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Rise, fall and rise of the athlete, a crack-up laid out by Robert Mulligan as a laboratory experiment with the clinical evenness of early studio TV. From childhood a psychological case for little Jimmy Piersall, chocking back tears while Dad (Karl Malden) bazookas fastballs at him in a tenement backyard fenced in by wire. The bruised hand behind the catcher's mitt is a crucial image, by high school the jittery kid has turned into Anthony Perkins, gulping pills straight from the bottle and washing them down with a mouthful of shower water. Big league scouts come courting but the overeager father is never satisfied, "Was that good enough?" becomes the son's quivering refrain. Accepted at last by the Red Sox, he celebrates by gloomily visiting the empty stadium and imagining the roar of a crowd as a malevolent tremor. The agony of success, business as usual for "our latest misguided missile." Between Bigger Than Life and Psycho, the meltdown after the home run, the straitjacket outside the dugout. Grids, nets, bars and flood lights fill the earnest mise en scène, the shadows under the bleachers receive the lad too afraid to go home. "I don't understand the things I do." Shock therapy at the clinic, the edge of catatonia that gradually gives way to a Freudian epiphany (cf. Zinnemann's Teresa) and the diagnosis of the well-meaning ogre. "To relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set," says Walt Whitman, that's the thing about baseball. Mulligan in Bloodbrothers revises the situation in a contrasting style, Truffaut's Cahiers du Cinéma review praises it as a picture that didn't make him want to visit America. With Norma Moore, Adam Williams, Perry Wilson, and Peter J. Votrian. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |