The Story of Shattering Baseball's Color Barrier

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"I don't think it matters what I believe, only what I do."

Jackie Robinson (Chadwick Boseman)

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This Sunday will be the 71st anniversary of Jackie Robinson's historic major–league debut.

Three days before the 66th anniversary, on this day in 2013, the movie "42" premiered in American theaters. It told the story of that event with Chadwick Boseman starring as Robinson and Andre Holland playing black sportswriter Wendell Smith, who played a significant role in encouraging Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford), the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, to choose Robinson to be the first black ballplayer in the majors.

Blacks had already served with distinction in World War II yet the armed forces were still segregated. Robinson broke baseball's color barrier more than a year before Harry Truman desegregated the troops.

Last week, we marked the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who is widely regarded as the father of the civil rights movement. But King was a teenager when Jackie Robinson first played in the major leagues.

When Rickey presented the idea to Robinson, the future barrier buster asked if Rickey wanted someone who didn't have the guts to fight back.

Rickey replied that he wanted someone who had the guts not to fight back.

It was a different country in the 1940s, and Rickey knew that there would be obstacles every day in every city. He knew that whoever that first black ballplayer in the majors turned out to be, he would be subjected to all kinds of abuse — almost all of it sanctioned by the laws and attitudes of the time.

That is probably difficult for many people to comprehend in the 21st century.

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But, as I say, it was a different country. And Jackie Robinson was one of those who helped change it.

The movie repeatedly made that point — as it should. To the black community, Robinson was a hero. It is fair to say he was considerably less than that in the eyes of the white community.

But he persevered.

And he inspired the many black ballplayers who followed — one of whom, Ed Charles, was depicted as a child in the movie. Charles, who died last month at the age of 84, was a member of the 1969 Amazin' New York Mets.

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As miraculous as the Mets were, they weren't as miraculous as Jackie Robinson's barrier–breaking season.

While Charles was presented as a child of perhaps 9 or 10 in the movie, he was actually a teenager in 1947.

One more thing. Ford, who was 70 when "42" premiered, was better suited for the role of Branch Rickey than he was to play Indiana Jones again (as he had five years earlier) or Han Solo again (as he did two years later). In fact, Ford was five years older than Rickey was in Robinson's historic season.

Getting a Second Chance

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Mike Nichols' "Regarding Henry," which premiered on this day 25 years ago, was about an unlikely second chance — and, in my opinion, it was Harrison Ford's finest performance.

I know, Ford is mostly known for his iconic roles as Han Solo and Indiana Jones — and, the more I think of it, Ford's performance in "Regarding Henry" may not have been his finest. Perhaps the better word would be challenging. I thought he did a remarkable job in meeting that challenge.

Ford played Henry, who was, at the start of the movie, a narcissistic lawyer (is that redundant?), too absorbed in his career to pay any attention to his wife (Annette Bening) and daughter (Mikki Allen). But then he got shot in the head when he interrupted a robbery at a convenience store, and the rest of the movie was about his struggle to regain his memory and his mobility.

And, as anyone in such a position would be expected to be, Ford's character was a changed person — not in that near–death experience kind of way in which the victim holds life to be more precious than he did before (and has been overdone on TV and in the movies) but in the sense that he was a completely different person.

(Roger Ebert wrote that Ford's former character had been a "taciturn taskmaster who treats his young daughter as if she were a balky client and his wife as a partner with whom he is friendly but not intimate. After the grievous wound to his brain, Henry recovers into an altogether more pleasant person.")

So, while Ford played a single character, it had two distinct and different personalities and tastes. In effect, they were two entirely different characters.

For example — and on a very basic level — the original Henry loved eggs for breakfast, but the post–shooting Henry didn't care for eggs at all.

On more significant levels, Henry did not recognize anyone he had known before the shooting — his wife, his daughter, his associates at the law firm, his mistress ...

You read that right. Mistress. A young woman from his office. As it turned out, Henry's wife had been having an affair with one of his colleagues. It was that kind of relationship — if you can call it a relationship.

