Every baseball game is filled with Glory. And thus, Conflict. Courage. Belief. Hope. Honor. Heroes. Villains. Improbable victory. Unassailable odds. That’s why anybody who loves the game does so.

If we only realized it, this is also the case with every life lived, both yours and mine, and the stories told about each of our lives. Baseball, for those who love baseball—and even those who don’t—can become the grand stage upon which these dilemmas and struggles and triumphs play out. And in 42, these are eloquently depicted through the lives of Jackie Robinson, Rachel Robinson, and Branch Rickey. Finally, a baseball movie without irony, that is what it is.

This new movie, the “true story” of the rise of Robinson to become the first black player to break Major League Baseball’s all-white color barrier, tells a only a small portion of what has to be endured to fuel righteous changes, but it more forcefully portrays what changes must occur in oneself in order to enact them.

In the Robinsons and in Branch Rickey, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who convinces Jackie to accept his contract to play in the National League, we witness the reasons why Rickey sought for and fought for this ballplayer: the Jack Robinson in whom he saw the talent, the bravery, and the self-control who could challenge the racism inherent in professional sports, and the American cultural fandom that worshipped its heroes.

Their stories come together with precision in this movie, providing for the audience not only examples of valor, but compelling evidence of how goodness and sacrifice, fearlessness and determination, can achieve the impossible. It happened, not once upon a time, but in 1947, in Brooklyn, in the National League. Since this is primarily a movie review, not just the summary of the lives of courageous individuals, one must evaluate 42 as a cinematic text. Yes, we can be inspired by the protagonist’s noble and risky deeds, but if this doesn’t work as a movie, it’s no more than an intrusive sermon.

To work, the characterization has to be well-meshed with the keen outlay of particularized baseball elements, and thus care must be paid to the plot, the set design, the accuracy of at-bats, and so on, lest 42 truly become a mere fairy tale.

So, gratefully, I can testify that the casting and the script and the detail all conspire to bring the Robinson baseball era to life. The Robinsons, played with energy and integrity by Chadwick Boseman & Nicole Beharie, and Branch Rickey, played by the estimable, acerbic Harrison Ford, simply are superb. Ebbets Field, home of the Dodgers, and other ballpark subtleties, live again. Minor league cities are recreated with skylines, and vintage cars, and hotels. Surely someone who loved baseball, and the history of baseball, put the right package together as a labor of affection.

Those who play other ballplayers look like ballplayers; newspaper reporters have the same inane questions; the umpires are just as clueless. But, most of all, to keep the movie true to its life and times, the vicious racism of management, teammates, and fans, is on display, graphically underscored by the language and epithets that accompany racist behavior.

(Such vocabulary is scattered throughout, but is particularly intense in a ten minute sequence in the Dodgers’ opening series with the Phillies, and centered in the despicable treatment of Robinson by the Phillies’ manager. If you want to know more, there is a brilliant, in-depth biography of Jackie by Arnold Rampersad, a Bowling Green State University graduate, well worth your effort to track down and read.)

Jackie’s prime athleticism and baseball skill, Rachel’s resilience and support in face of threats to her and Jackie’s life, and Branch Rickey’s Biblically-sharpened wit, are standouts. (I have to highlight Ford’s Branch Rickey as a masterful evocation of the Scripture-quoting, Christian gentlemen Rickey was; he captures his righteous motivation and forthrightness with his ballclub in his determination to integrate the Dodgers’ roster.)

Rickey famously said, “Luck is the residue of design,” and while this is thought to be a comment about baseball strategy, and it is, Rickey didn’t really believe in luck. He believes in God. And thus he understood that in Jackie he found what every victim of oppression knows by heart, that no injustice will fix itself; no, men and women of courage and self-restraint, must rise up and use the opportunity set before them to challenge and defeat the status quo. Together Rickey and Robinson made a formidable pair. Jackie says in the movie, “God built me to last.” Indeed, He did.

1. MY TROUBLED CHILDHOOD IS MORE TRAGIC THAN YOUR TROUBLED CHILDHOOD. A compendium of self-pitying journal entries in which narcissistic, woe-is-me chroniclers bewail their present status, tracing their adult dysfunction to neglectful parents, neighborhood schools, Ritalin-plagued siblings, cursing coaches, prom-less senior years, that one broken toy—and the Cleveland Browns.

