Eleanor Gehrig allowed Wright to borrow the jewelry (which is now part of the collection at Cooperstown). Late in the film there is a nice touch of verisimilitude: The real Lou Gehrig had a number of small trophies he had been given over the years-watch fobs and the like-linked together as a bracelet for his wife. When the boy homers, the ball clearly comes not off his bat but from somewhere well offscreen. (In fairness to the filmmakers, Herman does breeze past a ghostly actual-Lou Gehrig as he hustles into second.) Maybe the most egregious depiction of baseball comes in the film’s first few minutes when a young Lou is shown elbowing his way into a sandlot game. Louis to play the Browns, then fade into footage of Billy Herman running the bases during the 1936 All-Star Game. These are a hash of disconnected images spliced together from disconnected game footage-the film will suggest the Yankees are in St. Similarly, there are a number newsreel-type montages supposedly showing Gehrig playing with the Yankees. This can be confusing because the backgrounds don’t always match their purported environs. For shots looking out from home plate the screen is often divided horizontally at the midline, with Little Wrigley below and a matte of some other park backdrop above. In actuality, when Lou and Eleanor began seeing each other he was 30 and she was 29.Īll game footage was shot at Los Angeles’s Little Wrigley Field, then home of the PCL Los Angeles Angels. Wright was 23 and could pass for younger, so the gap between them is stark. But more problematic than Cooper’s play is his age the film takes Gehrig from his college years through his age-36 retirement. This is a strange choice given that however awkward Gehrig could be socially (and sometimes on defense) he was an incredible multi-sport athlete. Cooper does look ungainly in most of his baseball scenes, but he’s also been directed to be ungainly as a matter of character. His true deficiency was in throwing, where he was hampered by a chronically-injured arm. In actuality, former major leaguers and Pacific Coast League stars Babe Herman and Lefty O’Doul coached Cooper and got his left-handed hitting up to a passable level, with Herman occasionally doubling for him in long shots. Tom Shieber of the Hall of Fame has debunked that story. From the moment the picture was made it was popularly understood that in order to compensate for Cooper’s inability to hit left-handed he wore a backwards uniform (“SEEKNAY”) and ran to third, then the film was flipped. That necessitated trading baseball experience (Montanan Cooper had done a great deal of horseback riding but had never touched a bat or glove) for acting ability. There isn’t a great deal of baseball in the film and that’s probably for the best as this isn’t a story about a ballplayer who happened to be a great man but rather a great man who happened to be a ballplayer. How Realistic is the Depiction of Baseball? Not as bad as Cooper’s reputation for clumsy play would suggest, but not as good as you might wish. He was thrice nominated for the Academy Award for best director, receiving nods for Goodbye, Mr. He made several baseball films in his career, including They Learned About Women and The Stratton Story, before succumbing to paranoia and rabid anti-Communism. Mankiewicz of Citizen Kane fame.ĭirector: Sam Wood. Douglas Croft, who plays young Lou also played young Ronald Reagan in King’s Row and young James Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy that same year. Violet Dickey), Bob Meusel, and Mark Koenig as themselves. Starring: A trio of multiple-Academy Award winners, including Gary Cooper as Gehrig, Theresa Wright as Eleanor Twitchell Gehrig, and Walter Brennan as sportswriter Sam Blake (based on Baseball Writers Association cofounder Fred Lieb).Īlso: Elsa Janssen and Ludwig Stössel as Mom and Pop Gehrig, Dan Duryea as Gehrig-skeptical sportswriter Hank Hanneman (a stand-in for Ruth ghost/future commissioner Ford Frick), and Babe Ruth, Bill Dickey (and Mrs. Logline: By virtue of a humility and an unrelenting work ethic, Lou Gehrig rises from a humble upbringing to be one of the greatest ballplayers of all time and find love, only to be cut down in his prime.

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