Review of Eight Men Out (1988) by Edith N — 21 Aug 2008

I'm not getting into the debate about whether these guys deserve a shot at the Hall of Fame or not, because I neither know nor care about the details. I haven't even watched any of the Olympics; I haven't seen watched anything even having to do with the Olympics since I tried to see the drag queens in the Sydney closing ceremonies, and I don't think that counts. The only sport I watch is curling. Ergo, I know nothing of the intricacies of the subject and really don't care anyway. Heck, I don't even know if any of them were good enough to deserve to be in the Hall of Fame in the first place; I understand there's some disagreement there, too. It almost doesn't matter; the story is so fictionalized over the last, what, 89 years that I don't think anyone left alive could say how good any of them were to begin with.

What is certainly true is that the players in Comiskey's 1919 White Sox were not paid the way ball players are paid today. I'm having a little difficulty getting details about exactly how the economics worked, but Eddie Cicotte (David Strathairn) made $6000 in 1919 and was not getting the $10,000 bonus he was promised if he won thirty games in the season. (He was set up so that he couldn't.) That was, apparently, what it took for him to throw the game, and the gamblers (Christopher Lloyd and Richard Edson) who initially have the idea feel they cannot make it work without him. The others in on the fix, or who knew about it, were Oscar "Happy" Felsch (Charlie Sheen, who's in the only two baseball movies I own or care to), Arnold "Chick" Gandil (Michael Rooker), the infamous "Shoeless" Joe Jackson (D. B. Sweeney), Fred McMullin (Perry Lang), Charles "Swede" Risberg (Don Harvey), Claude "Lefty" Williams (James Read), and George "Buck" Weaver (Jon Cusack). (Apparently, ball players all had nicknames in those days.) [i]Eight Men Out[/i] is the story of those men and those games.

I don't know a great deal, as I said, about the reality of the men, but I find the creation of these men in the film to be fascinating. Eddie Cicotte was a good man. He worked very hard to win games, and he expected "Commie" Comiskey (Clifton James) to treat him fairly. Unfortunately, Comiskey turns out to have been a bastard who screwed him over on purpose. He has, as is said, daughters that he wants to put through college. On the other hand, there is Buck Weaver, the honest man. He knew, but he didn't tell--and was treated just the same as if he'd gone along with it in the first place. These are the two men the movie pays the most attention to; Shoeless Joe, the object of such fascination in our upcoming [i]Field of Dreams[/i] (it went on the hold list today), is scarcely there at all. We know that he cannot read; he is read to. We know that he is a good ball player, because Buck calls him the best. But we almost pay more attention to William "Kid" Gleason (John Mahoney), the coach.

The cast on this is amazing. Frankly, I bought it because I was on a Cusack kick at the time. (This was some five or six years ago.) However, it does have all those guys mentioned above, not to mention Kevin Tighe, known from my childhood as Roy DeSoto on [i]Emergency![/i] Actual-by-Gods Studs Terkel is in this, and even I've heard of him. (Side note--Sunday, when I was in Port Townsend, I had the option to buy a book by Ring Lardner, who is also a character in this movie--played by John Sayles, who also wrote and directed the movie.) And the cast works. Cicotte, who as I mentioned is one of the film's two moral compasses, would not work as well were he not played to tortured perfection by Strathairn. And, of course, there's a reason I'm such a Cusack fan!

I don't much like sports movies; you'll notice there are a lot that I skip over. (We will actually get to [i]Bull Durham[/i] at some point, but the library didn't have it and I'm not pushing it up on the queue.) I pretty much only watch the ones that are considered great. (Okay, and [i]Major League[/i], but you'll note I skipped the sequels--even the one with Scott Bakula.) This is a sleeper. This is not one that shows up on most people's lists. But I [i]like[/i] this movie. It's a portrait of men, not a game.