All-Stars & Movie Stars: Sports in Film & History (review)

We sit in the dark, gazing at actors on a silver screen, and see … what? Adventure, heroism, despair, anguish, triumph, failure—certainly, that and much more. We also see our concerns and anxieties—threatened masculinity, gender and racial inequality, political decay, social disorder, and economic chaos. Films are our personal mirrors, often reflecting our dreams and nightmares, hopes and fears. All-Stars & Movie Stars, a collection of essays on sport films, provides ample evidence that sport films are not a class apart, that if as a body they do not quite rise to the level of a genre, they are nonetheless films that tell us a great deal about our society and culture—as well as about ourselves.

As with all such collections, the quality of the essays varies in terms of research and writing, but as a whole they treat sport films as significant cultural documents. Throughout there is an attempt to fuse academic concerns with race, class, and gender with traditional sport films and documentaries. Dayna B. Daniels, for example, explores misogyny and the treatment of women in sport films, Pellom McDaniels III focuses on the treatment of African Americans in baseball films, Ron Briley shows the racial politics inherent in Hoosiers, and John Hughson examines the social context of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Of course a number of other essays also address these themes, including ones by Victoria Elmwood and Clay Motley that discuss the class, racial, and gender implications of Rocky. At times the essays verge on suggesting that sports films are about everything but sports. Indeed, in a delightful essay Latham Hunter demonstrates how The Natural can be used to introduce students to the field of cultural studies.

As a whole, the essays seem directed toward history and cultural studies scholars and students. Most do not address specifically film studies issues. A full discussion of sports films as a separate genre or subgenre would have been a welcomed addition. Nor are a number of subjects of interest to sport historians addressed. How, for instance, have sport films influenced and shaped how we regard athletes and how the games are played. In an essay on televised golf as narrative, Harper Cossar discusses how television dictates how we watch the game, but there is no discussion of how the game has fundamentally changed to meet the demands of television. Similarly, basketball, football, baseball, boxing, and a number of other sports have altered their rules and tempo to suit the demands of television.

All-Star & Movie Star is highly suggestive. It demonstrates that sports films are rich documents, that they offer much for scholars of film, television, cultural studies, sport, and history. It also signals a need for more systematic studies, such as Dan Streible's Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema (2008).