Monthly Archives: July 2026

  • Field of Dreams

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Phil Alden Robinson (1989)

    The second half of what turned out to be a baseball-movie double bill:  Barry Levinson’s The Natural (1984) was about to disappear from Netflix, Phil Alden Robinson’s Field of Dreams soon to leave Amazon Prime Video (at least as a free watch for Prime subscribers).  Neither will be a great loss; I’m not sure which film is worse, but Robinson’s is undoubtedly weirder – at least as a concept.  Thirty-six-year-old Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) has recently turned his hand to corn farming in Iowa.  Walking through a cornfield one evening, Ray hears a voice telling him that, ‘If you build it, he will come’.  After hearing the voice again, he has a vision of a baseball diamond in the cornfield, and, in the middle of the diamond, a player whom Ray recognises.  He is the legendary ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta), the most famous name among the eight Chicago White Sox players involved in the ‘Black Sox’ scandal of the 1919 World Series.  Jackson and his teammates, who allegedly conspired to fix the Series by throwing games, were banned from professional baseball thereafter.  Joe Jackson died in 1951.  It’s the present day, the late 1980s, when he appears, still a young man, in Ray’s cornfield and gets into conversation with its owner.

    It doesn’t feel like the late 1980s, though, because Field of Dreams seems to be happening in a timeless zone – goldenly glowing, vaguely nostalgic though definitely Hollywood; a place where the laws of nature can be defied and dreams come true.  This impression eclipses a welter of specific dates and locations in Ray’s opening voiceover, accompanied by visual aids from the Kinsella family photograph album.  Ray’s father, John, was born in North Dakota in 1896.  John never saw a big city until, after service in France as a doughboy, he returned to America in 1918 and settled in Chicago, where he became an ardent White Sox supporter.  John himself played in minor leagues before moving to Brooklyn in 1935, marrying in 1938, becoming a father in 1952 and a widower three years later.  ‘Instead of Mother Goose’, explains Ray,

    ‘I was put to bed at night with stories of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and the great Shoeless Joe Jackson.  Dad was a Yankees fan then, so of course I rooted for Brooklyn. But in ’58 the Dodgers moved away, so we had to find other things to fight about.  We did.  And when it came time to go to college, I picked the farthest one from home I could find.’

    Ray enrolled at Berkeley as an English student but his major ‘really was the Sixties … I marched, I smoked some grass, I tried to like sitar music …’.  At Berkeley he also met his future wife, Annie (Amy Madigan).  After graduation, Ray sold insurance, then drove a cab, then worked in a pizzeria.  He and Annie married in late 1974, a few months after John Kinsella died.  Over a decade later – by which time he and his wife are parents, with a daughter, Karin (Gaby Hoffmann) – Annie has talked Ray into buying a farm in her native Iowa.

    Almost buried in this surfeit of biographical data is Ray’s admission that ‘Until I heard the voice … I’d never done a crazy thing in my whole life’.  He feels compelled to listen to the voice’s cryptic advice:  Ray takes this to mean that he should build a baseball field, floodlights and all, in the middle of his farmland – never mind the huge financial risk to his family’s livelihood – and that Shoeless Joe Jackson will come there to play baseball again.  Annie backs her husband to the hilt in this extraordinary venture, but her relatives think Ray is nuts and the townspeople arrive in force to jeer at the baseball field.  There’s an even bigger turnout for a PTA meeting at a local school, where Beulah Perkins (Lee Garlington), an outraged parent, is the rabid spokesperson for a campaign to ban from the syllabus the ‘pornographic’ works of a writer called Terence Mann.  This can’t be Karin Kinsella’s school – she’s only about six years old – but Ray and Annie turn up anyway, because Terence Mann was a campus favourite when they were students.  Annie does all the anti-censorship talking at the PTA meeting, but it’s enough, despite her profane, abusive turn of phrase, to win round everyone there except Beulah Perkins.  During the meeting, Ray says only, to himself, ‘Terence Mann … Terence Mann’.  By now, the voice in the cornfield has started a new mantra, ‘Ease his pain’.  Ray is convinced that this refers to Mann, who stopped writing novels and disappeared from public view as the Sixties became the Seventies.  Ray resolves to seek him out.

