(ABOVE IS THE COMMENT BOARD AT GATEWAY)

Full
disclosures: 1) I am not a baseball fan  2) I am not a Harrison Ford
fan  3) I am not a ‘Hollywood biography’ fan and 4) because of the
latter, I take ‘based on a true story’ with more than a grain of salt.
Okay, now that I got that out of the way let me say GO SEE “42”!

More
than a baseball story this is about love between a man and woman, two
men with tremendous courage  and how one man can make a difference. This
is a story of  Jackie Robinson (Chadwick Boseman, in a breakout role)
who became the first major league black baseball player. It is about a
man, Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford) who picked Robinson to do just that
and backed him all the way just as his wife, Rachel Robinson, (Nicole
Beharie) did.

Thanks
to the screenwriter and director, Brian Helgeland, you are taken on a
roller coaster ride of sweet moments, comedy and anger while cringing at
some of the true language many whites used against blacks and why
Robinson was the man Rickey picked because he knew the former had the
guts not to fight back. He shows, in only one scene, how it ate at him.
Besides the language Robinson was hit by baseballs, had his foot stomped
on by an opposing player and wasn’t wanted by most of the other players
on his team.

Harrison
Ford shows he is more than just a ‘pretty face’ or action star. He
disappears into the role of the Brooklyn Dodgers general manager
completely and shouldn’t be forgotten at award time. Boseman and Beharie
have great chemistry between them and the former, as the baseball
player, shows how he drove the other teams pitchers and catchers crazy
as he ‘danced’ in between bases either by stealing them or catching the
others so off guard they dropped the ball or threw it wrong. More
important Boseman shows the intelligence of the man inside the player
and what he faced.

There
is a big supporting cast without a weak link. One of the funniest
scenes in a movie in a long time, which could have gone awry, is when
pitcher Ralph Branca (Hamish Linklater) wants to know why Robinson won’t
shower with the rest of the team and it dawns on him that what he is
saying could be taken the wrong way. Christopher Meloni effective, as
Leo Durocher, is out of the film too soon. Lucas Black as shortstop Pee
Wee Reese as the first player to embrace Robinson on the field touches
you just as the language and taunts yelled at Robinson in public by the
manager Ben Chapman (Alan Tudyk) of another team will make you gasp
and/or cringe. T. R. Knight is strong as Rickey’s assistant as is Andre
Holland as Wendell Smith the first black sportswriter to be accepted in
theSportswritersAssociation. John C. McGinley is Red Barber who is a
legend, even today, as a radio announcer for the Dodgers.

“42”
takes place during 1945 to 1947. I was about 10 years old and don’t
really remember all of this though I did root for the Yankees against
the Dodgers.  This is a film that should be seen by all generations and
especially the kids of today. Whether Jackie Robinson was as completely
as ‘good’ a man as writer/director Helgeland makes him to be or the too
pretty film isn’t as gritty in appearance as it should be one must
realize that this is a ‘Hollywood biography’ but it will get you
cheering and some will even applaud as the closing credits show what
happened to most of the people pictured.

THIS IS A MUST SEE FILM!