By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
'Baseball and American Culture': Opening Day at MoMA
The good news about being stuck in California this week is that I will be able to watch my beloved San Francisco Giants live on TV as they flail into their 2006 campaign. The bad news is that I am going to miss out on at least a third of MoMA’s Baseball and American Culture film series, which starts today and runs through April 30.
The program includes a dozen selections dating back to 1920, from a restored print of the Babe Ruth myth-umentary Headin’ Home to Dan Klores’s 2005 Latino player chronicle Viva Baseball. You can probably conjure most of the remaining titles without too much strain, The Jackie Robinson Story, Bang the Drum Slowly, The Natural and Field of Dreams probably being chief among them. And while clumsy entries such as A League of Their Own and Cobb apparently outclass notable omissions like The Pride of the Yankees and The Bad News Bears (and even Major League, which I know will never have an audience at any museum ever but deserves a second look anyway, if only for Dennis Haysbert’s classic turn as voodoo-obsessed slugger Pedro Cerrano: “Jesus, I like him very much, but he no help with curveball”), it is nice to see the museum dust off the Ray Milland gem It Happens Every Spring, and Aviva Kempner’s documentary The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg never really gets old.
Not coincidentally, Terrence Rafferty has a lovely little essay about baseball and the movies over at The Times, featuring a particularly astute assessment of why Ron Shelton’s Bull Durham endures as the genre’s finest film:
This movie is about success in failure, surviving your dreams rather than about fulfilling them, which gives it an appealing, and kind of sneaky, modesty: it’s all bunts and hard slides and singles slapped through holes in the infield, and it winds up beating the swing-for-the-fences baseball epics of its era by a country mile.
The series starts tonight, featuring a Babe Ruth/Jackie Robinson-biopic double feature, to be introduced by Brooklyn Dodgers expert Carl Prince. Consider checking it out, assuming baseball’s actual opening day does not take the precedence it probably should.
You forgot THE SANDLOT…one of the best baseball movies around. And…
The Giants aren’t “flailing” into anything, pal. This is our year!
p..s I have 2 tix for Friday night at face value…Braves/Gents…