Found this movie tucked away on one of those public-access TV channels, as I believe the copyright ran out years ago and a very curious film it is too. Made as I understand while Robinson was still actively playing baseball, it covers a very recent time-span of his emergence into big-league baseball where he broke the "colour bar" in becoming the first black player to play for a major team, the Brooklyn Dodgers. Here, he plays himself although almost everyone else in the cast is played by an actor. If nothing else, it was certainly quite a brave film to make, I'd imagine, as the bigger civil-rights breakthroughs of the 50's hadn't yet been accomplished and wouldn't for some time, by the likes of Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King of course.
Chosen by Dodgers manager Branch Rickey, Robinson has to endure loathsome racial discrimination from fans, opponents and even fellow team-mates and I would imagine in real life, he suffered far worse than the watered down treatment we see depicted here.
It's certainly a well-meaning film and gets its point across but it's a shame the action is so static, the acting so wooden and the writing so clichéd. The best I can say about Robinson himself is that he reads his lines probably better than he says them. His faux-naive approach does however throw into relief his nobility in passively dealing with the threats and taunts in such a self-controlled and dignified manner. The actual baseball scenes are quite boringly staged too, one wonders that actual game-footage couldn't have been used instead, at least for realism's sake.
I'm no aficionado of baseball, being from across the water but was aware of Robinson's history-making breakthrough in US society as well as sport. This film, for all its faults has its heart in the right place, and is watchable more as a historical document than as bona-fide cinema entertainment.
Chosen by Dodgers manager Branch Rickey, Robinson has to endure loathsome racial discrimination from fans, opponents and even fellow team-mates and I would imagine in real life, he suffered far worse than the watered down treatment we see depicted here.
It's certainly a well-meaning film and gets its point across but it's a shame the action is so static, the acting so wooden and the writing so clichéd. The best I can say about Robinson himself is that he reads his lines probably better than he says them. His faux-naive approach does however throw into relief his nobility in passively dealing with the threats and taunts in such a self-controlled and dignified manner. The actual baseball scenes are quite boringly staged too, one wonders that actual game-footage couldn't have been used instead, at least for realism's sake.
I'm no aficionado of baseball, being from across the water but was aware of Robinson's history-making breakthrough in US society as well as sport. This film, for all its faults has its heart in the right place, and is watchable more as a historical document than as bona-fide cinema entertainment.