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Fear Strikes Out
In advance of Fever Pitch, diehard Boston Red Sox fan Larry Carroll glances back a half century at one of the oddest baseball movies ever made.
Tuesday, April 5, 2005
By Larry Carroll
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Paramount Home Video
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A dark slice of Red Sox Nation
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For eight decades, fans of my beloved Boston Red Sox wondered why we couldn’t take home the World Series trophy. Maybe it was because our teams were always full of big, slow sluggers. Perhaps it had something to do with the disgraceful fact that the Sox were the last team to integrate. Or maybe, just maybe, the team had been cursed by the greatest hitter to ever play the game.
Now, with the trophy firmly in hand and the afterglow keeping us warmer than we’ve been in three generation’s worth of winters, we can finally look back with a clear head at what made us losers for so long.
The Red Sox love eccentric characters. Sure, we didn’t have any championships for all those years, but we did get to watch Bill “The Spaceman” Lee throwing his eephus pitch, “Oil Can” Boyd watching cartoons before every start, Wade Boggs scarfing down chickens and Mo Vaughn insisting that the team was having private investigators shadowing him at strip clubs. We also had Jimmy Piersall, one of the game’s great characters, a guy who took himself too seriously but eventually loosened up to the point where he ran the bases backwards for his 100th homerun.
But watching the exploitatively-titled 1957 film Fear Strikes Out, a Sox fan can’t help but think that we never won the Series because we had too many characters like Jimmy Piersall; of course, it also might have had something to do with the Sox being a team that would call up a twenty-year-old outfielder who threw like a girl and put him in at shortstop for opening day.
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Paramount Home Video
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The Anthony Perkins stare
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After a well-respected career directing dramas for television, Robert Mulligan selected the film adaptation of Piersall’s autobiography as his first foray into feature films. Although the opening title card identifies Piersall as “one of America’s leading sports figures”, his notoriety came more from struggling with bipolar disorder than the .277 lifetime average or 58 home runs he had compiled by 1957, his seventh season in the bigs.
Now, nearly fifty years later, Fear Strikes Out still plays much like Piersall’s
career: it’s full of drama, it’s full of character, but its baseball skills are faulty enough to result in as many swings and misses as opportunities driven home. This despite the fact that as recently as 2003, Piersall stated, ‘The movie has been playing so many years, it keeps me alive. I do all the card shows, the speaking engagements…I have to say that going nuts was very good to me.’
Director Mulligan, building a solid foundation of unease with the help of Elmer Bernstein’s score and Haskell Boggs’ rich black-and-white cinematography, found his Piersall in a young ‘teen idol’ actor-singer named Anthony Perkins. Perkins, longing to be taken seriously, dove into the role of the troubled baseball player headfirst. ‘Tony lived his role,’ Mulligan would later say, ‘and his tortures were real.’
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Paramount Films
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Original poster art
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Of course, Perkins was fortunate enough to have much of the groundwork laid
on his behalf by veteran child actor Peter Votrian as the agonizing young Jimmy. Votrian (who, oddly enough, never appeared in another movie after 1957) stares up at his father, masterfully portrayed by Karl Malden, with an innocence that appreciates his attention while fearing his wrath. As Malden orders the boy to practice his sliding, work on his hitting or catch the hardest throw an adult man can muster, he becomes the manifestation of what every father who has watched his child at a little league game hopes to
avoid. Similarly, the image of little Jimmy running behind the shed to nurse his wounded glove hand has become the breaking point that makes us wince at the stories of the militant fathers of everyone from Tiger Woods to Eli Manning.
When Mulligan cuts to a teenaged Piersall chasing down a ball in right field, several observations come immediately to mind: the striking figure that the broad-shouldered Perkins struck; the intense psychosis that carries over from the eyes of the young Piersall; and the limp, three-quarter armed throw that looks like it could barely reach a cut-off man. Indeed, Kevin Costner made it a point to joke about Perkins’ arm as he promoted his various baseball movies; fan polls have pegged the actor’s baseball weaknesses as second only to Gary Cooper; and Peirsall himself said that Perkins ‘threw a baseball like a girl and pranced around the outfield like a ballerina.’
Mulligan does his best to get around Perkins’ lack of baseball credibility, cutting away as the actor’s arm is about to swing forward in his motion, throwing him off-camera tosses rather than making him catch fly balls, even laughably avoiding any shots of him fielding a groundball during the shortstop experiment. Some may say that the movie is a story of humanity, not baseball, but the game is a backdrop just as surely as Annie Hall is set in New York or Ocean’s Eleven is set in Las Vegas.
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Steve Granitz/Wireimage.com
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Karl Malden, circa 2004
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A director needs to tend to his background with as much attention as his script, or the distractions can take an audience right out of the spell. Why then, did Mulligan cast Perkins? Just watch the film. If ever there were a performance that could make up for miscasting, this would be it. Perkins, stretching muscles that likely opened the eyes of the master director who would make him famous with Psycho three years later, snarls and stares and stumbles his way into putting the audience in a state of panic. This
baby-faced boy playing a child’s game has some demented thoughts going on behind those eyes, and no one could portray the difficulties of living up to the expectations of your father (or later, mother) than Perkins.