2. I’M WAY, WAY MORE MORE EVANGELICAL THAN YOU. In this 600 pp. book, megachurch pastors take turns explaining and debating what “carpe diem” means, even though it does not actually appear anywhere in Scripture and none of them took Latin in high school. It’s the initial volume in Inter-Varsity Press’ new series, “Ancient-Recent Commentaries on Foreign-sounding Epigrams That People Keep Quoting at Church.”

3. PIPER’S PIPINGS. A luxurious, full-color coffee table book consisting of photos of suit lapel pipings captured during John Piper’s sermons at Bethelem Baptist Church in downtown Minneapolis between the years 1986-1998. Each is helpfully annotated with a whimsical excerpt from one or more of his poems by one or more of his sons. A second volume is in the works.

   

4. BESIDE THE DAWN, HE CREEPS. Another entry in the Tolkien-Lewis sweepstakes of fantasy knock-offs that infuse an otherwise ordinary tale with worn supernatural elements that draw attention away from the graceless prose and feckless plot of its author. Writing under the pseudonym, Harriet Downer Steele, a well-known evangelical pastor’s wife depicts the story of a well-known evangelical pastor’s wife who despises the constant smile implanted on her face, and decides to take her revenge out on the Maine coastal town’s languid florist by turning him into a toad who can only quote Kierkegaard in Danish, thus meriting a positive Books and Culture feature article. The toad, not the author.

5. Les Liaisons dangereuses, or, THE MARRIAGE BOOK. Written by Newt Gingrich. Between marriages and the Iowa caucuses. Reminisces on what makes a marriage sacred. Short answer: not marrying Newt.

I got to see what I think were an unusual number of movies before I was ten. Many of these I saw in the theatre, sometimes during our NYC summer trips, but most of them I saw on TV, often late into the night on faraway UHF stations. Technologically, if you saw a movie you loved, there was little chance in the 1950s and early 1960s that you would ever see it again. Think about that. There were “revivals” at some metropolitan theaters, but Akron was not a candidate for them. You came to rely much upon your memory of that first viewing—and, paradoxically, it meant for greater impact, for you knew you had to deliberately hold onto it, or allow it to hold you, or you’d lose it.

This is a testimony to what indulgent parents incidentally may supply an impressionable child both directly and when left unsupervised for many hours, alone in his own world of solo Strat-o-Matic baseball and psychedelic dreams viewed in black and white. These are presented in the chronological order of when the movies were made, but I do want to give the first one pride of place as my most beloved movie of childhood.

1. The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) — March 2, 1962 is the exact date I saw this movie for the first time, which I know because Wikipedia lists it as one of the movies that NBC used in its inaugural season of Saturday Night at the Movies. It was this movie that helped enrapture me to science-fiction of the literate, thoughtful kind—and taught me how you could smuggle in Jesus into a movie without anyone suspecting. Here the invader was not a monster but a creature of peace with a great robot, maybe the greatest robot ever, Gort. He came incarnate in human form and brought the earth to a stand still in order to dramatize its predicament. Michael Rennie played “Klaatu,” a savior, like Jesus whom he was meant to symbolize, who dies and comes back to life. In the theater showings, Rennie appeared before the start of the film to give a two-minute introduction. His character’s “human” identity was as “John Carpenter,” “J.C.,” who himself, of course, was a carpenter. Did I know this then? No, but it was a powerful register to me, anchoring me to look for such a hero when I met Him.

