The only problem with including Pride of the Yankees on the list is that the film was just a little too distorted, especially the depiction of Lou Gehrig's famous farewell at Yankee Stadium, but elsewhere, too. Who says Hollywood got it right in the olden days before those pesky lefties hit town and yanked everything inside out? Either the fact checkers were on strike or Sam Goldwyn (par for the course?) decided not to let the actualities get in the way of rushing a tearjerker out. Consider, if you will:
* Lou Gehrig never hit two home runs in any World Series game in which Babe Ruth also happened to hit one out.
* Gehrig and his wife, Eleanor, didn't meet early in his career, never mind marry after his first World Series---they met after he was well-established with the Yankees, in 1931 . . . and married two years later.
* Gehrig didn't take himself out of the Yankee lineup before heading to the plate for a game at-bat to shock the crowd at Detroit's Briggs Stadium. The crowd got their shock before the game, when the stadium announcer told them Gehrig was out of the lineup. Gehrig actually made his decision that his time was up the night before, even going to Yankee manager Joe McCarthy's hotel room to give him the news. At the actual game, Gehrig walked the lineup card out to the plate umpire and then the word whipped around the park like wildfire. (On Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day at Yankee Stadium, where Gehrig would give his spontaneous "Luckiest Man" speech, McCarthy cracked while addressing the crowd and then addressed Gehrig directly: Lou, what else can I say except that it was a sad day in the life of everybody who knew you when you came into my hotel room that day in Detroit and told me you were quitting as a ballplayer because you felt yourself a hindrance to the team. My God, man, you were never that.)
* Gehrig's doctors didn't give him the grave diagnosis a doctor is shown to give him straight in the film. (Gary Cooper as Gehrig: Doc, I'm a man who believes in knowing his batting average.. Doctor: Lou---it's strike three.) Certainly not after his wife promised the doctor Gehrig would never know that she knew he was dying. If anything, we know now that the Mayo Brothers gave him an unrealistically optimistic prognosis---at his wife's insistence. (Plus, it was somewhat common practise in those years not to tell patients that they were suffering cancers or other degenrative diseases.) We also know now that Gehrig wrote a letter to his wife while he underwent the six days' testing at the Mayo Clinic that delivered the diagnosis, and he was quite direct about the news: The bad news is lateral sclerosis, in our language chronic infantile paralysis. There isn't any cure... there are very few of these cases. It is probably caused by some germ . . . Never heard of transmitting it to mates . . . There is a 50–50 chance of keeping me as I am. I may need a cane in 10 or 15 years. Playing [baseball again] is out of the question. (Gehrig became a New York City parole official---moving to the Bronx from his New Rochelle home to satisfy the residency requirement---in 1940; he held the job and performed it out of the public eye until he resigned a month before his death, since his body no longer allowed him to do even that job.)
*Gehrig's wife and his mother are depicted as semi-friendly rivals with more distaste than real animosity in the film. In real life, they could barely stand each other, and their relationship even went as low as to challenge each other with accusations involving whom between them might actually have been responsible for his illness.
* This is Lou Gehrig's actual farewell talk at Yankee Stadium---which he gave off-the-cuff:
Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth.
I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans.
Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn't consider it the highlight of his career just to associate with them for even one day? Sure, I'm lucky.
Who wouldn't consider it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert? Also, the builder of baseball's greatest empire, Ed Barrow? To have spent six years with that wonderful little fellow, Miller Huggins? Then to have spent the next nine years with that outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology, the best manager in baseball today, Joe McCarthy? Sure, I'm lucky.
When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat, and vice versa, sends you a gift - that's something. When everybody down to the groundskeepers and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies — that's something.
When you have a wonderful mother-in-law who takes sides with you in squabbles with her own daughter — that's something. When you have a father and a mother who work all their lives so you can have an education and build your body — it's a blessing. When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed - that's the finest I know.
So I close in saying that I might have been given a bad break, but I've got an awful lot to live for. Thank you.
And, the film's version:
I have been walking onto ball fields for sixteen years, and I've never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans.
I have had the great honor to have played with these great veteran ballplayers on my left - Murderers' Row, our championship team of 1927. I have had the further honor of living with and playing with these men on my right - the Bronx Bombers, the Yankees of today.
I have been given fame and undeserved praise by the boys up there behind the wire in the press box, my friends, the sportswriters.
I have worked under the two greatest managers of all time, Miller Huggins and Joe McCarthy.
I have a mother and father who fought to give me health and a solid background in my youth.
I have a wife, a companion for life, who has shown me more courage than I ever knew.
People all say that I've had a bad break. But today . . . today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth.
Numerous publications published versions of the actual speech, and it could have been given properly without once diluting the effect old Sam Goldwyn wanted for the big climax. Goldwyn made great entertainment out of a mishmosh of factual errors, which is about par for the course. Not letting the facts get in the way of a juicy piece of filmmaking didn't begin and hardly ended with Robert Redford's distortion of the 1959 quiz show scandals in Quiz Show.
For the record---if I had to choose the best baseball film of all time, it'd be a dead heat between Bang the Drum Slowly, Field of Dreams, and 42.
