Jerome McKeever

Was John Frankenheimer born in a railroad yard? Probably not, but the director of THE TRAIN (1964) sure knows his way around a steam locomotive. Frankenheimer helmed a classic WWII film in glorious black and white, reflecting the coal and steam that dominate so many scenes. THE TRAIN is clearly the best work of Frankenheimer’s significant career. He draws out the best from an international cast (Lancaster is spellbinding) and uses deep focus and long tracking shots in an unobtrusive and always engaging manner. Most directors cannot help but romanticize the French Resistance, but Frankenheimer’s tragic view of life conveys the true cost of fighting the Nazi occupation.

During summers, day and evening, we played pick-up baseball in the sandlot behind the junior high school. Because personnel was limited, teams were composed of two outfielders, a shortstop, and a pitcher. The team batting supplied the catcher, pitcher’s mound was out, and anything hit to the right of second base was foul. On a few occasions, a girl would play. Patti was very good and always welcome. Unfortunately, she was born too late. Cubs owner Phil Wrigley founded The All American Girls Professional Baseball League in 1943. The League drew nearly a million fans in 1948, the year Patti was born, but folded in 1953. Over 600 women played in the AALPBL. For as much as I love baseball, I never knew about a professional women’s hardball league until Penny Marshall’s period piece, A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN (1992), which captures the wartime spirit of the nation and the changing roles women played because of the war. Marshall’s film is funny, intelligent, and sentimental, but not overly so—after all, there is no crying in baseball. Marshall captures a moment in time, and we can watch it every year, over and over again, and remind ourselves of how much baseball has meant to all of us.

All the great Hollywood directors of the Golden Age paid homage to Ernst Lubitsch, not the least of whom was Leo McCarey, who seamlessly wove comedy and tragedy in a way that emulated the Lubitsch Touch; however, in THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER (1940) the master Lubitsch pays tribute to the disciple, McCarey. The couple at war with each other in McCarey’s THE AWFUL TRUTH (1937), Jerry and Lucy Warriner, discover after a long period of separation preceding a divorce that they cannot live without each other. In THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER Lubitsch’s bickering couple, Klara Novak and Alfred Kralik, discover the same awful truth—life without the other is not worth living. The film is made in Lubitsch’s unique way, of course, and the result is superb, if not sublime.