Let me get a couple of negatives out of the way first. The very real baseball team the Boston Red Sox forms a large part of this movie but apart from their home ground, Fenway Park, and the manager at the time, Joe Cronin, no one else is name-checked; not owner, Tom Yawkey, or well-known team-mates of Piersall, Ted Williams, Dom DiMaggio, Bobby Doer, Johnny Pesky. John Piersall (Karl Malden) is established within minutes as a brutal control freak with tunnel vision focussing on one goal, a place in the Red Sox line-up for son Jimmy (Anthony Perkins). Given this single-mindedness surely the last thing he would have welcomed and/or permitted was a girl in Jimmy's l which would clearly be seen as a threat/rival, but, after walking in on Jimmy and Mary talking and being introduced we cut to some time later when Jimmy and Mary are not only married but living with Jimmy's parents apparently happily. The film does a lot of this; cutting to the chase, ignoring normal development. In the same way we are not told that Piersall and first wife Mary had nine children, that Jimmy married three times and played for another three teams before retiring. Here's the thing: none of this matters! In a more run-of-the-mill film it would matter but Fear Strikes Out has two towering perfomances from Karl Malden and Anthony Perkins as John and Jim Piersall respectively, both worthy of Best Actor Oscars and unfairly overshadowing Perry Wilson as Jimmy's mother and Norma Moore as his wife. Trivia question: What do Karl Malden and Angela Lansbury have in common? They both played monsters, the ultimate Stage Mother From Hell, Lansbury in Gypsy and Malden in Fear Strikes Out. If you're looking for a baseball film that isn't really about baseball at all then this is for you.
Review of Fear Strikes Out