    Field of Dreams is soon puzzling beyond its mystical dimension.  Ray’s lengthy introduction doesn’t give much clue as to why he and his father didn’t get on.  Ray’s ‘we had to find other things to fight about’ comes as a surprise because up that point, he has said only that, after his mother died, ‘I suppose Dad did the best he could’, and that father and son supported different New York baseball teams.  It’s not clear why Ray feels sure the ‘he’ in the voice’s first mantra is Shoeless Joe – who appears in the cornfield before Ray turns it into a baseball field.  Once that has happened, the seven other Black Sox also arrive and play baseball together:  so why not ‘they will come’?  Ray’s certainty that it’s Terence Mann’s pain that he must ease, also seems odd:  it’s based entirely on Mann’s having once said that, as a boy, he dreamed of playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and naming a character in one of his stories John Kinsella.

    In the film’s climax, a second team of 1920s baseball all-stars arrives for a game against Shoeless Joe et al.  As usual, the Black Sox leave the field of play and disappear into elephant’s-eye-high ears of corn; Joe bids Terence Mann (James Earl Jones) to follow.  Ray is miffed not to be invited, too, but Joe now reiterates ‘If you build it, he will come’ and looks in the direction of the catcher who’s not moved from his playing position.  The latter removes his mask, and Ray realises it’s his father (Dwier Brown) as a young man:  ‘he’ was John Kinsella all along.  Unlike Ray, most viewers will already have assumed that – for no better reason than that the bad blood between son and father, though barely explained at the start, emerges as central to Ray’s rueful feelings about his life.  He eventually admits to Terence Mann that, at the age of fourteen, he stopped playing catch with his father because John’s favourite player was Shoeless Joe.  Ray, who must have been precociously pompous, told his father that he ‘could never respect a man whose hero was a criminal’[1].  (By the way, you’d never guess from Ray’s reaction to the revenant Joe that he once held this view.)  Ray tells Mann that his biggest regret is not reconciling with his father:  in other words, nothing less than that will do for the film to deliver the happy ending that’s clearly inevitable.

    Phil Alden Robinson operates a production line of amazing coincidences and time travel.  On the night before he sets off in search of Terence Mann, Ray and Annie have the same dream, that Ray and Mann are watching a baseball game together at Fenway Park, Boston.  So Boston is where Ray heads, and he quickly finds the disenchanted Mann, though persuading him to come to the ball game takes somewhat longer.  During the game, Ray hears the voice, now urging him to ‘go the distance’ and sees statistics on the Fenway Park scoreboard for someone called Archie Graham, who it transpires played in one game for the New York Giants in 1922 but never got to bat.  Next stop for Ray, with Terence Mann in the passenger seat of his car, is Chisholm, Minnesota where Archie Graham became a much-respected doctor and died in 1972; next moment, Ray is back in 1972 to meet him.  Infinitely benign Graham (Burt Lancaster) says that medicine, not baseball, was his vocation and declines Ray’s invitation to visit his cornfield-ballpark.  Driving back to Iowa, Ray and Mann pick up a young hitchhiker – name of Archie Graham, eager to play in a baseball team.  Back home, Ray gets into an argument with Annie’s brother, Mark (Timothy Busfield), who begs him to sell the farm to avoid the bank’s foreclosing on him.  During the game in Ray’s field in which Archie Graham plays alongside Shoeless Joe, there’s a scuffle between Ray and Mark.  This results in little Karin falling from the ballpark bleachers.  Her parents are frantic until young Archie Graham heads in their direction, metamorphosing into elderly Dr Graham on the way.  He examines the unconscious child and removes a piece of undigested hot dog (traditional ball game fare) from her throat, after which Karin is fine.  There’s a price to pay:  once Graham has left the field of play, he can never return to it.  But as the old man is about to disappear into the corn, Joe Jackson calls out, ‘Hey, rookie – you were good!’ and Archie Graham’s eyes sparkle with grateful tears.

