Robert Mulligan (1957)

Anthony Perkins is a baseball player who has a nervous breakdown:  it’s no surprise that he’s more convincing in a mental hospital than he is in the locker room.  Although tall and broad-shouldered, Perkins lacks the physical heft you expect but the miscasting is chiefly an issue of temperament.  You don’t have to have a clichéd idea of what a sportsman is like to find Perkins wrong for the role.  Even at this early stage of his film career (he had his first lead role here), his dynamic neuroticism suggests, from the moment he appears on screen, that psychological collapse is imminent.  The BFI programme note included a piece by Jeff Stafford from the Turner Classic Movies website.  This quotes the producer of Fear Strikes Out, Alan J Pakula, explaining his interest in the published autobiography of the baseball star Jimmy Piersall as follows:

‘… it dealt with a ballplayer, … the all-American figure, and at that time, the fifties, there was much of middle America who thought about mental breakdown and emotional illness in terms of neurasthenic, bohemian, artistic, sensitive types rather than recognising that it is something that can happen to anyone.’

Piersall’s life story (to be more precise, the story of his early life:  he was then only in his mid-twenties and he’s still alive today) was first dramatised on television the year before Fear Strikes Out was released, with Tab Hunter in the lead.  But the casting of Anthony Perkins – the quintessential ‘neurasthenic … sensitive’ type, the antithesis of a regular guy – muffles the element that appealed to Pakula.  Because Perkins isn’t a credible ballplayer, he virtually reinforces the assumptions of middle America that Pakula wanted to change.

In spite of its specific and real-life sporting context, Fear Strikes Out, with a screenplay by Ted Berkman and Raphael Blau, feels like a generic drama of its time, in which the young lead’s problems are due entirely to their parent or parents and, if the protagonist is lucky, are solved through the intervention of a wise, compassionate psychiatrist.  Jim Piersall’s father John was, in his youth, a useful baseball player.  Now a middle-aged, vaguely embittered blue-collar worker, John wants to achieve through his son what he yearned for himself.  He impels Jim towards sporting success and mental disintegration:  however successful Jim is, John withholds praise (according to the film).  It’s never clear whether the domineering John Piersall’s hands-on (to put it mildly) management of his son’s career is unusual within the world of professional baseball but the ballpark, although the film-makers don’t seem that interested in it, functions effectively as the psychodynamic arena of the story.  There’s a particular cachet attached to sporting achievement – it’s an unusually unequivocal form of success – and it’s easy to accept John Piersall as representative of a particular kind of father.  That said, the role is written very crudely and it’s as well that, in this case, the casting is right.  The father would be intolerable if he weren’t played by someone as naturally sympathetic – in both his approach to characterisation and his audience rapport – as Karl Malden.

It was also clever of Robert Mulligan and Pakula to cast Peter J Votrian as the early teenage Jim in the opening scene, featuring the boy and his parents (Perry Wilson has the underwritten role of Jim’s mother), which foreshadows the larger story.  You immediately think this boy doesn’t look like a ballplayer in the making but you can believe he’ll grow into Anthony Perkins:  this somehow gives a bit (not a lot) of reality to Perkins in his baseball kit.  Jim Piersall fulfils his ambition, and his father’s greater ambition for him, to play for the Boston Red Sox.  His breakdown occurs in the most public (and melodramatic) circumstances imaginable.  After hitting a home run, Jim keeps on running until he reaches the point in the stands where his family are watching.  He claws at the wire mesh fence, yelling, ‘Was I good enough?  Answer me, Pop, did I show ‘em?  Was I good enough for you?’  By now, Anthony Perkins has already had some impressive moments:  he’s charming and funny in his quiet courtship of the nurse who becomes his wife (Norma Moore) and alarming in the illustrations of Jim’s irrational behaviour towards other Red Sox players but it’s once he’s hospitalised that Perkins really comes into his own – and Robert Mulligan directs him very well in these sequences.

Although Fear Strikes Out is often compelling because of the gulf between the quality of the dialogue and that of the two main actors, some of what Perkins is given to say from this point onwards is better written and he creates remarkable emotional rhythms in his delivery of the lines.   In the interviews with the kindly, omniscient psychiatrist (Adam Williams), Perkins persuades you in his expression of Jim’s thoughts that these have really just occurred to the character.  Jim defends his father against what the psychiatrist is suggesting and snaps, ‘If it wasn’t for my father, I wouldn’t be where I am today!’   The line is nothing if not obvious but Perkins’s realisation of its double meaning transforms it; I especially liked the way that, as Jim storms out of the room, he petulantly knocks a pen out of the doctor’s hand.  In the big, truth-telling confrontation between father and son, Perkins mixes love and anger imaginatively.  It’s a gripping moment in more ways than one when Jim hugs John close – seeking protection at the same time that he’s telling his father what he’s done to him.   The good, well-judged score is by Elmer Bernstein.

21 November 2014