If you find yourself asking, "Whatever happened to the old Saturday Evening Post?" this is the film for you

Rating: Null/10 (28 April 2001)

Robert Redford has made a career packaging integrity, and in this sappy soaper, he has really hit paydirt. The cast is adequate, given the material, and that is NO compliment. What drives this tearjerker on for 135 dentist-drilling minutes is Randy Newman's luscious score; indeed, he should have written this as a concert piece and withdrawn from the film. The rape of Bernard Malamud's short novel of the same name, based on the tragic fall of Shoeless Joe Jackson's throwing the 1919 World Series in the infamous "Black Sox" scandal, is a travesty. The novel ends with a paraphrase of the apocryphal question posed to Shoeless Joe by a teary-eyed child, "Say it ain't so, Joe." Malamud closes the novel, "When Roy looked into the boy's eyes he wanted to say it wasn't but couldn't, and he lifted his hands to his face and wept many bitter tears." Instead, we get a music and light show reminiscent of the spaceship landing scene in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," that brings tears to our own eyes and a dulling of our senses. The big question to ask: Why hasn't Darin McGavin, who plays the cynical sportswriter, been given screen credit? Was he too ashamed to have his name attached to this glossy stinker?