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But things were different between them after the shooting. Henry's personality was almost childlike, dependent on and trusting of everyone. When he was told by his family that he loved eggs, he obediently ate the eggs that were given to him — even though the new Henry despised eggs. And he noticed — and appreciated — things he never noticed before, like his surroundings and the people in his life.

His discoveries about the kind of person he had been before the shooting were powerful moments. The movie was filled with powerful moments — yet after I had seen it, I felt that the movie was emotionally manipulative. Ebert appears to have agreed with me.

"There is possibly a good movie to be found somewhere within this story, but Mike Nichols has not found it," Ebert wrote. "This is a film of obvious and shallow contrivance, which aims without apology for easy emotional payoffs and tries to manipulate the audience with plot twists that belong in a sitcom."

It was telling, too, as Ebert observed, that Ford's personality and mental sophistication were conveniently childlike when they needed to be but almost as conniving as before the shooting when it suited the story.

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For example, before the shooting, it had been arranged that Henry's daughter would be going to a boarding school — a plan that the family at least attempted to carry out. The daughter was resistant, but Henry talked her into going ahead with it by telling her of a similar childhood experience he had on his first day of school and how everything worked out beautifully.

"That's sweet," his wife said after their daughter went off to join her new classmates. "I didn't know you remembered that."

"I don't," Henry replied.

It was an entertaining movie — but blatantly manipulative. Now, I don't have issues — in general — with manipulation, but it seems to me that you have to do some work to justify its use. As Ebert wrote, "Regarding Henry" went for "easy emotional payoffs." It wasn't above bending the facts (inasmuch as a fictional story can have any facts) to suit the purpose.

Taking a Roller-Coaster Ride With Indiana Jones

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Marion (Karen Allen): You're not the man I knew 10 years ago.

Indiana (Harrison Ford): It's not the years, honey. It's the mileage.

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When George Lucas co–wrote "Raiders of the Lost Ark," which premiered on this date in 1981, his intention was to re–create the movie serials of the 1930s and 1940s.

That was before my time, but my parents used to watch the movie serials when they were children, and I gathered from their reaction to the movie that Lucas succeeded in his objective.

Film critic Roger Ebert apparently agreed with them, even though he was born in 1942. Movie serials continued to be made into the early 1950s so he was probably old enough to witness the end of that era — but certainly not its heyday. Nevertheless, his homage to the serials was as entertaining as it could be. I watched it again recently, and I probably enjoyed it as much as I did the first time I saw it.

Ebert wrote nearly 20 years after its debut that the movie "plays like an anthology of the best parts from all the Saturday matinee serials ever made," but he added that "I haven't seen much discussion of the movie's other driving theme, (director Steven) Spielberg's feelings about the Nazis."

Ebert went on to observe that Spielberg gave us his adult treatment of the Holocaust in movies like "Schindler's List," but it was Spielberg's inner teenager who made "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

It was full of edge–of–your–seat adventures from Nepal to Cairo with snakes, spiders, explosions, Nazis — and Karen Allen, who played Ford's sidekick, his best of the series, in my opinion. And it had moments that one remembers years after seeing them — like the iconic scene at the beginning of the movie in which Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) outran the big ball.

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That was in the first seven minutes. After that, no one should have had any doubt about what to expect in the next hour and a half. And what followed was most of the stuff that tends to appeal to teenage boys — primarily action and pretty girls.

It was a roller–coaster ride, from one adventure to the next, each one loosely connected to the central theme of the race between the Nazis and the good guys to find the Ark of the Covenant.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about it was that it worked.

I have seen only a few original serial episodes, but that was probably enough to get a good idea what the serials were like, and my impression was that they were, in a word, preposterous.

I suppose they had to be. The plot, as it were, existed solely to get the hero into some kind of predicament so, no matter how unlikely the premise might be, the viewer would accept it — it was the price that had to be paid to see the hero hanging from a cliff by his fingernails or something like that.

