The New Pictures, Aug. 3, 1942

The Pride of the Yankees (Goldwyn; RKO-Radio) is, as nearly everybody knows, Gary Cooper impersonating Lou Gehrig, late, great first baseman of the New York Yankees. Some 80,000,000 U.S. baseball fans knew Gehrig or his picture by sight. A year ago, when he died at 38 of a rare, incurable form of paralysis, they virtually canonized him. To biographize him so soon was a ticklish job. Pride of the Yankees does it with taste and distinction.

Baseball fans who hope to see much baseball played in Pride of the Yankees will be disappointed. Babe Ruth is there, playing himself with fidelity and considerable humor; so are Yankees Bill Dickey, Bob Meusel, Mark Koenig. But baseball is only incidental. The hero does not hit a home run and win the girl. He is just a hardworking, unassuming, highly talented professional. The picture tells the model story of his model life in the special world of professional ballplayers.

It is a typical U.S. success story (janitor’s son to national hero), and Gary Cooper plays it with likable restraint. The film is somewhat overlong, repetitive, undramatic, but the facts stick reasonably close to Gehrig’s life. The tone is entirely faithful. Gehrig had a stubborn vigor, a fine sense of sportsmanship, an honest belief in the copybook maxims. Cinemactor Cooper manages to suggest these qualities by being his shy, loping, American self. Cooper’s right-handedness faced Hollywood with an appalling problem (Gehrig was a lefty). It was solved by having Cooper bowl, punch a bag, throw pebbles, rocks, finally a baseball, lefthanded. Batting came easier; Outdoorsman Cooper always swings an ax from his left shoulder.

The best part of Pride of the Yankees is its grade-A love story. Cooper meets his future wife (Teresa Wright) at the White Sox ball park in Chicago. It is his first chance to bat for the Yankees. On his way to the plate he pratfalls on the carefully laid-out row of bats in front of the dugout. “Tanglefoot!” cries Teresa. He gets even by marrying her.

Their life together is a very human, average domestic true story, somewhat solemnized by the fact that its unhappy ending is known to almost everyone from the beginning. As Gary Cooper’s better half, Teresa Wright is also a good half of Pride of the Yankees.

Pride of the Yankees is also a very important picture for 24-year-old Muriel Teresa Wright. It is her first big role. If moviegoers like her in it, she may become cinemadom’s foremost dramatic actress. If they don’t, she can 1) try again; 2) remain what she is: one of the best young dramatic actresses Hollywood has turned up in many a talent hunt.

Teresa’s rise toward stardom has been without benefit of glamor. Neither prettier nor shapelier than thousands of other American girls, Cinemactress Wright has not got what it takes to become a blonde comet. Thus reduced to brains and ability, she has adamantly refused to trick them out with fake publicity. She also persists in her right to lead a private life. When her boss’s head publicity man revealed her engagement to Scriptwriter Niven Busch before she had informed her closest friends, Sam Goldwyn had to take her aside and tell her the facts of Hollywood life. Said he: “That private life stuff is all right for a Garbo, but you’re no Garbo. You’re an average American girl.”

She might have been just that if she had followed her Maplewood, NJ. high-school teacher’s advice to take up typing because “you can’t make money as an actress.” Teresa’s present salary is about $1,000 a week. Daughter of a widowed, peripatetic insurance salesman, she once played a rippling brook in a grade-school pageant, a few roles in high-school plays. Then, unable to type fast enough to pass her stenographer’s tests, she put in two solid summers with the Wharf Theater players in Provincetown, Mass., thence sailed right on to Broadway.

After two years in Life With Father she was spotted by Goldwyn, who now boasts: “I knew she was a great actress before the first act was over.” At any rate, he signed her to play Bette Davis’ daughter in The Little Foxes. The reward for her performance was a choice role in Mrs. Miniver. Says William Wyler, who directed both pictures: “She can do nothing wrong. . . . I’ve never had less trouble directing anyone. She has the one best asset any actor can have: she has never committed an error in acting taste.”

With a perfect batting average—three hits in three pictures and an Academy Award nomination thrown in—Teresa quietly pursues her private life on her new husband’s walnut-treed, swimming-pooled, press-agent-free acres in San Fernando Valley. If Sam Goldwyn is right, this tranquil double life will not last. Says he earnestly and grammatically, apropos her role in Pride of the Yankees: “She doesn’t need much ballyhoo. Far better the public should discover her. They will. She’s got it inside, things you can’t learn.”

New Soldiers Are Tough (Warwick Pictures; United Artists). This Canadian propaganda documentary film sums up in grim news shots some of the bitterest lessons of warfare that the United Nations have learned from fighting the Axis. It is also a preview of the ways in which the United Nations are planning to show teacher how much they have learned.

The picture drives home lesson No. 1 when tinny little Japanese amphibian tanks snort toward Singapore through the Malayan rice paddies which Allied generals had pronounced impassable. Field Marshal Rommel and his mighty Mark IVs teach lesson No. 2 by blazing away through the Libyan sandstorms. Then there are the Nazi battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, on their dash to home port, defiantly steaming through the English Channel before the British navy woke up. A brief, shocking sequence of Jap soldiers executing a pair of Chinese prisoners suggests the basic note of frightfulness as a factor in Axis tactics.

The latest turn in British tactics is shown in an exciting sequence of Commandos training. One Commando attack is shown in naming detail: the destruction of fuel dumps on Norway’s Lofoten Islands. This is the most significant fact about New Soldiers. For this picture, the latest in the Canadian Government Film Unit’s World in Action series, talks solely in terms of attack. The first of the series (Churchill’s Island), made over a year ago, spoke only of defense.