Eight Men Out

EIGHT MEN OUT (15)

D: John Sayles

Rank/Orion (Sarah Pillsbury & Midge Sandford)

USA 🇺🇸 1988

119 mins

Sports/Drama/Biopic

W: John Sayles [based on the book by Eliot Asinof]

DP: Robert Richardson

Ed: John Tintori

Mus: Mason Daring

John Cusack (Buck Weaver), Clifton James (Charles Comiskey), Michael Lerner (Arnold Rothstein), Christopher Lloyd (Bill Burns), John Mahoney (Kid Gleason), Charlie Sheen (Happy Felsch), David Strathairn (Eddie Cicotte), D.B. Sweeney (Shoeless Joe Jackson)

The secret to making a good sports movie is to make it accessible to those who don't have any particular interest in the respective sport that it presents. Writer/director John Sayles does this flawlessly with Eight Men Out, tackling one of baseball's biggest scandals, in which players of the Boston Red Sox team were paid bribes to throw the 1919 World Series to the Cincinatti Reds.

The story deals very much with the human drama and characters behind the scandal, with the innocent members of the team having their careers tarnished along with the disgraced.

The 1989 film 'Field of Dreams' also referenced the same story with an element of fantasy, meaning John Sayles' film escaped the majority of public attention, despite being a more serious representation of events.

7/10