(It is much like the strategy my journalism professors encouraged for prodding a reader to read one's story all the way through. Newspaper readers, we were told then, give — on average — less than half an hour to the daily newspaper, and with so many news sources available today I am sure the average is much lower now. Most newspaper readers, our professors told us, skim the headlines and read the first paragraph or two of stories with headlines that intrigue them.

(My professors told us never to reveal everything we knew about a story in the first paragraph — or the second or the third ... Instead, we should give just enough information for the reader to want to be hungry for more and continue to the next paragraph — and the next and the next. Before they knew it, the readers had read the entire story — even if that had not been their original intention. Well, that was how it was supposed to work. And sometimes I guess it did — or does.)

And, too, I suppose that the serials seem more preposterous to me in 2016 than they did to someone in 1946 because moviemaking technology is so much better now with computer–generated graphics and all that stuff that didn't exist during the serials' heyday. It can make even the most preposterous plot seem plausible.

And yet ...

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Was it so implausible to think that the Nazis would devote all those resources to locating a biblical artifact that may or may not have existed outside of the pages of the Bible?

After all, it is pretty well known that the Nazis sought supernatural support and justification for their cause — and, according to legend, any army that possessed the Ark was invincible. Could the Nazis have resisted such a concept?

It is beyond doubt that the Nazis actively sought any advantage they could get in World War II. The prophecies of Nostradamus, for example, were used as propaganda tools, and we know the Nazis were in a race with the West to develop a nuclear weapon.

Is it so far–fetched to think they might have been looking for the Ark, just as Spielberg and Lucas suggested?

I guess that is a matter of opinion. But the truth of the story was mostly irrelevant because, as Ebert noted, it was "just plain fun" — whether you were a teenage boy or not.

When Worlds Collide

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"We're all very happy that you're going to live, John Book. We didn't know what we would do with you if you'd died."

Rachel (Kelly McGillis)

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"We're inside this story," declared film critic Roger Ebert when "Witness" premiered 30 years ago today.

That was an astute observation for, indeed, the viewer was inside the story — and for the reasons Ebert outlined. But I'll get back to that in a minute.

For me, what was fascinating was to study the clash between two worlds — the modern world and the (literally) horse–and–buggy world of the Amish — in what undoubtedly struck moviegoers of the time as a fairly common event, the murder of a man.

Maybe my fascination with the collision of those two worlds stems from my upbringing. My father was a religion professor.

Anyway, the movie began with a kind of glimpse of Amish life. The residents of the community gathered for the funeral of one of their own — the husband of a character, Rachel (Kelly McGillis), who would become prominent in the story. The Amish keep mostly to themselves in real life as they did in the movie, but there were times when they had to interact with modern people ("the English," the Amish called them). Rachel and her young son temporarily left their Amish home to visit her sister, taking the train.

The murderer and the victim were of the modern world, but the witness was a young Amish boy (Lukas Haas) who was in a bathroom stall in a Philadelphia station and saw what happened as he peeped through the slot between the stall door and the stall walls.

The two worlds were on a collision course.

The investigating officer was Harrison Ford, and he had to question the boy, who told him that two men had been involved in the murder, but he could only see one, a black man, which launched an investigation into all the known black criminals in the city. Ford subjected the boy to police lineups and photo albums, but no suspects could be identified — until he spotted a picture of Danny Glover, a respected narcotics officer, in a glass case at the police station.

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Glover was the one the boy had seen cutting a man's throat in the bathroom at the station.

Ford's character remembered that Glover had been in charge of a raid of some high–priced chemicals used in the production of speed — and that the chemicals had disappeared while in police custody. The obvious conclusion was that Glover had been involved in the disappearance, maybe even the ringleader, and was selling them. The killing had been done to protect the guilty.

He shared what he knew with his superior, then was ambushed by Glover in a parking garage. Ford's character realized that, since he had only told his superior what he knew, his superior must be corrupt as well and had tipped off Glover. Ford was wounded in the parking garage shootout.

