C2 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, SATURDAY, APRIL 4, 20201988
‘Bull Durham’Any movie that starts with the line “I be-
lieve in the church of baseball” surely de-
serves the highest praise. It’s spoken by An-
nie Savoy (Susan Sarandon), a sexually sa-
gacious English professor who comes be-
tween the veteran catcher Crash Davis
(Kevin Costner) and the phenom pitcher
Ebby Calvin LaLoosh, a.k.a. Nuke (Tim
Robbins), in this witty romantic comedy.
The writer-director Ron Shelton, a real-life
former minor leaguer, brings verisimilitude
to the script and reveals what’s really dis-
cussed during mound conferences — wed-
ding presents for teammates.
Available to stream on IMDb TV, the Roku
Channel, Tubi and Vudu; or to rent or buy on
Amazon, FandangoNow, iTunes, Vudu and
YouTube.1988
‘Eight Men Out’
The scandal-plagued 2019 Houston Astros
had nothing on the Chicago White Sox — or
Black Sox, as they came to be called — of a
century earlier. Though eight team mem-
bers were acquitted on charges that they
threw the 1919 World Series, they were
banned for life from baseball. The writer-di-
rector John Sayles movingly depicts “Shoe-
less” Joe Jackson (D. B. Sweeney) and
Buck Weaver (John Cusack) as unjustly ac-
cused and saves one of the best roles for
himself. He forms a two-man Greek chorus
with the historian Studs Terkel playing the
sly sportswriters Ring Lardner and Hugh
Fullerton.
Available to stream on the Roku Channel,
Tubi and Vudu; and to rent or buy on Ama-
zon, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube.1989
‘Field of Dreams’In this enchanting film, a farmer (Kevin
Costner) builds a diamond in his cornfield
after hearing a disembodied voice telling
him, “If you build it, he will come.” “He”
turns out to be both Shoeless Joe Jackson
(Ray Liotta) and the farmer’s long-es-
tranged father (Dwier Brown), and “Field
of Dreams” perfectly captures the magical
thinking in which so many die-hard fans in-
dulge.
Available to rent or buy on Amazon, iTunes,
Vudu and YouTube.1992
‘A League of Their Own’
After recently being found to have the coro-
navirus, Tom Hanks wrote, “Remember, de-
spite all the current events, there is no cry-
ing in baseball.” That aphorism, delivered
so indelibly by Hanks as the cantankerous
manager Jimmy Dugan, is only one of many
reasons the director Penny Marshall’s
poignant comedy-drama about the All-
American Girls Professional Baseball
League endures. At the movie’s heart is the
loving rivalry between the sisters Dottie
Hinson (Geena Davis) and Kit Keller (Lori
Petty), who find a new sense of self-worth
on the diamond as male players are away
fighting World War II.
Available to rent or buy on Amazon, Fandan-
goNow, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube.1989
‘Major League’
This raucous comedy about a ragtag Cleve-
land Indians club is generally considered
the favorite baseball movie of major league
players. Maybe that’s because it’s popu-
lated by so many recognizable archetypeswho are — to paraphrase the droll announc-
er Harry Doyle (Bob Uecker) — “just a bit
outside” the bounds of normality. Among
the most colorful are the vainglorious Roger
Dorn (Corbin Bernsen), the superstitious
Pedro Cerrano (Dennis Haysbert), the
cocksure Willie Mays Hayes (Wesley
Snipes) and the aptly nicknamed Ricky
Wild Thing Vaughn (Charlie Sheen).
Available to stream on Fubo, or to rent or buy
on Amazon, FandangoNow, iTunes, Vudu
and YouTube.2011
‘Moneyball’Brad Pitt radiates move-star charisma as
Billy Beane, the Oakland A’s executive who
figured out how to compete against big-
market teams despite having a fraction of
their payroll in this thoroughly entertaining
adaptation of Michael Lewis’s nonfiction
best seller. As the soft-spoken numbers
cruncher who converts Beane to the gospel
of sabermetrics, Jonah Hill proved for the
first time he’s a top-rank actor. And watch
for an endearing turn by a pre “Guardians
of the Galaxy” Chris Pratt as a journeyman
infielder.
Available to rent or buy on Amazon, Fandan-
goNow, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube.1984
‘The Natural’
A baseball movie never looked or sounded
better, thanks to Caleb Deschanel’s paint-
erly cinematography and Randy Newman’s
soaring score. The director Barry Lev-
inson’s masterful adaptation of Bernard
Malamud’s 1952 novel casts Robert Redford
in the title role as the superheroic slugger
Roy Hobbs, yet it’s the deep roster of skilled
character actors — including Robert Du-
vall, Glenn Close, Wilford Brimley and Rich-
ard Farnsworth — who set off the dramatic
fireworks.