2. Invaders From Mars (1953). This is the original, creepy, watch-your-back-because-anyone might be “one of them” movies, like Invaders of the Body Snatchers (1956) or Village of the Damned (1960) (both of which could be included in this list too). Of course, it is in black and white, and features small town folks whose lives are slowly taken over by Martians, who drill into the back of your neck once they capture you to make you their automatons. Latter day commentators on this movie always mention that this was the dark and foreboding vision of the 1950s that wasn’t really about alien invasion but about totalitarian governments, and sometimes Amerika, taking away freedoms and rights, and causing everyone to conform. To me, it was just scary movie about someone taking your mom or dad away in the middle of the night and changing them into zombie-like creatures. I didn’t like it, or the dreams I had afterward. I looked suspiciously at our neighbors for many years after this.
3. The Night of the Hunter (1955). My dad once told me that Robert Mitchum played the maddest of mad men in the 1950s, and this was at the top of the list. Mitchum is a killer fundamentalist preacher, “love” tattooed on one hand, “hate” on the other, who marries a widow (Shelley Winters) and terrorizes her two children, whom he believe knows where their father hid $10K stolen in a robbery. ($10K was a lot of money in those days.) This movie puts the noir in the film noir category. We saw this at the Lyn Theatre in south Akron, at the time, the largest indoor theatre in the area, and having the most ornate and comprehensive snack bar on the second floor. It’s always how I pictured a “Hollywood” palace type theatre. Here’s why it’s on the list—it’s the only movie my dad said I ever peed my pants in, because I was so scared. Again, what were my mom and dad thinking? Answer: they took me everywhere and never used a babysitter. Hence, Night of the Hunter.
4. Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957). This is a classic Roger Corman movie that I saw on TV on Cleveland’s own “Ghoulardi” theatre, Friday nights on WJW, channel 8, in the early 1960s. (Ghoulardi was, of course, Ernie Anderson, a famous midwestern TV personality and “voice talent,” who eventually moved to Hollywood to be the voiceover of a lot of primetime shows, including the early years of America’s Funniest Home Videos Ernie is the father of well-regarded director, Paul Thomas Anderson.) This movie is the epitome of the low-low budget monsters-created-because-of-nuclear-experimentation-gone-awry genre. Here’s its claim to fame to me: it’s the first movie I saw where I actually got to see one of the hapless movie extras gets clasped and eaten by one of the crabs, people who are only in the movie to get eaten, and from there I learned to spot them from their first appearance on the screen. No blood, since it was black and white, but it was stomach-churning to see him digested by a giant crab, and I don’t underestimate its imprint on my imagination. But, hey, they were just crabs being crabs (after exposure to radiation).
5. Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959). Truly, this is one of the most terrifying movies I have ever seen, and still is, because of the Banshees, Irish mythic creatures, who presented me for the first time (I was seven, and saw this with my mom at the Colonial Theatre) with a concrete image of death, and death’s transport from this world to the next. (C. S. Lewis had George MacDonald to thank, and i have Disney.) Their shape and the sound they made still haunt me. I think we may have rented it as a VHS tape when we lived at Stadium View apartments in Bowling Green. But never again. Sean Connery is in it, and actually sings.
6. Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). This is the craziest one on the list when I think about the circumstances in which I saw. I went with my parents and grandparents in NYC to a 23rd Street theatre in the summer of 1961, the movie shot in dramatic black and white. (This was the summer of Roger Maris breaking Babe Ruth’s one season record, and we took in a game at Yankee Stadium.) This gritty, gruesome, very “adult” treatment of the Nazi War Crimes trial, gripped me and arrested my attention for the whole 186 minutes. What other adults in the audience, who often gasped at what was depicted on the screen, must have thought of my parents and grandparents for having me with them in this graphic movie! If there had been ratings, it would have been hard-R. I did not get up once. And it both educated and elevated my understanding of evil, giving me a palpable set of images with which to reckon wide, conspiratorial evil, and provided my growing vocabulary a horrific challenge. I was transfixed by the courtroom drama and particularly the performance of Judy Garland as a concentration camp victim who was “sterilized” by the Nazis. I asked my mom afterwards what that meant. She told me she couldn’t tell me, but that it was a very bad thing they did to her, whom I only knew as Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. Why would they want to hurt Dorothy? Later, I learned what it meant, and it was a very, very bad thing.
7. The Absent Minded Professor (1961). This is the greatest comedy of my youth, the one that gave me both a sense of what college might someday be like (finding colorful characters to associate with), and what science was really for (helping athletes). This is the great and grand movie that introduced FLUBBER to the world, and the glorious golden days of Disney’s real-action comedies, as Fred MacMurray’s character invents a substance that allows him to help the basketball team beat their bitterest rival, and for Fred MacMurray to win back his best girl from the evil English teacher, who mocked the professor’s discoveries, by creating a flying car. Ever since that day, I thought of the college campus as a place where you could find true eccentrics who were secretly discovering ways to alter the universe for good; I just didn’t know they were in writing programs, not in the laboratories. (Robert Stevenson directed this light hearted movie—and just have realized in writing this that he also directed Darby O’Gill. Hmmmm.)
8. The Music Man (1962). This was an unusual movie for my mom and dad to go to, but my dad liked the music from this very famous movie, which i had learned by heart before we ever saw it, because this was a soundtrack made available because of its broadway run. It’s well known story is about a con man from Iowa, who outfits a whole town with band instruments, bringing joy and hope to an otherwise dour town. And my mom and dad both loved then journeyman actor, Robert Preston, who was legendary on Broadway for his portrayal of Professor Harold Hill and his satirical speech about “Trouble,” trouble right here in River City, sung with great aplomb in the pool hall, “Trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with P, that’s stands for Pool!” The movie cast includes the very young pre-Mayberry, Ron Howard, son of Marian the Librarian (Shirley Jones), whom Preston charms by the end of the movie. This is, as far as I remember, the first musical I had ever seen, and I loved the production, the staging, and the performances, the way dialogue and music and poetry merged and did not clash with the unfolding of the plot, which came to signify for me the possibility of someone starting out as one kind of person and then, in the course of the movie, revealing a different kind of person. The anti-hero becoming the hero, in spite of himself, the guilt-ridden grifter who rises to the challenge of redeeming himself while redeeming the people around him.
9. State Fair (1962). Pat Boone was a popular singer and actor, and one who was one of our household’s “heroes,” because he came from a Church of Christ background, the church of my childhood. By 1962, when State Fair came out with him as lead, Boone’s career as an actor was reaching the point where his brethren were wondering if he’d “gone Hollywood,” and later he wrote a book to confess that, indeed, his fame had eclipsed his faith, but that he’d come back to it, albeit by becoming a Charismatic. But, this movie, another musical, represented to me something else, something about the wide open sky of the West, the possibility of a summer of discovery and adventure (the greatest season of all to a 10 year old boy), and also the theme of “true love” (which was actually a top 40 hit for Boone in 1959) emerging in the most unlikeliest places. As a romantic ten year old of the time, it set me to dreaming of the day that my own true love would someday come. And she did, and I didn’t need Pat Boone’s help to realize it, though it taught me to wait for her, and to look long and hard until she came, rejecting impostors.
10. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) Even AFI recognizes the brilliance of Gregory Peck’s performance as Atticus Finch, citing him as the greatest movie hero of the 20th Century. I cannot remember now if I watched this on TV, or whether we saw it at the State Theatre, in Cuyahoga Falls, OH (which is where we saw Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), with grandpa, on the summer we were visiting Akron just after we’d moved from Texas to Bowling Green). But I remember thinking, even without understanding everything going on, that Atticus was indeed a good man whose courtroom speech is one of the greatest in movie history. In the post-trial recessional, Atticus is the last person to leave, save the balcony filled with African-Americans who have witnessed his heroic delivery, to no avail. They all stand to honor Atticus, silently. I have never forgotten that scene of Gregory Peck collecting his papers and walking out of the courtroom with his briefcase, a man doing his duty for another man, convicted but whose only crime was being kind to a person of another race. What a scene. In the movie’s climax, Boo Radley (Robert Duvall), a misunderstood, hulking “mentally challenged” figure in the town, proves himself also to be a hero by defending Atticus’s children against the man who wrongfully charged the African-American in the first place, played by Brock Peters. A thrilling climax to a great movie that made me want to write movies that could depict goodness and heroism without being trite and cloying.
    