    You might not mind all this so much if Field of Dreams was primarily a children’s picture, but although plenty of kids must have seen it (the film had a PG certificate), it isn’t that.  And although it seems to share a key message with the great Mary Poppins (1964) – be a child at heart, and you’ll open yourself up to magic and joy – Phil Alden Robinson’s screenplay is remarkably slapdash in making the case.  When he first hears the voice, Ray calls to Annie to ask if she heard it, and she didn’t.  (You wonder how she could have, since she’s sitting on the farmhouse porch with Karin, not even in the cornfield, and the voice isn’t very loud.)  But Annie, as a spirit of the Sixties counterculture, is a natural believer, and Karin really is a child; both soon see what Ray sees.  Yet so can anyone else when it suits the storyline.  Terence Mann may be disillusioned but, at the end of his visit with Ray to Fenway Park, Mann admits to hearing the voice and seeing Archie Graham’s stats on the scoreboard.  Annie’s materialistic family can’t see Joe and his teammates; instead, earthbound Mark just goes on and on about mortgages and bankruptcy.  Yet as Archie Graham exits the scene, Mark suddenly sees the players too and tells Ray he shouldn’t sell the farm after all.  How come?

    It is rather fitting, though, that, in this manipulative piece of hokum, the spiritually enlightened characters know as well as anyone what makes commercial sense.  During Ray’s showdown with Mark, Karin argues that people will pay to watch ball games on the field of dreams, and Terence Mann backs her up:  ‘People will come,’ he says, so that they can recover the innocence of childhood that baseball apparently symbolises.  In the film’s closing shot, night has fallen over the field, but the floodlights are on, and a long procession of car headlights is making its way towards Ray’s farm.  James Horner’s awful music, which has been twinkling in hopeful anticipation from a very early stage, can at last come to full inspirational bloom.

    Kevin Costner, who appeared in this film just a year before his astonishingly successful Dances with Wolves, was always quite a boring actor, and that’s certainly the case here.  Costner might have seemed a good choice for a man who’s ‘never done a crazy thing’ in thirty-six years; he’s badly miscast as a man receptive to the magical, or even as a man with evident humour.  (To be fair to the filmmakers, the obvious choice to deliver in both those departments, Tom Hanks, was their first choice for Ray but he turned the role down.)  Costner is effective enough in a film like Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987) – as a decent, solid protagonist complemented by entertaining turns like Robert De Niro’s Al Capone and the characters played by Sean Connery and Andy Garcia.  Something similar happens in the second half of Field of Dreams – in the first half, Amy Madigan, though likeable as spunky-sparky Annie, is required to do nearly all the heavy lifting – but only a bit similar.  James Earl Jones and Burt Lancaster take the heat off Costner through the power of screen presence rather than the quality of their characterisations.  In any case, Ray Kinsella isn’t meant to be unexcitingly dependable.  He seems to resent his father, who worked for years on the New York docks, for being just that.  John Kinsella, for his part, apparently took a dim view of his son’s zany student life, and, presumably, of his failure to hold a steady job once he got out of Berkeley.

