As a former teammate of Gehrig's, Leo Durocher should have known better than to say "Nice guys finish last." Of course, as Brooklyn Dodger manager who was talking about his rival New York Giants, he might be given some slack, but there are lots of cases of nice guys who were champions in their fields, and nobody was a nicer champion than Gehrig. In fact, the movie has little conflict for its lovable hero except that everybody knows the elephant in the room is the disease that will strike him down eventually. My only beef I have with the picture is that Cooper was just a bit old to be playing Gehrig, especially as a college kid. Beyond that, it's still the greatest sports movie ever made. Others in that genre may have had greater suspense (SEABISCUIT)or happier endings (THE NATURAL), but none pulled at the heartstrings quite like this one.Between playing SERGEANT YORK and the HIGH NOON sheriff, no actor probably ever had three greater heroic roles in his career. His supporting players were also at the tops of their games. Babe Ruth may have just played himself, but he did it most convincingly. Walter Brennan turned in his usual top notch performance. And Teresa Wright, in just her third motion picture acting job,received her third Academy Award nomination and won the Oscar for her role in MRS. MINIVER that same year, to go along with her nomination the year before in THE LITTLE FOXES. She was actually the fourth actress to be nominated twice in the same Oscar season, following Janet Gaynor, Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo, and was succeeded four decades later by Jessica Lange, Sigourney Weaver, Holly Hunter and Emma Thompson (Garbo, Weaver and Thompson all failed to take home the statuette in those years.) Although Gehrig saw many of his records broken, including the "iron man" record of 2,130 consecutive games, nobody has yet to beat Teresa's three-peat of Oscar nominations at the beginning of a film career, which is a bit of an "iron woman" mark to rival Lou Gehrig's once "unbreakable" record. Considering that she did it in only two Oscar seasons, that mark should last as long or longer as his did. Dale Roloff
Review of The Pride of the Yankees
