The Pride Of The Yankees | Critique

"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. " These two concluding lines say a lot about the speaker. A gentle and honorable person who gave his life to game and is very satisfied to the core. So was Lou Gehrig, the iconic first baseman of New York Yankees. TPOTY is a movie dedicated to the baseball legend whose career was curtailed premature due to a nerve disorder, which later claimed his life.

Unlike most of the sports-movies, this movie is more drama than game itself. Lou (played by a brilliant Gary Cooper) wants to be a baseball player but her mother presses him to follow path of an uncle who had a successful career. While he is pursuing engineering, his mother gets sick and he joins Yankees for a contract. In his first game he is mocked by a beautiful Eleanor (Teresa Wright). Later both fall in love with each other (another cliché) and marry. His career is blooming and along with Babe Ruth (another legend who did a cameo) is rated as the best in the game. But later his performance starts dipping and doctors reveal that he is suffering from a fatal amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. In the last scene, he says adieu to the game he loved the most.

TPOTY is perhaps one of the most lively biopics I have ever seen. The character of Gehrig, Eleanor and Gehrig's writer friend Sam Blake are beautifully crafted and adds only smiles. The movie hardly puts in any phase of depression and even in the moments where Gehrig's end is being shown, the tone is very hopeful. Direction is adorable. The movie, however, is known more for editing than any other technical aspect. Editing won the Oscar. The use of montages to show Lou's growth as a player is iconic. It takes out the monotony as the game is actually about the player and not about the game. The crisp editing makes the movie a memorable affair.

Written By: Sujoy Ghosh