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Reviewed by:
  • The Baseball Film in Postwar America: A Critical Study, 1948–1962 by Ron Briley
  • James J. Donahue
Ron Briley. The Baseball Film in Postwar America: A Critical Study, 1948–1962. Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2011. 214 pp. Paper, $40.00.

Ron Briley, editor of two previous collections of essays for McFarland on baseball and American culture, has just published the first book-length critical study devoted solely to the baseball film in postwar America. And while there is much in this volume of interest to popular readers and fans interested in the role of baseball in popular American culture, unfortunately as an academic study this work is of limited value.

In the study’s preface, Briley notes that “the baseball film genre of the post-war era was more than just a nostalgic enterprise in which young people [ . . . ] could seek to escape reality” (3). Accordingly, Briley reads the films from the period as evincing the various tensions that had beset postwar American society, in particular tensions related to gender, race, and class. Further, this preface sets up a useful thematic organization for the following films, though this organization is not employed by the study itself. Such an organization, in this reviewer’s opinion, would have strengthened the reading of the films and provided better, more fluid connections between the individual chapters. This is especially the case with the biopics, as Briley is often referencing earlier discussion in his later chapters. Instead, the chapters are arranged mostly chronologically, with the notable exception of chapter 8, “Baseball and Supernatural Intervention: It Happens Every Spring (1949), Angels in the Outfield (1951), and Rhubarb (1951),” a chapter organized thematically by discussing three of the four “supernatural” films included in the study. Other than the resulting length of the chapter, this reviewer sees no reason why the discussion of Damn Yankees (1958) could not have been included in this chapter. In a similar vein, all of the biopics could have been included in one larger section, given Briley’s particular strength in the individual chapters for establishing the importance of the biopic as a subgenre within the baseball film.

All that said, there is much value in the discussion of the various movies. The individual chapters (with one exception, noted above) focus on one film and read that film both within the context of American social anxieties of the time as well as against the historical figures and events depicted in the films. This, of course, would be of particular interest to fans of the players whose biopics are included in this study: Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Jim Thorpe, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Dizzy Dean, and Jimmy Piersall. It is this reviewer’s opinion that the chapters focusing on biopics are the strongest chapters because they demonstrate the best balance between discussion of the film, situation within social/cultural contexts, and comparison to the historical record. Fans of the individual players whose lives have been depicted (or [End Page 158] romanticized, as Briley smartly demonstrates) in these films will find much valuable discussion in these pages. In short, Briley is at his best as a historian of baseball and American culture.

The remaining chapters, unfortunately, do not cohere into a clear thematic pattern, which may be one reason for Briley’s choice to discuss the films (mostly) chronologically. That said, Briley convincingly demonstrates the cultural importance of several films which are often considered little more than mere entertainment by film scholars and popular audiences alike. Films such as Take Me Out to the Ballgame (1949) and Damn Yankees explore gender tensions in postwar American culture; films such as The Jackie Robinson Story (1950) and Jim Thorpe: All American (1951) force audiences to confront racial tensions in professional baseball as a focal point for American society at large. Similarly, The Stratton Story (1949), The Winning Team (1952), and Safe at Home! (1962) all engage the battle between individual achievement and the merits of teamwork, which Briley smartly connects to the larger cultural response to “the organization man.”

There are a couple of instances in this study where Briley’s engagement with the larger discussion of the history and culture, unfortunately, detracts from the discussion of the...

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