Available to stream on Netflix, as well as
IMDb TV and Crackle, or to rent or buy on
Amazon, FandangoNow, iTunes, Vudu and
YouTube.An All-Star Roster
Is Ready to Play
Here is a winning batting
order, featuring some of the
best films involving baseball
from the last 50 years.
By BRUCE FRETTSUNIVERSAL PICTURESPARAMOUNT PICTURESAbove, Robert De Niro
as a catcher for the
fictional New York
Mammoths in “Bang
the Drum Slowly.”
Below left, Kevin
Costner in “Field of
Dreams.”Opening Day has come and gone, and
there’s no sign when Major League Base-
ball will return with new games. But fans
needn’t despair. You could watch all 18½
hours of the director Ken Burns’s definitive
1994 documentary “Baseball,” streaming
for free on the PBS website (and the four-
hour 2010 sequel, “The Tenth Inning,” on
Amazon Prime). Or you can catch a Mur-
derers’ Row of great baseball features read-
ily accessible online. Here, in alphabetical
order, are my picks for the 10 best of the last
50 years.
1976
‘The Bad News Bears’
Ignore the inferior sequels and the remake
— and the politically incorrect insults of
mini-bully Tanner Boyle (Chris Barnes):
The director Michael Ritchie’s satire of
America’s win-at-all-costs mentality is the
ultimate Little League movie. (Sorry, devo-
tees of “The Sandlot.”) The role of the
booze-guzzling coach Morris Buttermaker
fits Walter Matthau like an old mitt, and mu-
sic from Georges Bizet’s “Carmen” pro-
vides a classy counterpoint to the profane
antics of the hurler Amanda Whurlitzer
(Tatum O’Neal), the thuggish slugger Kelly
Leak (Jackie Earle Haley) and the rest of
the lovable misfits.
Available to rent or buy on Amazon, Fan-
dango Now, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube.
1973
‘Bang the Drum Slowly’
“Raging Bull” isn’t the only classic sports
movie Robert De Niro has made. In base-
ball’s answer to “Brian’s Song,” he chews to-
bacco, if not the scenery, as a terminally ill
catcher who stays on the roster thanks to
the undying friendship of an ace pitcher
(Michael Moriarty). Vincent Gardenia
makes a credibly gruff manager, and while
the fictional team is named the New York
Mammoths, sharp-eyed viewers will recog-
nize the locations as Shea Stadium and the
old Yankee Stadium at their grittiest.
Available to rent or buy on Amazon, Fan-
dango Now, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube.
1976
‘The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars
& Motor Kings’
Before they became fixtures of the “Star
Wars” universe as Lando Calrissian and the
voice of Darth Vader, Billy Dee Williams
and James Earl Jones joined forces for this
exuberant comedy about a barnstorming
squad in the days of the Negro Leagues. But
the real scene-stealer of this movie is an up-
roarious Richard Pryor as Charlie Snow, an
outfielder who tries to break the color barri-
er by posing as a Cuban named Carlos Ne-
vada, then a Native American named Chief
Takahoma.
Available to rent or buy on Amazon, iTunes,
Vudu and YouTube.
1800 by the same act of Congress that
moved the federal government to Washing-
ton, with a $5,000 budget for books ap-
proved by John Adams. The library was
originally meant for the sole use of Con-
gress, and its role was debated over succes-
sive administrations and crises, including
several catastrophic fires. By the time its
first dedicated building opened in 1897,
though, its status was settled: It was “the
book palace of the American people,” as one
librarian of Congress called it, a classifica-
tion that expanded when it began adding
films.
“Sneeze,” a.k.a. “Edison Kinetoscopic
Record of a Sneeze,” is the library’s earliest
surviving copyrighted motion picture and
was submitted in paper form. Films weren’t
protected by copyright until 1912 but photos
were, so savvy producers deposited their
films as paper contact prints (entire motion
pictures were submitted that way). There
are more than 3,000 such paper prints in the
library (they’ve been turned back into
films). Most were produced in the United
States and open fascinating, often charm-
ing windows to earlier times whether
through a Yale-Princeton football game, a
New Jersey baby parade or some nuzzling
in “Kiss,” the first film to show lips locking.
You can sample this bounty on the Li-
brary of Congress website or through its
more limited, curated selections on
YouTube, where loading times seem faster.
