TDA Bullpen - Our Writers' Blog

Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Another Talent of the Golden Age Passes

Today brings news of the untimely death of Anne Bancroft, the oscar-, tony-, and emmy-award winning actress who is, of course, best known for her role as Marian Foley in the 1953 film "The Kid from Left Field". In one of her earliest film roles, Bancroft played the secretary for the owner of the "Bisons" baseball club, a St. Louis Browns-like club that stinks and plays before a mostly empty park (LA's Wrigley Field, later to be made more familiar to fans of "Home Run Derby".) Despite it being described in various sources as a comedy, the movie is more of a drama in the vein of the Wallace Beery-Jackie Cooper 1930s movies, featuring a single-parent loser father trying to redeem himself in the eyes of his pre-adolescent, still-wants-to-believe son. The father in this case is played by Dan Dailey in the role of Cooper, a washed up big league player who can find no better job that to sell peanuts at the ballpark. He is an incredibly bitter and acerbic man, and he lets everybody know he could run the club a lot better than the incumbent manager; nobody listens. Cooper's kid, Christy, is played by Billy Chapin (the kid in the magnificently gothic and expressionistic "Night of the Hunter") with wide-eted awe in the Jackie Cooper vein. The kid knows ball from hanging out at the park and of course mostly from his old man. Ray Collins (the villainous Boss Gettys in Citizen Kane) plays team owner Fred F. Whacker, a publicity stunt-loving huckster modeled more or less on Bill Veeck. (Veeck had just been forced out of ownership of the Browns by the other owners on the heels of such stunts as batting Little Person Eddie Gaedel in 1951 and giving flashcards to the home crowd to let them manage' a game by vote.)

Bancroft's business-like persona masks a sentimentality, and she is convinced Christy knows the game as well as any grown-up, and introduces him to Whacker. To make a tried and true plot line shorter than usual, the kid becomes the team's manager -- but is fronting for his bitter peanut-hawking dad. Romantic complications ensue as a sideplot.

For all the Horatio Alger storylines inherent in this plot, the movie reads -- and is photograped -- a lot starker than one might think. Bancroft's gift for playing the sophisticated ice queen, on the verge of melting, is clearly evident already in her early 20s.

Despite the modest success of the movie, Bancroft never again made a baseball movie. Go figure. She was later featured in somewhat more obscure movies, "The Graduate", "The Miracle Worker", and "The Turning Point", but I reget to report they were not about a prospect in the Cape league, Dr. James Andrews, or a mid-season 9th-inning comeback as the titles might suggest.

posted by The Crank 1:03 PM