Naturally, a ballplayer who craved the spotlight and never missed a chance to put on a show should be the subject of a Hollywood movie.
Seventy years ago, in 1952, the film “The Pride of St. Louis,” about the life of pitcher and broadcaster Dizzy Dean, came to theaters across the United States.
It got a better critical reception in New York and Los Angeles than it did in St. Louis.
From mound to movie
A master showman on the Cardinals’ Gashouse Gang teams of the 1930s, Dean was the last National League pitcher to achieve 30 wins in a season. Other pitchers of the era, such as Carl Hubbell, may have been as talented, but none matched Dean’s ability to perform theatrics and attract attention.
In his big-league debut for the Cardinals, he pitched a three-hitter and gained the affection of the fans. When he faced Babe Ruth for the first time, Dean got the best of the matchup and even had the Babe laughing. When armed robbers learned it was Dean who had been a victim of their stickup, they sent him a batch of neckties as a token of apology.
By 1951, Dean was an established and popular baseball broadcaster. Producer Jules Schermer pitched the idea of a movie about Dean to 20th Century Fox executives. After they bought in, Schermer approached Dean, “who was, of course, delighted” with the suggestion, the Associated Press reported.
The movie people envisioned the central characters to be Dizzy Dean, his wife, Patricia Dean, and Dizzy’s brother, Paul Dean, who also had pitched for the Cardinals. According to John Carmichael of the Chicago Daily News, Dizzy got $50,000 for the movie rights to his story. Paul was offered $15,000, but held out for more.
“Finally, I said I’d give him $5,000 of my end if he’d sign the danged contract, or we might never have got it made,” Dizzy told Carmichael.
In the book “Diz,” biographer Robert Gregory wrote that Patricia Dean negotiated the movie rights to Dizzy’s story and “settled for $100,000 _ payable, she insisted, in spread-out sums so the taxes would be smaller.”
Music man
Herman Mankiewicz was hired in 1951 to write the screenplay for “The Pride of St. Louis” from a story by Guy Trosper. Nine years earlier, Mankiewicz and Orson Welles won an Academy Award for best original screenplay for “Citizen Kane.”
Dan Dailey, known best for his work in musicals, was cast as Dizzy Dean.
In 1949, Dailey got an Academy Award nomination for best actor in “When My Baby Smiles at Me,” co-starring Betty Grable. (The best actor Oscar that year went instead to Laurence Olivier for “Hamlet.”) Dailey also appeared in 1949’s “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” with Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly.
Soon after he was tabbed for the Dizzy Dean role, Dailey admitted himself to the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kan., for psychiatric treatment because of an emotional breakdown. “I’d cracked,” he told syndicated columnist Hedda Hopper.
Dizzy Dean kiddingly told people that Dailey “went nuts” at the thought of having to portray him, The Sporting News reported.
After five months at the clinic, Dailey was discharged and began preparing to film “The Pride of St. Louis” in late summer 1951.
Joanne Dru got the part of Patricia Dean. An actress who co-starred with John Wayne in westerns such as “Red River” (1948) and “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” (1949), Dru was the sister of Peter Marshall, who went on to host the “Hollywood Squares” TV game show. Marshall’s son, Pete LaCock, became a big-league first baseman and hit a grand slam against Bob Gibson to beat the Cardinals’ ace in the last game of his Hall of Fame career.
A newcomer to movies, Richard Crenna was cast as Paul Dean. A radio performer, Crenna went on to have a long career in television (“The Real McCoys”) and film (most memorably, 1981’s “Body Heat”).
Learning curve
Dailey spent weeks studying slow-motion footage of Dean on the mound. “Then, working before mirrors, Dailey painstakingly imitated his windup, rear-back, and follow-through,” The Sporting News reported.
According to the Associated Press, Dailey pitched 45 minutes a day for three weeks to Ike Danning. A former minor-league catcher who got into two games with the 1928 St. Louis Browns, Danning coached Dailey on pitching motion.
“If determination means anything, he’ll look something like a pitcher,” Danning said. “It isn’t easy to teach a guy to look professional when he hasn’t played much baseball. It’s especially hard with a style like Dizzy’s.”
The baseball scenes were shot in Los Angeles at Gilmore Field, home of the Pacific Coast League’s Hollywood Stars, according to Internet Movie Database.
To get a feel for being a ballplayer, Dailey, wearing a Hollywood Stars uniform, sat on the team’s bench during a game, The Sporting News reported.
Dean, who went to Hollywood to see early clips of the movie, said Dailey “looks just like me when I was fogging them in there,” The Sporting News reported.
Starry night
The Missouri Theater at North Grand Boulevard and Lucas Avenue in St. Louis was site of the world premiere of “The Pride of St. Louis” on Friday night, April 11, 1952. The next day, the Browns and Cardinals were to play the first of two exhibition games at Sportsman’s Park before the regular season opened.
Attending the premiere were Dailey, Dru and her husband, actor John Ireland, Dizzy Dean and St. Louis mayor Joseph Durst, who proclaimed April 11-18 as Dizzy Dean Week in the city.
Several members of the Browns, including team owner Bill Veeck and manager Rogers Hornsby, attended, but no one from the Cardinals.
“It is understood the Cardinals declined to attend, even though the film has a great deal about the Cardinals team,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted without offering an explanation.
Television station KSD did a live broadcast of the ceremonies from the plush theater lobby.
Different perspectives
New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote, “Baseball itself, while it runs loudly and rampantly all through the film, is not the major interest in this picture … It is Dizzy Dean, the character, the whiz from the Ozark hills, the braggart, the woeful grammarian, the humbled human being, that is dished up here.”
He rated the Herman Mankiewicz script “howlingly humorous,” noted that Dailey played Dean “in high gear and in accents that reek of the hills,” and gushed that the ending “brings a little tug on the heart and it leaves you grateful to all who made this picture _ and to a legend by the name of Dizzy Dean.”
Los Angeles Times critic John L. Scott also gave a rave: “How much of this is fact and how much fiction need worry nobody. It is entertaining and whether you like baseball or not you will find ‘Pride of St. Louis’ an enjoyable movie.”
In St. Louis, “Singing in the Rain” with Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds opened the day before “The Pride of St. Louis” premiered. Praising “Singing in the Rain” for having “everything you could want in a musical,” Post-Dispatch critic Myles Standish noted that “Kelly does a solo on a rain-swept street to the title song which should rank as a classic.”
As for “The Pride of St. Louis,” Standish disliked “a rather trite and tepid screenplay” that showed Dizzy “as an amiable, rather child-like, buffoon.”
Standish also didn’t like Patricia Dean being portrayed as a “conventional sweet movie wife bolstering up her man” instead of “the shrewd manageress she seems to be,” or that the concerns of a few teachers regarding Dean’s lousy grammar were “absurdly magnified into a phony dramatic climax.”
(“The Pride of St. Louis” earned Guy Trosper an Academy Award nomination for best story. The 1953 Oscar, however, went to a trio of writers for “The Greatest Show on Earth.”)
Dizzy Dean loved “The Pride of St. Louis.” By mid-April 1952, he’d seen it six times, according to biographer Robert Gregory.
“I ain’t saying this just because it’s about me,” Dean said, “but I think them Hollywood boys outdid theirself.”
See it for yourself: You Tube video