It is too bad that Green Lantern had to be the 189th superhero to be made into a movie.

If not, we would likely be raving about this movie, not only for its imaginative CGI (i.e., sans 3-d), but also for its playful but uncampy, serious but open-handed treatment of what is probably the most complex mythology created for a comic book.

The Green Lantern phenomenon, i.e., the ongoing reiterations of origins of multiple Earth-bound Lanterns, and those who patrol the utter cosmic reaches of the vast universe, rival J. R. R. Tolkien’s own creative intensity and output for inventing middle-earth, its languages, creatures, landscapes. But alas, moviegoers, except those (like me) fascinated by the DC comic’s history and uniqueness, will be unlikely to discern the cogency of these kinds of comparisons.

The movie is dwarfed by the sheer number of movies gone before, and the onslaught of scripts and treatments and, therefore, derivative movies, now out there, coming soon, or already in production. Hero fatigue is at work. But how sad that the sui generis genre that Green Lantern represents goes unremarked and beyond the grasp of the majority of people who will see it. When I was growing up (late 1950s, early 60s), it was pre-Marvel (the age of the newly self-conscious and problem-driven, angst-filled superhero) and, so, the age of the singular superhero: Superman and Batman, men driven by childhood trauma (the death of Krypton, the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents), to fight evil and combat villainy all by themselves. Superman was “invulnerable” (I loved that word, and all that it meant; except for green Kryptonite, nothing could “penetrate his skin”) and he could fly, had x-ray vision, super hearing, and, what is this used for anyway?: “super breath”; Batman, lacking superhero “powers,” out-thought, out-manuevered, out-athleticized his enemies, whose own colorful idiosyncrasies (The Joker, the Riddler, the Penguin) made up for Batman’s own dark and brooding nature, as the bat signal in the sky, Batman only summoned at night, symbolized his lonely, sunless crusade. These were heroes who were Alone, Unaccompanied in their quest to rid, first, their cities, then, the cosmos, of crime, delinquency, and evil.