    The source material, Canadian W P Kinsella’s 1982 novel Shoeless Joe, sounds unusual – a piece of fiction whose main character shares the novelist’s surname and with a key role in the narrative for a real, living writer:  Shoeless Joe‘s equivalent of the film’s Terence Mann is J D Salinger[2].  It’s not only the dilution of those two elements, and opting for a less distinctive title, that gives writer-director Robinson’s film of the book a relatively familiar feel.  Field of Dreams evokes a Hollywood tradition whose enduring exemplar is Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946):  supernatural, extra-temporal intervention transforms life in the present and, for the individual living that life, redeems their past.  Field of Dreams might seem bad PR for Heaven, the Christian concept of which is often disparaged as childish fantasy:  Heaven, according to Ray’s father in the concluding conversation with his son, ‘is the place where dreams come true’.  On the other hand, and despite its miracles, the film isn’t explicitly Christian, which would complicate things.  There may be an implication that ‘Except ye … become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven’, but Robinson in effect takes his text from ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’ from Disney’s Pinocchio  (1940):  ‘Anything your heart desires/Will come to you./If your heart is in your dream/No request is too extreme …’.

    Field of Dreams is designed to appeal chiefly to male sentimentality:  it’s a favourite, says Wikipedia, of former President George W Bush – ‘it made him cry because it reminded him of playing catch with his father’ (who was in the White House when the film was released).  I suppose plenty of English kids can remember kicking a ball about or cricketing with their dad, and vice versa, but it’s not a primal image of boyhood/fatherhood, the way that playing baseball together evidently is (or, at least, used to be) in American families.  The Natural opens with a father and son, a bat and ball; it closes with the son, now himself a father, carrying on the tradition with his own boychild.  That’s how Field of Dreams ends, too, never mind the father has returned to life from who knows where.  Kinsella Jr’s simple response to Kinsella Sr’s definition of Heaven is, ‘Hey Dad, you want to have a catch?’

    26 July 2026

    [1]  A glance at Wikipedia’s account of the Black Sox scandal suggests that, more than a century on, the eight players’ guilt or innocence remains a matter of some dispute.

    [2] Salinger was, as well as notoriously reclusive, notoriously litigious:  according to the Wikipedia article on the novel, he ‘contacted Kinsella’s publisher via his attorneys to express outrage over having been portrayed in Shoeless Joe and intimated he would sue should the character “J D Salinger” appear in any other medium, should Shoeless Joe be adapted …’.

  • The Natural

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Barry Levinson (1984)

    Midwestern country boy Roy Hobbs dreams of becoming the greatest baseball player of all time.  In 1923 his progress towards a Major League Baseball career is stopped in its tracks:  precocious talent Roy, just nineteen, suffers a serious gunshot wound and consequent persisting health problems.  In 1939, aged thirty-five and after showing his abilities at semi-pro level, Roy gets signed to the New York Knights, who are currently propping up the Major League.  Their coach is furious to be saddled with a middle-aged rookie and won’t give him a place on the team – until Roy seizes an opportunity in a Knights batting practice to show what he can do.  It’s the start of a chance to transform the team’s fortunes and a second chance for Roy to realise that boyhood dream.

    Although it’s based on an esteemed (1952) novel by an esteemed writer, Bernard Malamud, the screen version of The Natural is all about Hollywood mythology and iconography.  This is plain to see even in the film’s early sequences – pre-adolescent Roy (Paul Sullivan Jr) and his father Ed (Alan Fudge), a Nebraska farmer, out in the fields with bat and ball.  DP Caleb Deschanel gives the images a gilded nostalgic glow; on the soundtrack a sub-Aaron Copland anthem plays, courtesy of Randy Newman.  In the next sequence, Roy’s father keels over with a fatal heart attack and Newman’s music promptly turns to sticky elegy (you almost hear syrup dripping from the violin strings).  Hobbs Jr carries on honing his ball skills, now single-handedly.  When a nearby tree is struck by lightning, Roy fashions himself a new bat from the tree, carving ‘Wonderboy’ plus lightning-bolt logo into the wood.  The bat will be his Excalibur.