On each platform, the films are organized
into playlists like the National Screening
Room, a catchall that includes everything
from educational films to slapstick com-
edies. Here’s where you can watch “Mabel
and Fatty’s Wash Day” (1915), which was
co-directed by one of its stars, Mabel Nor-
mand, or dive into Pare Larentz’s “The
River” (1938), a classic about the Missis-
sippi made for the Farm Security Adminis-
tration. Here, too, is where to find Edward
O. Bland’s “The Cry of Jazz” (1959), a politi-
cal scorcher about jazz that has bad acting,
searing documentary imagery and terrific
music (from Sun Ra, among others).
The aesthetic quality of the titles varies,
but that’s to the point of the library’s demo-
cratic mandate. Not all the films on deposit
are exemplars of the art — although great-
ness abounds here — but they nevertheless
have cultural and historical value. Some are
flat-out weird and wonderful, while others
seem like souvenirs from a distant land.
That’s true of “Television,” a 1939 curio that
opens with an audience seated in the darkbefore a tiny glowing screen that abruptly
grows larger, a stark encapsulation of TV’s
challenge to moviegoing. “Television now
takes its place,” the narrator promises
(threatens!), “as a new American art and
industry.”
One of the library’s best YouTube
playlists gathers together a small selection
of titles from the National Film Registry.
The registry is part of the library, and new
titles are added to it annually with the help
of the National Film Preservation Board, an
advisory body. The library also invites the
public to nominate titles for the registry, so
if you’d like to endorse Robert Aldrich’s 1964
freakout “Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte”
you have until Sept. 15. To be eligible, a mov-
ie must be at least 10 years (so hold off on
nominating “The Last Jedi”) and be “cultur-
ally, historically or aesthetically signifi-
cant.”
Some of the registry titles online are in so-
so shape, but many look great, and the
painstakingly refurbished ones probably
look better now than when they first playedin cinemas. Most are short, which is useful if
you’re having a tough time focusing on any-
thing for very long. Mervyn LeRoy’s 10-
minute nugget “The House I Live In” (1945)
finds Frank Sinatra breaking up a gang of
peewee thugs chasing a Jewish boy. Sinatra
calls the bullies Nazis and lectures them
about being good Americans. (The writer
Albert Maltz, one of the Hollywood Ten, was
soon blacklisted in Hollywood.) The film’s
piety feels even more canned when viewed
next to “In the Street” (1948), a lyrical slice
of New York life from James Agee, Helen
Levitt and Janice Loeb.
Among the most beautiful films in the
registry playlist is the Fleischer Studios
cartoon “Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad
the Sailor” (1936), a gorgeous example of
the work produced by this onetime Disney
competitor. The story is simple — it’s the
usual smackdown with boasts, quips and a
can of spinach — but the film is a Technicol-
or marvel with liquid animation, vibrant
critters and wittily choreographed bits. It’s
also predictably antediluvian. “Bring me
the woman,” Sindbad says with a leer to a
giant purple bird, which snatches Olive Oyl
from Popeye’s ship. She gets a few good
licks in, which is delightful, and delivers
ringside advice (“Give him the twister
punch!”). But the victory belongs to the
spinach-fortified Popeye.
Clocking in at just over three minutes,
“Jam Session” (1942) is badly scratched but
is very much worth a watch and listen be-
cause it features Duke Ellington and his
band — Ben Webster and Ray Nance are
among its cool cats — playing “C Jam
Blues.” The film set looks like an unused
studio storage room, but the music is heav-
enly. The number ends, soon after Sonny
Greer’s drum solo, with Ellington ambling
over to join some female visitors. The film
was produced as a Soundie, a musical movie
that was shown jukebox-style in machines
called Panorams, which were found in bars,nightclubs and the like. Patrons could sum-
mon up Ellington for a coin and start jitter-
bugging.
Among the features on the registry
playlist are a pair of shoestring classics
from very different filmmakers. Written, di-
rected and produced by Oscar Micheaux,
“Within Our Gates” (1920) is a melodrama
about black sovereignty and white racism
that plays like a direct rebuke to D. W. Grif-
fith’s “The Birth of a Nation.” By turns
touching and gravely disturbing, “Gates” is
a passionate declaration of independence —
political, cinematic, existential — from
Micheaux, the first African-American film-
maker. Micheaux found his voice despite
Hollywood and became a legend. The same
holds true for Ida Lupino, whose taut, tense
film noir “The Hitch-Hiker” (1953) is also
available. Both movies are essential hold-
ings in America’s greatest library.An Online Film Trove From the Library of Congress
CONTINUED FROM PAGE C1
MANOHLA DARGIS CRITIC’S NOTEBOOKMost are short, useful if
you’re having a tough
time focusing on things.NATIONAL FILM REGISTRY, VIA LIBRARY OF CONGRESSFlo Clements in “Within Our
Gates,” a 1920 melodrama
about black sovereignty and
white racism. It was written,
directed and produced by Oscar
Micheaux, the first
African-American filmmaker.