FLASHING SPIKES (1962) DVD

An old ballplayer, thrown out of baseball due to a bribery scandal, becomes friends with a young phenom. The younger player is at first tainted by his association with the oldtimer, but eventually the truth about the scandal is revealed.

James Stewart ... Slim Conway

Jack Warden ... Commissioner
Patrick Wayne ... Bill Riley

Tige Andrews ... Gaby Lasalle
Carleton Young ... Rex Short
Willis Bouchey ... Mayor
Don Drysdale ... Gomer
Stephanie Hill ... Mary Riley
Charles Seel ... Judge
Bing Russell ... Hogan
Harry Carey Jr. ... Player in dugout
Vin Scully ... Announcer

also John Wayne and Fred Astaire as narrator.

This is such a great piece of television history that has all but been forgotten. It is the only thing that John Ford ever directed for television! It is 50 minutes of fun starring Jimmy Stewart, Tige Andrews, Jack Warden and a whole list of others including a cameo by John Wayne. Fred Astaire was in it too and narrated it. Baseball legends Don Drysdale, Vin Scully and Harry Carry Jr. were also in it.

It is a fun tangential story about the famous incident in baseball history that "almost destroyed the game of baseball." One of the players who was accused of throwing a world series (Jimmy Stewart, playing Slim Conway) is banned from all baseball stadiums in America! He still loves baseball and played on a team called the wanderers who went around playing other minor league teams. He meets and befriends Bill Riley (Patrick Wayne). He likes his potential and tells the famous Gabby La Salle (Tige Andrews) to give him a chance in spring training.

Gabby is the flamboyant, once player, now manager who is characterized after a famous Giants manager. The season is interrupted by the war, and gets back on track after. Find out what really happened with one of baseball's biggest controversies as this tangential story enfolds. A great, great show.

The first of Flashing Spikes' pleasures is the exquisite deployment of the Ford stock company in cameo roles, creating a taxonomic gallery of baseball culture grotesques: a haemorrhoidal Edgar Buchanan swatting at pests, Harry Carey Jr. in a dugout, Tige Andrews as the baseball manger in need of anger and syntax management, Carleton Young perching on John Carradine's usual niche of public sanctimony and cant, “Michael Morrison” as the sergeant-major of a Korean baseball diamond, and even (possibly) Ford himself, lurking in the mock lynch-mob of grumpy old ball-game buffs. By this time Ford had such control over the grammar of Fordian performance that their presence was all that was required. The Cast of Characters title-card itself now had a poetics.

Flashing Spikes' second great pleasure is formal, showing that Ford could also have an old master's control over the “parametric variations” of film style. Most of its structure, situation, setting and set-ups are of the late and supposedly tired Ford: interior sets, wide shots, dialogue business. These communal rooms could be places for preaching and in the end, as the weaker of the late Fords did (Cheyenne Autumn, Donovan's Reef [1963]) Flashing Spikes falls away into the “preachment yarns'” easy atonement and abiding of characters with fellow characters. But it's finest sequence, one of the nicest in late Ford, is outdoors as The Wanderers and the high school kids sideline spectatorship, hubris and hypocrisy to get on with the game. Ford's best moments are, of course, always set to warm motifs of American folk music; here, the autumnal Wanderers are called to the bat to a few rude bars of “The 'ol Grey Mare” (“he ain't what he used to be”) and dance around the ball-park to another sort of folk “music”: an atonal communal cacophony of peanut gallery catcalls, sarcasm and ball-game patois. Flashing Spikes features an unusually complex use of diegetic, actuality sound that enlarges and enriches diegetic space; Ford's preference was for diegetic music to expand emotional space (although Gallagher claims that it was less art and more part of Ford's cunning plan to pay old friends the scale rate for speaking parts) (4).

But best of all is the film's star-turn: James Stewart with his gangling, hesitant minimalist frame. As performance, it's a pantomime trick, collaborating with Ford's medium shots and the constriction of the TV frame to delay and dissemble recognition of Slim, the infamous thief who stole baseball. As presence, it is also about delaying the revelation of Stewart the star, dissembling his iconography; like with Pat Wayne, when Stewart first gets off the bus we also have to look twice. But it's also as minimalist achievement of rich emotional affect: cap, spectacles and gait are virtual mask, so Stewart lowers the articulation of Slim as a battered baseball fringe-dweller into his limbs. When the mob pick Slim out and begin to pelt him with cups and cushions, Stewart shows them and Ford's camera his hunched, fortified back; all the old pain walled up but transparent behind it. Flashing Spikes is one of Ford's nicer “haikus”.