    Things aren’t so plain to see in much of what follows in The Natural, for two reasons.  In that opening section, young Iris Gaines (Rachel Hall), blonde-haired like Roy, watches him adoringly from the next-door farm.  When the action moves forward a few years and the childhood sweethearts are in their late teens, Iris is played by thirty-six-year-old Glenn Close and Roy has turned into forty-seven-year-old Robert Redford.  Their poignant farewell on the eve of Roy’s departure from Nebraska, for a try-out with the Chicago Cubs, takes place in discreet twilight.  Once Roy is on the train for Chicago, with talent scout Sam Simpson (John Finnegan), the dark-toned visuals start their shift into what will be a more persistent obscurity:  to signal the presence of sinister or malign characters who threaten to obstruct Roy’s path to greatness.

    There’ll be worse to come than two of Roy and Sam’s fellow train passengers – ‘The Whammer’ (Joe Don Baker), a swaggering, boorish batting legend of the game, and Max Mercy (Robert Duvall), a shady, venal sportswriter – but they foreshadow the evil to come.  During a train stop at a carnival, Sam wagers Mercy that Roy can strike out the Whammer in three pitches; to the astonishment of both nasty pieces of work, Roy does just that.  The feat attracts the attention of another train passenger, Harriet Bird (Barbara Hershey), who looks every inch, and soon proves to be, a femme fatale.  On arrival in Chicago, she invites greenhorn Roy to her tenebrous hotel room, though not to seduce him.  Pathologically, morbidly obsessed with athletes, Harriet shoots Roy in the stomach before committing suicide.

    The Manichaean lighting might seem problematic throughout these 1923 scenes – tricky for a cinematographer even as gifted as Caleb Deschanel to keep Robert Redford’s not-teenage face in shadow at the same time as stressing Roy Hobbs’ decency in contrast to the dark forces opposing him.  This hardly matters, though, because it’s already clear that The Natural’s cynosure is the film’s star, much more than the character he’s playing.   And it doesn’t matter at all once the narrative leaps ahead to sixteen years later, when Roy’s in his mid-thirties and Redford’s stellar good looks further reduce the age gap between them.  That is, it doesn’t matter to Barry Levinson or his leading man:  it matters a lot to the film’s dramatic quality.

    Levinson reduces the other, younger New York Knights to Roy’s satellites – so much so that, with one exception, none of them registers even visually in the story.  That exception is Bump Bailey (Michael Madsen), but not for long.  Once Roy ousts him as the Knights’ star player, Bump loses his confidence:  running desperately to make a catch, he crashes through a wall in the outfield and is killed!  Besides, Redford’s exasperating reluctance to delve into the moral weaknesses of whoever he’s playing, in combination with his natural authority on screen, dilutes what the plot and the dialogue keep suggesting is an important theme in The Natural – that Roy Hobbs, although essentially honourable, might fall prey to temptation.  Not with incorruptible Robert Redford in charge, he won’t.

    Redford was disappointed not to get the role of Benjamin Braddock in Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (1967).  How he didn’t get it is recounted by Mark Harris in his book Scenes from a Revolution: The Birth of the New Hollywood:

    ‘Nichols, who had championed the idea, surprised himself by turning [Redford] down.  “We were friends, we had done [Barefoot in the Park on stage], I was playing pool with him, and I said, ‘I’m really sad, but you can’t do it.  You can’t play a loser,’ “ says Nichols.  “He said, ‘Of course I can play a loser!’  I said, ‘You can’t!  Look at you!  How many times have you ever struck out with a woman?’  And he said, I swear to you, ‘What do you mean?’  He didn’t even understand the concept.  To him, it was like saying, ‘How many times have you been to a restaurant and not had a meal?’ “ ’

    This story rather chimes with Robert Redford’s miscasting in The Natural, not just because Mike Nichols uses a baseball term and never mind that Roy Hobbs never ‘strikes out’ with a woman either.  By this stage of his eminent career, Redford, if he wanted a role, was unlikely to be turned down by anyone.  (The Natural was his first screen appearance in four years; in the meantime, he’d directed his first feature, Ordinary People, and won an Oscar for it.)  Being too old for Roy Hobbs throughout, although it may sum up Redford’s stubbornness in being set on the role, is only part of the problem.

