Everybody loves Lou (and Coop, too): "The Pride of the Yankees," with populist prototype Gary Cooper playing Lou Gehrig, the iconic iron horse, still has the ability to make grown men cry.

• Author: Gehring, Wes D.
• Position: The Pride of the Yankees - Mass Media - Movie review

A PRECEDENT-SETTING populist movie in a number of ways, "The Pride of the Yankees" (1942) still resonates with film-loving audiences today--and not just baseball fans caught up in the annual rite of pennant fever.

Despite being made well over a decade after the birth of talkies, "Pride" was the first sound-era baseball biography. The picture broke the movie norm of associating baseball with broad comedy, as Harold Lloyd's "Speedy" (1928) and Joe E. Brown's diamond trilogy--"Fireman, Save My Child" (1932), "Elmer the Great" (1933), and "Alibi Ike" (1935)--had done. Moreover, by being one of the year's top-grossing pictures, "Pride" helped put to rest the mistaken belief that baseball movies could not score at the box office. Moreover, the film's eight Academy Award nominations (it won three) was a then-unheard-of total for a sports cinematic effort.

This critical acclaim also was the catalyst for another baseball movie breakthrough--a successful reception outside of the U.S. As a reviewer for the London Observer stated, "You do not need to be an American or play baseball in order to enjoy 'Pride of the Yankees.' ... I cannot say, as a foreigner, how true it is. I can only say that it rings true."

Artistic and commercial success of any film is tied to a multitude of factors. Thus, before addressing the populist heart of "Pride," let's briefly note components from other genres showcased in the picture. Most obviously, "Pride" is a biography. In telling the story of New York Yankees star Lou Gehrig (Gary Cooper), the movie often follows standard procedure for a profile--chronicling the highlights and establishing a signature "hook," a pivotal trait or event that helps define the subject. What makes the "Pride" hook unusual is that the filmmakers chose something that many biographers would shy away from-Gehrig's less-than-colorful nature. (Of course, it is precisely this blue collar, everyman persona that makes him a populist hero.) Thus, when a sportswriter (Dan Duryea) implies Gehrig is boring, the athlete's baseball columnist friend (Walter Brennan, Cooper's frequent co-star) defends him as an old-fashioned hero: no front page scandals or daffy excitements. He simply is a guy who does his job and nothing else. He lives for his job. He gets a lot of fun out of it and millions of others get a lot of fun out of watching him do something better than anybody else ever did it before.

Fittingly, New York Daily News critic Kate Cameron observed at...