Big Leaguer
With Edward G. Robinson, Vera-Ellen, Jeff Richards.
US, 1953, 35mm, black & white, 70 min.
Aldrich’s enterprising years as a television director on the East Coast ultimately paved the way for an offer to direct MGM programmer Big Leaguer at the Florida training camp of the New York Giants, an MLB organization that decamped to San Francisco four years after the film’s release. A humbly scaled paean to America’s pastime, Aldrich’s feature debut sketches a small community of professional prospects and the scouts who seek to groom them for $150/week contracts. Edward G. Robinson expertly balances sunny nonchalance and drill sergeant rigor as the sage ex-pro running the operation, and Vera-Ellen costars as his niece, a fresh-faced beauty for the ripe athletes to swoon and spar over. Hardly the lean-and-mean dagger of Aldrich’s more iconic sports film, The Longest Yard, Big Leaguer is instead an uncharacteristically generous entry in the director’s filmography, marked less by any righteous indignation at systemic failings than by a contagious fondness for the game borne out in such telling details as a Carl Hubbell cameo.