At this point, the two worlds collided in full. Ford took McGillis and Haas back to their home and passed out shortly after their arrival, causing considerable angst among the villagers. No one was trained as a doctor, and Ford needed that kind of attention.

But he was a police officer, and he knew the routine. If he was taken to the hospital with a bullet wound, there would be a police investigation, and he would be found — and if he was found, the boy would be found, too.

That was a pretty persuasive argument for the Amish folks, who decided to give him shelter — and hoped he would recover. They had no idea what they would do if he died.

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So he stayed with the Amish and tried to blend in. He wore their clothes. He worked on their farms. He helped them raise houses and barns.

(And he and McGillis were falling in love. In defiance of social codes of conduct.)

Even so, his adversaries from Philadelphia managed to find him. It wasn't easy, considering that the Amish had no phones and literally thousands of people in that vicinity had the same surname as the boy and his mother. But they found him, and that led to a final showdown.

If you haven't seen it, I don't want to spoil the ending for you. I'll just get back to Ebert's observation about being "inside this story." I had seen the movie before I read Ebert's piece, and I knew exactly what he meant when I read that. Well, I thought I did.

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At the time, I thought he was speaking of the camera angles — which really do make a viewer feel like he/she is inside the story. Then, I thought perhaps it was a reference to Maurice Jarre's Oscar–nominated score, which did a brilliant job of summarizing the two ways of life.

(I'm a fan of Jarre's work, anyway. Even if I didn't particularly care for the movie, I always liked his music.)

But Ebert went on to speak of how all the elements of the movie worked so well together that they drew the viewer into the story. And that, ultimately, was my sensation. The camera angles, the score, the performances, the Oscar–winning screenplay and film editing, they all worked together to make an excellent movie.

Young Stars Left Their Mark in 'American Graffiti'

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As I have mentioned here before, my father was a college professor when I was growing up.

He was rather young compared to others on the faculty, and I guess he always had a more informal relationship with his students than many of his colleagues did. I never really stopped to think about it. All I knew was that many of his students came to our house when I was a child.

The young men in my father's classes frequently came to help with the landscaping that my father often did around our property. Their girlfriends — well, I guess I assumed that was what they were — chatted with my mother and helped her make lemonade for the men to drink when they took breaks from their labor.

Other occasions appeared to be extensions of my father's classes. I remember times when many students came to our house, apparently for prearranged group discussions. My point is that my father had a friendly relationship with his students.

Anyway, we were kind of in a hurry in August of 1973. My family had spent about six or eight weeks in Austria that summer, and not long after our return, we had to move to Nashville where my father was going to be on sabbatical for the rest of the calendar year.

When "American Graffiti" premiered on this day 40 years ago, we probably hadn't returned to the United States yet, and, when we did, we didn't have time for movies. Fact is, I don't think we went to a single movie while we were in Nashville.

After Dad's sabbatical was over, my family returned to my hometown, and Dad resumed his teaching duties at the college where he had been employed for as long as I could remember. And not long after classes resumed following the Christmas break, I remember being in his office one afternoon, and a group of his students were there.

They were all chatting about a movie that had been in the theaters for some six months but was just getting to my hometown theater, and they were all excited about it.

(Actually, that was pretty quick for my hometown. As I have mentioned here before, it typically took movies a year or more to come to my hometown when I was a child.)

The movie was "American Graffiti," and its advertisements asked a simple question: "Where were you in '62?"

One of the students had seen the movie while she was home for Christmas, and she told the other students, "If you can remember the '60s, you'll love this movie."

And on the basis of that remark, my father decided to take my mother to see it. They were reasonably young, younger than most of my father's faculty colleagues, and I guess my father figured they could relate to the same things his students could.

But the truth was that my parents were a bit older than the characters played in the movie by Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss, Harrison Ford and Cindy Williams. My father's students were a bit younger, but they were influenced by the same things.

So they could relate to what they saw in "American Graffiti," but my parents really couldn't. They had already been shaped by other experiences by 1962, and I think that was when they realized that their lives were at a different point than my father's students.