Along came Hal Jordan into my comic book universe: The Green Lantern. What’s a “Green Lantern”? Sit down, son, and I will tell you—it’s complicated. Green Lantern was empowered (rather than “powered”) by the ring that all Green Lanterns wore. (He was decidedly not “invulnerable.” Abin Sur, who brought the ring to earth in a crash landing proved that.) Did I say “all”? Yes, there is a Green Lantern for every sector of the universe. Except that Earth sort of came last in the designation of a hometown Green Lantern, last, no doubt, for some of the same reasons C. S. Lewis chose to call Earth in his cosmic space trilogy, the “silent planet.” In Lewis’s imaginative world, Earth’s angelic overseer, its “Green Lantern,” had been cast down as a rebel, and Earth being “quarantined” from the rest of the galaxy for his corruption. This makes the imaginative landscape for multi-world, multi-verse adventures and plots and alien life forms infinitely expandable.

Though Green Lantern’s earth-bound adventures were thrilling, it is when he went off-world that my heart soared, because I knew he would encounter the diversity of non-biped species, and the artists would be freed to draw the most amazing creatures, creatures not beyond good and evil, but subscribed to the same ethical creed as “our” Green Lantern, “let those who worship evil’s might, beware my power, Green Lantern’s light.” Wow. We were not alone in the universe, and if Superman and Batman couldn’t be in two places at once, well, there were thousands of Green Lanterns who could come to our rescue. I was comforted by the notion that the Green Lantern Corps stood behind us, and were not dependent on “earth’s greatest scientists” to save us or rid the universe of evil.

Looking back, I didn’t understand it so theologically, of course, but like Lewis’s archangels (“Oyarsas”) who governed for the deity, Maledil, the Green Lanterns were the spiritual agents of glory and majesty, ever brave, loyal, and true, and empowered by the emerald glow of their rings and lanterns–the combined, unfallen will of their Creator. Could there have been a more enterprising and ambitious set of premises for a comic book?

But I digress.

This Green Lantern, is less lofty, at least in this first episode, because of all the obstacles in front of the moviegoers already cited (and I can throw in clueless critics like Christy Lemire, who declares categorically that the Green Lantern mythology is “stupid”) and also because of all the dilemmas in front of the screenwriters and director of what to include and what to leave out (the “fanboy,” ugh, factor). It doesn’t come close to satisfying the longings of a audience member like me, who “knows too much” to enjoy the movie simply as is. But it doesn’t betray me, either: a crucial distinction.

Here’s the thing: when I think of the sheer improbability of Green Lantern coming to the big screen at all, the odds of its moving through the “green-lighting” (sorry) process, it’s a miracle that it indeed emerges as the respectable and respectful movie it is, one that tells the story of Green Lantern’s origins and Corps as best as it can to an uninitiated audience, portrays the power of the ring “in use” as skillfully as one could hope, and, therefore, begs for a deeper and even more imaginative sequel to explore and display the richness of the worldview behind it.

This I believe: If Green Lantern had preceded the Iron Man series, we’d be talking retrospectively about its wit, the jovality of Ryan Reynolds, and the ingenuity of set designers and f/x wizards who manage to bring both childlike innocence and cosmic import to the use of the ring, and, how, subsequently, Robert Downey, Jr.’s performance seems, by contrast, crass, flip, incongruently selfish, and pugnaciously snide. Here’s some advice: Ignore the critics. See Green Lantern. Hope for a second coming.

Yes, it’s true. I am reviewing a whole country even though I have only spent about 10 hours in it over two days separate days. The best thing about Brussels is that we get to leave it Sunday. The people look depressed with lots of sublimated anger. Our desk clerk was grumpy and sullen. We walked up to the check in desk and he said yes? Like we were interrupting his life. The travel site had said this hotel was a five minute walk. More like 20! And when you lugging luggage there is no turning back. it’s no Bruges!

Since we exited the Metro and turned the wrong way, we walked for about 45 before finally getting a set of directions that worked. So this is not the relaxing part of the trip. We did have a fairly nice meal of mussels just now. Tomorrow we’ll scout out the way to the Brussels South Airport, for which we will have to leave the hotel before 4:00 am and fly on Ryanair at 7:30 to Rome. There is a reason the fares are cheap! But we are going to spite Belgium and have a good time, laughing our heads off all the way! But not before we get our waffles!