Search - The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg on DVD

A solid homage to a trailblazing ballplayer

Robert Moore | Chicago, IL USA | 07/25/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This film doesn't back even a quarter inch from being a documentary of a great Jewish ballplayer. The opening theme song is "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" in Yiddish. It sets the tone for the whole film in perfect fashion.

One of my professors in grad school explained to me how he changed his name as a grad student in the 1930s in order to "pass" as what we would now call WASP in order to escape the "Jew quotas" placed against the hiring of too many Jewish professors. Today we forget just how anti-Semitic much of the United States was before World War II and beyond. As this documentary points out, this was especially true in Detroit, where America's premiere industrial anti-Semite, Henry Ford, held sway. The film mentions but does not expand upon Ford's anti-Semitic activity, which included paying for the printing and distribution of the wretched forgery "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," one of the most racist rags ever penned. This provides the social and historical background for this marvelous documentary history of the great Hank Greenberg, the first professional baseball star to openly embrace his ethnic background. He thus served as the Jackie Robinson of the Jews in the thirties. But there was a slight difference. Though African-Americans were discriminated against and subjugated to terrible racial injustice, there was a sense in which they were undeniably American. Jews, however, at the time enjoyed an almost outsider status, not really Americans, more in the nature of displaced Europeans. Greenberg, however, was not just a Jewish sports star, but a star in the great American game of baseball. His Jewish identity is central to the film, from the recounting of his earlier years to the shocking film footage of Nazi rallies in New York in the late 1930s to Greenberg's being drafted (and reenlisted) for military service in World War II. And as commentator Alan Dershowitz points out, he was the anti-thesis of what Hitler said it was possible for a Jew to be. He was the living proof of the lies of Hitler.

One of the many jokes in AIRPLANE! is when someone asks for some light reading, and is given a slender pamphlet entitled GREAT JEWISH SPORTS STARS. Greenberg is one of the great athletes to give the lie to such a conception. He would reign as the great Jewish baseball player until the emergence of Sandy Koufax twenty years later. What is striking about both players is that they were both handsome, eloquent, and great gentlemen. Both men were great heroes to Jews across America, but interestingly neither was especially religious.

As a baseball fan, I really enjoyed a lot of the baseball lore that comes through in the film. For instance, I knew that Greenberg and Gehringer were a great twosome in the infield, but I was unaware that one season the infield knocked in more runs than any infield in baseball history. Or that a new and controversial glove that the poor fielding Greenberg debuted one season would be finally approved by the league and eventually lead to the modern first baseman's glove. Or that Greenberg was the first $100,000 player. Most of all, perhaps, is all the great game footage. Most baseball fans know Greenberg by sight in a photo, but few of us would recognize him from the way he swings his bat. But now perhaps I would. There is also the fantastic segment in which Greenberg in film from the 1980s explains how the Tigers were able in late 1940 to steal the signs of the other team by placing a minor league coach in the stands with binoculars, and signaling by which hand he held them what pitch was coming.

Although in many ways Greenberg enjoyed a relatively short career, shortened by injuries and by military service in what would be the peak years for most power hitters (the peak for most home run hitters comes between the ages of 30 and 35, the very years Greenberg was in the military), he enjoyed by any standard a remarkable career. Because of the war years he lost any chance at 500 career homers, but he led the Tigers to several remarkable seasons, with four pennant winners and two world championships, all to go with his two MVP awards.

A bit of trivia partially revealed in the film. In the 1935 World Series umpire George Moriarty stopped the game to order the Cubs to stop making anti-Semitic remarks directed at Greenberg. The film then briefly interviews actor Michael Moriarty, the umpire's grandson, who himself starred in one of the great baseball films ever made, BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY, starring Moriarty and a very, very young Robert DeNiro."