Author Laura Kay Palmer, in her book Osgood and Anthony Perkins, wrote that others may have played baseball more believably, but ‘No one else could
freak out in Fenway Park like Anthony Perkins.’ When the defining moment of the film comes to pass, Perkins burns himself into your memory. Staring into nothingness, manager Joe Cronin (Bart Burns) reminds him it’s his turn at bat; with mad eyes, he takes turns staring emptily at the pitcher and glancing over at his father in the box seats.
Lining what appears to be an infield fly into some unseen part of the ballpark, Perkins makes a mad dash around the bases as if his Dad were running behind him. ‘All the way!’ he starts shouting as he crosses second base, eying an inside-the-parker. When
he crosses home plate, he keeps running, right up the protective screen separating him from the crowd and, screaming ‘Was that good enough Pop?’ before descending into madness.
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Steve Grayson/Wireimage.com
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Current poster boy Damon
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Mulligan uses the protective screen to employ the symbolism of a cage, shooting Piersall’s breakdown from the outside looking in. Jimmy is trapped at this point, unable to escape the spectacle that he has finally created while trying to put on the impossible circus show his father wants to see.
Notice that the symbol is foreshadowed earlier, when Karl Malden delivers the telegram that scouts are coming to see Jimmy through a fence, his son standing on the inside once again looking out. After John Piersall’s heart attack, Mulligan shoots Jimmy collapsing on his bed, seen through the prison bars of his bed frame. Mulligan completes the image at the end of the film, when Jimmy greets his father while playing with a handball inside a fence-in courtyard. This time there’s a door, through which the two Piersall men meet halfway, before engaging in a game of catch.
Fear Strikes Out is at its best when exploring the nightmarish way that
mental illness takes over a family. Piersall, entering an asylum, doesn’t speak for weeks and as a result is volunteered for electro-shock therapy. His wife Mary (the competent if unremarkable Norma Moore) is left stranded, raising an infant child while trying to keep Jimmy’s father from losing his mind as well. The pipe-smoking Doctor Brown explains the disease of mental illness to us in broad strokes (much as Simon Oakland did in Psycho), and then Malden and Perkins bring out the best in each other in a scene that sums up the relationship that every father and son has at their root.
Sneaking in to his boy’s room, John Piersall’s eyes meet with his and the two stare at each other as if they’re apparitions. Heavily employing the shadows from the desk lamps in the simple room, Mulligan keeps his camera still while the two stars confront each other. In profile, Malden approaches as Perkins backpedals; each reaching out a hand, you realize how close a hug can be to a stranglehold.
Going to a two-shot, we watch as Perkins’ eyes give us a masterful lesson like something out of the Actor’s Studio – confused, then bitter, then furious with rage as he weighs his father’s conflicting words with those of the psychiatrist. Attempting to bring forth that competitive drive that drove his son mad, John tells him about the sports writers who’ve written that Jimmy Piersall will never play again – ‘We’re not through,’ Malden barks, ‘We’re not washed up!’
| Choking on the words, Perkins spits out his next lines as if they were a vile ball of phlegm he can’t wait to dispose of. ‘All my life, I’ve been splitting my gut to please you and I never could,’ he fumes. ‘No matter what I do, it’s not enough. Dad, you’re killing me.’
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Naturally, John denies it – he’s doing what he thinks is in his son’s best interests. There you have it: a father trying to live his son’s life, and a son apologizing for not being enough to please him. Sure, Perkins can’t throw a ball – but this is a movie
that strives for universal truths far beyond the foul lines.
A stereotypical Hollywood ending of that period wraps things up neatly as
Piersall puts on his uniform and heads onto the field to get his life back on track. Before that happens, however, Mulligan and Perkins have one last card to play: the smile. After ninety-nine minutes of grimacing, shouting and steaming, Jimmy Piersall kisses his wife, tells her he loves her, tells her he wants to play the game, and then allows himself one full-toothed, wide-mouthed smile into Mulligan’s camera.
| Everything’s going to be all right, it tells us; this boy is gong to fight through this thing. For a man who will forever be remembered as Norman Bates, it is the cap on a
performance of amazing range that demanded much of it be unspoken.
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As for Robert Mulligan, his career blossomed after Fear Strikes Out, yielding such gems as To Kill a Mockingbird, Love With the Proper Stranger
and Up the Down Staircase. Fear Strikes Out may not have been his greatest movie, but it was indicative of what was to come and resulted in Perkins and
Malden giving him two of the best performances he ever caught on film.
Mulligan may not have been a baseball loyalist, but he understood the importance of the game in the relationship of father and son, and how like any good thing it can ruin people’s lives if abused. As for my beloved Red Sox, well, we continue to embrace characters to this day.
| Let the Yankees ride the team bus in their Versace suits, neatly shaven and carrying briefcases. We’ve got midgets in the clubhouse; we’ve got Kevin Millar handing out shots of Jack Daniels before the World Series. And thanks to Fear Strikes Out, we’ve got the enduring legacy of Jimmy Piersall, a baseball legend who otherwise
would have been forgotten decades ago.
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His eccentricities made the team more endearing, and there’s no doubt he would have fit right in with the current World Champion team. Maybe Piersall would have grabbed a bat and started swinging at Terry Francona, but can anybody really say with certainty that Manny Ramirez or Johnny Damon is any saner? Watching a madman running around Fenway Park in a Red Sox uniform, it just makes you appreciate all the more that the characters finally won.
Somewhere, Jimmy Piersall is smiling, and hopefully Anthony Perkins is as well.
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