    As written (in Roger Towne and Phil Dusenberry’s screenplay), Roy has a degree of native wit and is willing to say what he thinks, but he’s not a conventionally brainy type.  Redford was unusual among American actors of his generation in being easily able to project intelligence; in fact, he looks naturally cerebral on screen.  (Just as he didn’t like expressing a character’s weakness – as though nervous that fans might think it was his weakness – so Redford seemed comfortable reminding the audience of his own, very considerable intelligence.)  Early in The Natural, Roy’s hesitancy in conversation is probably meant to signal his youthful lack of sophistication but Redford delivers the relevant lines so uneasily that Roy sounds simple-minded, while his face tells a different story.

    Redford’s Roy hardly interacts with anyone – neither his teammates nor the women in his life, who include, as well as Iris and Harriet, Memo Paris (Kim Basinger).  Memo, niece of the New York Knights’ coach, Pop Fisher (Wilford Brimley), is one of the few ambiguous elements of the story.  After her couple of scenes as Bump Bailey’s girl, Memo emerges as a cross between gold-digging vamp and ill-used woman.  She’s mixed up with villains determined to sink the Knights and force Pop to relinquish his part-ownership of the team – chiefly, a Mr Big known as ‘the Judge’ (Robert Prosky) and gambler-bookie Gus Sands (Darren McGavin) – but, once Memo seduces Roy, she shows some genuine feelings for him.  Whereas Bump is revealed to have been bribed by the bad guys to throw games, Roy can’t be bought:  his rectitude – or Robert Redford’s, at any rate – seems also to explain Roy’s distance from Memo, even when they’re sharing a bed.  Memo really gets through to Roy only when, on the eve of a crucial big game, she poisons his food at a party, and he ends up in hospital.

    Surgery reveals a silver bullet, lodged in Roy’s stomach since Harriet’s gun put it there sixteen-plus years ago.  You could say that two femmes fatales have conspired to destroy him but Memo’s appearance, as well as her character, shows that, unlike Harriet, she’s slightly on the side of the angels.  Even though she’s platinum blonde, Memo’s hair colour is a hint of kinship with Roy and Iris:  in the visual scheme of The Natural, fair hair signifies virtue.  On the point of leaving the Midwest homestead, Roy tells Iris he wants to marry her.  It’s not clear why he breaks off contact thereafter – except that, of course, it must be so.  Once Roy’s sporting exploits start getting media attention, Iris, now a single mother working in New York City (although she still also has the farm in Nebraska), hears about the newcomer to Major League and his trusty Wonderboy bat, and turns up at a Knights game.  She certainly stands out in the crowd:  backlit by Caleb Deschanel, Glenn Close’s blonde hair is an aureole.  Redford is haloed repeatedly over the course of the film.  Yet no sparks fly between him and Close, once Roy and Iris see each other again.

    Redford’s self-absorption makes it hard to believe Roy when he tells Iris he’d have loved to be pointed out on the street as baseball’s GOAT.  There’s a bit of mock black-and-white newsreel that shows him talking with a group of awestruck kids; his manner towards them is pleasantly encouraging yet detached.  The only youngster that Roy shows any kind of feeling for is chubby batboy Billy Savoy (George Wilkosz), who, under Roy’s guidance, makes a bat that will come in handy in the film’s climactic game.  Why did Robert Redford want to play Roy Hobbs?  Because, on screen at least, Roy is a true hero, repeatedly overcoming adversity and resisting corruption – though Redford’s presence and performance drain Roy’s sporting and moral victories of suspense.  Perhaps also to show that he really could handle a baseball bat and pitch a ball.  He seems to do both very convincingly, but this gets tedious:  whenever a game has reached a vital stage and Roy’s in the batter’s box, Levinson insists on showing Redford’s shot in admiring slow motion.