I couldn't really relate to it, either. It was before my time. Wolfman Jack, an important albeit minor character in the movie, was a pioneer D.J. to my father's students; to me, he was an occasional host of The Midnight Special on Friday nights in the '70s.

And, while I can't speak for my father's students or anyone else, I remember the night before I started my college years, and it was nothing like what was depicted in "American Graffiti."

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Well, it was a different time.

What's really interesting for me today when I watch "American Graffiti" is to think about where all these people are now and what they've done with their lives in the last 40 years. "American Graffiti" was a big break for many of them.

Howard, of course, needed no break. He started out as Opie on The Andy Griffith Show, and he starred in another hit sitcom, Happy Days, not long after appearing in "American Graffiti." Then he moved on to directing.

Dreyfuss has had a distinguished career, which included an uncredited part in "The Graduate" several years before he was in "American Graffiti," but his best, most successful — and, in one case, Oscar–winning — roles came after he was in "American Graffiti."

(In hindsight, success may have come a bit too quickly for Dreyfuss. He was, at 29, the youngest Best Actor winner, and he struggled for awhile with drug issues.)

Ford was in several movies before he made "American Graffiti," but it seemed to open a lot of doors for him. He's made a lot of movies in his life, but he is probably best known for playing Han Solo in the first "Star Wars" trilogy, and Indiana Jones in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and the other Indiana Jones movies, all of which came along after "American Graffiti."

Williams is probably best known for starring in a TV series that was a spinoff from Happy Days — although she also appeared with Ford and Gene Hackman in "The Conversation" the next year. She had mostly forgotten TV roles in the years before "American Graffiti;" people remembered her after the movie was a hit.

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Even Suzanne Somers, who played the mysterious (and silent) girl in the white T–bird, enjoyed success that may have been due, at least in part, to her role in "American Graffiti." A few years later, she was a co–star on a smash hit TV sitcom, Three's Company.

Concluding the First Star Wars Trilogy

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It is really difficult to make a truly strong movie trilogy.

Sustaining the momentum is the problem, and that third installment really seems to be a stumbling block. I can understand that. Most of the time, it seems to me it is best to let a great movie stand unencumbered by a mediocre followup ... or two. I can think of only a few really good sequels, let alone a third edition.

But that doesn't keep people from trying to recapture lightning in a bottle anyway.

To an extent, that is what I thought when "Return of the Jedi," the third Star Wars movie, was released 30 years ago today.

As I have written here before, the original "Star Wars," which was in theaters in 1977, caught most people by surprise. It was based on a sci–fi novel that few outside the sci–fi followers demographic group knew anything about with a cast of largely unknown actors.

If memory serves me correctly, "Star Wars" started off slowly, then gathered momentum in the summer months of 1977. By the time I saw it, talk of a sequel had gained momentum, too. I don't remember exactly when it was announced that a sequel — 1980's "The Empire Strikes Back" — was being made or when it was announced that a trilogy of films eventually would be completed.

My guess would be that the trilogy plans were announced first — mainly because my memory is there was a lot of talk of a trilogy well before "Empire" made its theatrical debut. Certainly, there was talk of a third movie when I was making plans to see the second.

And, to be fair, I thought the sequel to "Star Wars" (which was subsequently renamed "A New Hope" with all of the movies in the series considered episodes of George Lucas' Star Wars franchise) was pretty good.

I suppose my attitude at the time could best be summed up in a comment I heard one moviegoer make as we left the theater — "What a wonderful movie! I can't wait to see how it ends!" Everyone who saw "The Empire Strikes Back" was prepared to be left hanging for another three years.

I didn't grow up in the age of movie serials — my parents did so I suppose they could tell you if the Star Wars trilogy of the late 1970s and early 1980s did a good job of re–creating the experience.

I can only speak of how I felt about "Return of the Jedi" in the context of the movies that preceded it.

I am no sci–fi fan. I do like some books and movies in the genre, but that is usually because the book and/or movie offers more than splashy space battles or strange intergalactic creatures.

