Review of Eight Men Out

Introduction

It`s hard, with a British perspective to understand just how important baseball is to the American national identity. Living in a country that has a long and chequered history, and steeped in tradition, it`s always easy to find a point of commonality when it comes to unity and identity. The United States on the other hand has a far briefer history, is a nation of 50 states separated by vast distances, many of them with little in common. Indeed it has hardly been 150 years since the States were divided in a bitter civil war. With little else to unite them, it was sport that introduced the first bonds that healed the nation. No matter what the differences between peoples, the rules of baseball would be the same in California and New York. With at first telegraph and then radio, a baseball game would be a talking point that would bring together people across a continent. In a nation built on equality, honesty and justice for all, baseball exemplified the best qualities that an American could aspire to. You could then imagine the scandal if baseball should be tainted in any way. The infamous `Black Sox` scandal of 1919 shook the game to the very core.

Eight Men Out is the dramatisation of that event, when eight members of the Chicago White Sox took money to throw the World Series against Cincinnati. The game at the time was in the hands of the team owners, who could pretty much dictate terms to the players. Charles Comiskey, owner of the Sox, was reputedly the stingiest of them all, paying his players a relative pittance and engineering games so that he could avoid paying bonuses. This is despite the 1919 White Sox being the then best team in baseball. The year of the infamous World Series, he reputedly promised star pitcher Eddie Cicotte a $10000 bonus should he pitch 30 winning games. Cicotte pitched 29 and Comiskey rested him for the rest of the season. It was this behaviour that persuaded most of the players to look elsewhere for money. And when there were men willing to bet vast amounts of their ill gotten gains on dead certs, it seemed like a match made in heaven.

Video

Eight Men Out gets a bog standard 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer from MGM. There`s a bit of grain, but the image is acceptable for the most part. There is some print damage, but some scenes seem to suffer more than others. It`s a period piece, and the sets, costumes and look of the film certainly bring across the feel of the early Twentieth Century.

Audio

The sound is also your standard back catalogue fare from MGM. DD 2.0 tracks in English, French, German and Spanish with a few subtitle tracks to boot. There`s appropriate music and the dialogue is clear throughout.

Features

It`s the current crop of MGM back catalogue discs, and that means that there is absolutely nothing. A static menu screen allows you to choose soundtracks, subtitles or play the film. There`s no chapter select screen and no trailer.

Conclusion

I guess most people like me, if they have heard of the Black Sox scandal, will have done so from the movie Field Of Dreams, in which an enigmatic `Shoeless` Joe Jackson returns to a baseball diamond built in a cornfield. However Field of Dreams does this movie a disservice, having built a mystique and magic around a character that certainly didn`t exist in reality. I admit that I came to this film with certain expectations, piqued by the possibility of learning more about the enigmatic character created by Ray Liotta in the earlier film, and found that Eight Men Out was in fact a faithful retelling of the actual events, with precious few if any liberties taken with the characters. Consequently D. B Sweeney portrays `Shoeless` Joe as uneducated and unworldly, but committed to baseball, in short human. It helps if you forget the more popular Costner movie before watching this.

The story itself is an interesting one, based as it is on true events. However I couldn`t help but feel cheated by the final movie. The cast itself is excellent, with names like John Cusack, Charlie Sheen, David Strathairn and Christopher Lloyd, as well as John Mahoney of Frasier fame among the names, but the characters they play are curiously muted. It`s as if everyone is trying to be the good guy in the film, the players who are trying to cheat, the team owner who is stingy but upright, the gamblers funding the scam are good natured, even when Rothstein sends a hitman round to pressure one of the pitchers, there`s no heat or malice.

Also there`s a bucket of schmaltz thrown unnecessarily onto the film, with plenty of fresh-faced kids following their heroes` exploits faithfully, and representing the betrayal of a nation`s innocence when the time comes. Call me a cynic, but there`s only so much sugarcoated wholesomeness a reviewer can take.

From what I`ve read, Eight Men Out is a faithful retelling of the events surrounding the Black Sox scandal, but the film is unsatisfying, and perhaps one or two liberties taken with the story, or more colourful characterisation would have made the film good rather than just merely average.

One for baseball fans only, and there has to be a couple on this side of the pond.