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COPYRIGHT 2005 Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
"If there's one thing I hate, it's the movies ... They can ruin you."
--Holden Caulfield (Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger) Time is of the essence. This is a highly skilled And beautiful mystery ... --Rolfe Humphries, "Polo Grounds"
NORTH CAROLINA WAS KEY. HOLLYWOOD SAGES WERE CONVINCED that, on the heels of the wildly successful Bull Durham (1988), which featured the Tar Heel State's best-known sports franchise, Kevin Costner would reject the invitation to head the cast in a second film about baseball. Back-to-back stories about the national pastime would typecast him, the best thinking argued. Field of Dreams (1989) would never have him as its star.
But it did. He fooled and confused all the naysayers, and soon thereafter plunged into the role of Ray Kinsella, farmer and baseball enthusiast whose daughter almost loses her life because of his monomaniacal belief in "build it and they will come."
Among those in both the movie and Shoeless Joe, the W. P. Kinsella novel (originally a short story) (1) on which it is based, is the skillful physician who saves the youngster from choking to death on a hot dog and bun. After "... loping in from right field ... his glove miraculously turns into a black [medical] bag" (247), (2) and the professional prowess of Dr. Graham, once known as Moonlight Graham, "the base-ball player of long ago" (247), literally moves the "convulsing" (246) five-year-old from death to life. His breath-giving techniques come, however, only after his most-cherished "baseball wish" (150) had been granted: he had held "a bat in a Major-League game ... [He had enjoyed] the chance to stare down a pitcher ... Make him wonder if I knew something he doesn't" (151). Thanks to Ray and his field of dreams, Archibald Wright ("Archie" or "Moonlight") Graham, played by youthful Frank Whaley, became a Major League hitter, not simply a half-inning right fielder for the New York Giants of 1905. (3)
Appearing as the ballplayer-turned-physician of "about seventy-five" (137) in his final Hollywood film was Burt Lancaster--born in Manhattan, not far from the Polo Grounds, less than eight years after Graham's name made its lone appearance in a Giants box score. That link to right field with the National League team was not the seventy-six-year-old Lancaster's first, however. In 1951, thirty-eight years and fifty-seven films earlier, he had a played a better-known Giants out-fielder, a far more famous athlete. In his fourteenth movie, at the age of thirty-six, he became Jim Thorpe--All American, among whose athletic achievements was a six-year Major League baseball career, most of it with the Giants, for whom he often played right field.
The Thorpe film, too, moves toward a closing similar to the Field of Dreams life-saving climax. Jim Thorpe's final words, "I'll help you," uttered to a horde of youngsters playing football on a sandlot field, resemble not only Dr. Graham's effective "medical work" (248) with Karin, but also the "more than fifty years he served as school physician" ("Chisholm") in Chisholm, Minnesota--a town he ventured to in 1908, after his professional baseball career had ended. Like Thorpe in the 1951 blockbuster hit, Graham moved from athletics to adolescents--to "helping young people," in the words of Charles Bickford, playing Coach "Pop" Warner, in the screen production on which Thorpe served as technical advisor.
In neither Shoeless Joe, the novel, nor the movie does Ray Kinsella make any great claims on baseball skills. In the former, however, he specifies that "in high school," he was "stationed in right field"--but not for Big League reasons. Unlike Graham and Thorpe, he "cannot judge fly balls," he confesses, and he "throws like a girl" (165).
Yet a player who could catch and throw capably as a right fielder sneaks into the film, thanks to "Shoeless" Joe Jackson's desire for games, not simply practice, on Ray's Iowa diamond. Mel Ott is recruited, the man who played over 2,100 games as the Giants' right fielder, and in twenty-two seasons, all with New York, socked 511 home runs. Subtly, quickly, Hollywood audibly inserts the player Moonlight Graham might have been,...
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