Baseball Movies: The top 5 characters ever? Who are yours?
By Rick Soisson
Moonlight Graham (Burt Lancaster) in Field of Dreams (1989): It’s only fair to pick a minor character among the top five, and particularly if one can pick a role handled by the great Burt Lancaster. The exceedingly sentimental Field of Dreams was Lancaster’s fifth to last film, and he may be the only actor in it who handled sentiment reasonably well.
The character played by Lancaster is essentially inserted into the story to allow a rumination on the idea of a player who made it to the big leagues, played half an inning, but never got to bat. (Graham was, in real life as the saying goes, a player for the ancient New York Giants, and he did exactly that.)
He’s essentially the same character in W.P. Kinsella’s novel, Shoeless Joe, on which the film is based, and which is superior to the screen treatment in considerable part because the part in the film played by James Earl Jones is taken by the writer J.D. Salinger in the original story.
It would have been interesting to see Salinger join these MLB film characters as Kinsella wrote him.
In any event, Graham turns out to not be greatly disappointed by his unsatisfying brush with athletic fame, telling Kevin Costner’s Ray Kinsella that he would have been more disappointed if he hadn’t been able to become a physician and hadn’t met his wonderful wife, who has passed away.
(Yep, Graham did become a doctor and practiced for years in Minnesota.)
Still, Ray Kinsella insists Graham must feel he missed out on something by his tantalizingly short career. Lancaster-Graham’s reply is an old pro’s reading of a long-forgotten dream:
“Well, you know I…I never got to bat in the major leagues. I would have liked to have had that chance. Just once. To stare down a big-league pitcher. To stare him down, and just as he goes into his windup, wink. Make him think you know something he doesn’t. That’s what I wish for. Chance to squint at a sky so blue that it hurts your eyes just to look at it. To feel the tingling in your arm as you connect with the ball.”