Field Of Bad Dreams

Rating: 9/10 (20 October 2018)

I write as someone born and bred in the UK who has never seen a live game of baseball even on tv but who loves the baseball played in the thirties, forties, and fifties, who has read many books on baseball in that period including arguably the greatest title of all Roger Kahn's The Boys Of Summer which features what became known as The Jackie Robinson Dodgers both in the 1951 season, when Kahn travelled with the team as a journalist and filed reports on every game, and, in the second half of the book, interviewed the iconic players - Preacher Roe, Duke Sneider, Pee Wee Reese, Roy Campanella, George Shuba, Gil Hodges etc - some twenty years later. By then, of course, Robinson was both loved and respected and his life was light years away from that depicted here - although Kahn has covered those early years elsewhere. It's not easy for me to find shortcomings as some - presumably US citizens - have done here, because I am so grateful to have access to a great movie like this - even then I had to buy it in Paris and with French subtitles. To me it was brilliant and I enjoyed the fact that I knew so many of the real people who weren't fully introduced - Red Barber, Happy Chandler - etc. I'm glad to own it and place it alongside Eight Men Out in my dvd collection, two fine films of great events in baseball.