    Redford so dominates proceedings that he’s inevitably the most evident problem.  But The Natural is in other ways bewildering (far beyond a British viewer’s vain struggle to grasp baseball’s scoring system).   This is a film in which lightning strikes more than twice – add to that, the mostly transparent good or evil characters, the highly predictable plotting, the even more predictable course taken by every one of the baseball games (you see what’s coming almost shot by shot).  All these suggest broadly enjoyable, melodramatic storytelling of the kind coming out of Hollywood during the period when most of The Natural’s story is happening.  There are what feel like dozens of newspaper-headline montages as narrative bridges, as though Barry Levinson is acknowledging and embracing the movie tradition in which he’s working.  Yet the film has none of the energy or pace of those 1930s pictures.  It drags solemnly along, as if to assert depth.

    By focusing (literally) on Redford alone, Levinson deprives the audience of a sense of what it means to Roy to be in a team with, and outshining, players of a younger generation.  (The idea that, without Roy, the Knights aren’t much of a team anyway, is hardly a sufficient pretext for this.)   When Iris turns up at the ball game, there’s no payoff of Roy catching sight of her – even though she’s glowingly conspicuous in the stand.  Encountering Roy in 1939, Max Mercy, who prides himself on his memory, gets the feeling that they’ve met before, but it takes ages for Mercy to remember the carnival and what then happened in Chicago – when he does remember, we don’t see the lightbulb moment.  After their reunion, Roy starts to tell Iris what happened during the sixteen years he was incommunicado; the sequence then fades out; we’re given no idea of how Iris reacted or what she felt.  Levinson appears to think these omissions are proof that his film is more sophisticated than its antecedents, which spelt everything out.  But omissions are all they are.

    The high-powered supporting cast is thwarted throughout; at least Richard Farnsworth, in a skinny role as the Knights’ sympathetic assistant coach, manages to suggest a man who had a life before the call of ‘Action!’ so holds your attention whenever he’s on screen.  In the home straight, to mix sporting metaphors, The Natural is increasingly ridiculous.  The hospital that admits poisoned Roy is so busy that he can only get a bed on a maternity ward; the ward doctor, presumably an obstetrician, informs Roy that his stomach lining has been so progressively damaged by Harriet’s bullet that if he tries playing baseball again, he may die.  Roy gets up from his sick bed for the game that could save the Knights and win them the championship pennant.  Iris is once more in the crowd, this time with her adolescent son, blonde-haired Ted (Robert Rich III).  With Roy struggling at bat and sitting disconsolately in the dugout, Iris gets a note passed to him there.  This informs Roy of Ted’s presence and of Ted’s father’s identity – which anyone watching The Natural will already have worked out, but Roy hadn’t.  This is the inspiration he needs, although he first hits a foul shot that splits Wonderboy in half.  He tells Bobby to choose a replacement bat:  no prizes for guessing which one.

    A few tastefully modest bloodstains from his damaged gut form on Roy’s shirt but there’s no stopping him now.  He whacks a home run into the stadium lights, destroying them in a power surge that sends up a shower of sparks that morph into a celebratory fireworks display, as Roy wins the game and the pennant for the New York Knights.  The film ends where it began, in the field where Roy and his father used to play.  Now it’s Roy and Ted; Iris watches; dazzling smiles all round.  I haven’t read Bernard Malamud’s novel so haven’t much idea of how much the film changes its source material – but it’s clear from Wikipedia that the finale is very different.  In the novel, at the end of which Roy’s team loses the final game:  ‘Hobbs sits bemoaning the end of the season and possibly his career, [Max] Mercy finds out that he was paid to throw the game.  If this report is true, Roy will be expelled from the game and all of his records removed’.  The moviemakers’ flagrant departure from Malamud’s story, which no doubt helped The Natural turn a box-office profit, puts a capper on an abominable film.

    17 July 2026

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