds. The police acompanies Cooper/Gehrig to delcare to Teresa and to get, being just married, to the stadium

Lou Gehrig died a year before this film was released, and that should tell you everything you need to know about it. It has no concern for telling the factual truth about Gehrig, it wants to present him as a saint. This is not biographical film-making, this is pure hagiography. Lou Gehrig’s story is an amazing bit of American mythology, and it deserves to be told, but it deserves to be told truthfully.

 

That’s the part where The Pride of the Yankees trips over itself. It’s not interested in providing a good dramatic story, but presenting a monument to a heroic figure. For his numerous sports accomplishments, or for the way he faced his death sentence with dignity, Lou Gehrig deserves some slight bit of embellishment, yet The Pride of the Yankees overdoes it.

 

Watching this, would you have guessed that Gehrig and teammate Babe Ruth had a famously prickly relationship? Or that manager Joe McCarthy treated him as a surrogate son? Or that his wife and mother battled each other frequently, and with a chillier disposition than the film limitedly presents? No, because it sidesteps those moments, or shutters them off to the sidelines. Here, Gehrig is a simple good-boy, the kind of “aw, shucks, ma!” character for which James Stewart is the subject of much satirical jabs.

 

The narrative tends toward monotony, with a heavy dose of folksy charm and Americana symbolism. The only major story beat that maintains your interest is the romance between Lou and wife Eleanor, and the final thirty minutes, which depicts the beginnings of his illness. If nothing else, The Pride of the Yankees rallies itself for a solid final fifteen minutes. That climatic speech is sucker punch of authentic emotional outpouring in a film that has trafficked in easy sentiment prior. Gehrig’s final walk to a darkened dugout, and then we fade to black, our hero struck down in his prime by cruel fate.

 

The film may not know when to cut elements, but it was smart to end there. What else was left to say? Shame this kind of approach couldn’t have been sprinkled throughout. Yards and yards of fantasy were woven into the script. Was it necessary to keep Dan Duryea and Walter Brennan as two warring reporters constantly arguing over Gehrig’s career prospects? Was that mid-film dance number essential to telling this story? Some of this is just hopelessly dated dreck – the maudlin way it presents Gehrig’s charitable work, or the cavity-causing glimpse into his youth. There’s no meaningful examination of his life and career here, just loose fidelity to the facts, and morale boosting for a nation on the brink of war.

 

Yet there’s still that final scene. It’s the only one anyone remembers, and with good reason. While a majority of the film surrounding it is the sight of a real-time embalming, that final scene is what the rest of it should have been all along. Gary Cooper’s earnest delivery and Teresa Wright’s teary-eyed stoicism ingrain themselves in the brain, and are powerful enough images to understand why they were Oscar nominated in the first place. But one great scene does not a great film make.