John Ford's Rookie of the Year

This week the estimable Turner Classic Movies showed Ford's Rookie of the Year, made for TV for the Screen Director's Playhouse in 1955.  It was made after The Searchers (but before it was released) and was also written by Frank Nugent and included some of the cast from The Searchers:  John Wayne, Ward Bond, Vera Miles, Patrick Wayne, Robert Lyden.  Ford was known to say that he liked animals, baseball and people, in that order, and Rookie of the Year is his only film about baseball.  Undoubtedly Ford knew that baseball, because of its immediacy, was not a great subject for movies and this film, very much like the later The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) is more about history and emotions than about baseball.  It includes scenes of children playing baseball, just as Lloyd Bacon and Frank Tashlin's Kill the Umpire (1950), another favorite baseball-themed movie of mine, does, to capture the pure beauty of the game, and there is even a tracking-shot to a close-up of Wayne, very similar to a shot in The Searchers, to capture the intensity of his emotions as he searches for a member of the Black Sox (based on Shoeless Joe Jackson), who he feels almost ruined the game. 

In this half-hour film Ford does not go into a discussion of the Chicago White Sox of 1919 but some would argue that the game has not been the same since:  that in order for people to stay interested in the game, and to bring in new spectators, they made the ball livelier and promoted the home run, thus eventually leading to steroids and the depressing emphasis on home runs that we continue to see in today's game.  In any case, Ford captures the joy of the game and the complexity of its history in this short, beautifully directed film.