And, at its core, the Star Wars story was always about the struggle between good and evil — within cultures, within galaxies, within individuals — more than it was about space. Space was merely the backdrop.

"Return of the Jedi" did a pretty good job of tying the loose ends from the first two movies together. In those first two flicks, for example, Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) always faced a hard choice between two suitors (Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill). When Luke (Hamill) and the audience learned that Luke and Leia were siblings, that opened a face–saving way for Luke to bow out and Leia and Han Solo (Ford) to be a couple.

I guess movie audiences always had the feeling that Leia and Han would wind up together. Han was the roguish swashbuckler type, the bad boy who always seems to get the girl — in real life as well as the movies. Luke, meanwhile, was the honorable, dependable country boy who fought his father and then redeemed him.

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(Incidentally, Fisher has confirmed that a personal trainer is helping her prepare for the seventh Star Wars film, and Ford apparently has all but acknowledged that he will participate in the movie, too, which should be interesting. I'll bet no one imagined a geriatric Leia and Han 30 years ago.)

"Return of the Jedi" was a reminder that a Lucas project, like a Steven Spielberg project, could be counted upon to give moviegoers more than a taste of the latest bells and whistles in moviemaking. It certainly delivered in that regard.

I have always thought the special effects in "Return of the Jedi" — while modest by 2013 standards — represented the state of the art at the time. In fact, I felt the special effects were the real stars of "Return of the Jedi." The scene I always think of is the heart–stopping, high–tech (and high–speed) bike chase through the trees. The actors were merely along for the ride.

But I could live with that. Lucas and Spielberg have always been like wide–eyed kids whenever technology gave them a new toy to play with. They can hardly wait to have a film project in which to try it.

The part about "Return of the Jedi" that I found objectionable was the way new creatures were introduced into the story — flimsy, transparent excuses for commercial mass–marketing of Star Wars toys. The introduction of the gremlinesque Yoda in "The Empire Strikes Back" was only the first step in an evolving strategy that included the creation of the teddy bear–like Ewoks who fought alongside the rebels in "Return of the Jedi."

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As I say, the first "Star Wars" caught everyone by surprise, and marketers had to scramble to catch up. By the end of 1977, there were Star Wars action figures and lunchboxes and that sort of thing, but I've known enough sales people in my life to know that most of them must have viewed the summer months of 1977 as a lost opportunity — one they were determined not to let slip through their fingers again.

When "The Empire Strikes Back" was still in the planning stages, I'm sure those sessions included marketers who could tell the people who would be writing the script and designing the costumes what the surveys of the day indicated would be most popular with various demographic groups.

And high on that list, I believed then (and still believe today), was what surveys indicated would appeal to children. That was an approach that was refined in "Return of the Jedi" — and greatly expanded upon 16 years later when the first episode in the prequel trilogy hit the theaters.

And yet ...

In many ways, I felt that "Return of the Jedi" may have been the most adult–oriented of all the Star Wars movies, not just the ones from 1977 to 1983. For example, it took a long, hard look at Luke Skywalker and the hatred that burned within him. Given Luke's passion for fighting the Empire and being the ultimate Jedi warrior, I guess audiences had long suspected there was a seething rage within him, and "Return of the Jedi" confirmed it.

There were some fearsome visions in that movie when Luke confronted the truth.

I'm sure they inspired some nightmares for younger viewers. "Return of the Jedi" may have inspired a successful line of toys, but it wasn't quite a kiddie movie.

There is a lingering perception that "Return of the Jedi" was the weakest of the series' original three movies, but I think that is truly a relative matter.

There was a segment of the population that could be counted on to come to the theaters no matter what anyone else said about it. By 1983, Star Wars devotees knew what to expect from a new movie in the series, and they simply would not allow themselves to miss an opportunity to watch Hamill and Ford wave light sabers or spaceships wage laser battles.

To bring non–Star Wars viewers to the theaters — which it did, earning more than $400 million at the box office — it had to have more. It needed a plausible story.

It was weak in parts, but it was entertaining enough to be a worthy finale for a successful movie trilogy.