Welcome to Saturday Night at the Movies.

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's movie is the 1942 Sports Biography of New York Yankees first baseman Lou Gehrig, "The pride of the Yankees".

Sam Wood directed from a screenplay by Joe Swirling and Herman J Mankiewicz.

Based on a story by novelist and sports writer Paul Gallico.

The pride of the Yankees stars Gary Cooper, Theresa Wright and Walter Brennan, with support from Dan Duryea, Elsie Janssen and Ludwig St össel.

Four New York Yankees who played alongside Lou Gehrig appear as themselves.

Bill Dickey, Robert W Meusel, Mark Koenig, and Babe Ruth.

We first meet the young Lou Gehrig as a boy living in the Yorktown neighborhood of Manhattan with his German immigrant parents.

He gets involved in a pickup baseball game with some other boys and hits a ball out of the vacant lot where they're playing, and through the window of a delicatessen.

Marched home by the deli owner and a policeman, Lou waits with his father for his mother to come home from work, pay for the window, and determine an appropriate punishment for the boy.

Her ambition is for Lou to study hard, attend college and become an engineer like his uncle Otto.

Lou would rather play baseball, but he does what his mother wants and in time attends Columbia University where he is a star athlete, playing both football and baseball.

A sports writer friend Sam Blake persuades a scout to see Lou play, leading to an offer Lou turns down, determined to fulfill his mother's dreams.

But when she becomes ill, Lou accepts an offer from the New York Yankees to earn enough money to have his mother cared for at a private hospital.

With his father's help, Lou hides from his mother the progress of his baseball career, first with a farm team, and later with the Yankees until his prowess on the diamond becomes the talk of the neighborhood.

He brings to baseball not only athletic ability, but an earnestness that amuses his teammates, but ultimately wins over the fans, including one young woman in particular, who in time becomes his devoted wife.

Lou Gehrig, born Heinrich Ludwig Gehrig on June 19th, 1903 is widely considered one of the greatest baseball players of all time.

He played first base for the New York Yankees for 17 seasons, beginning in 1923, and played in 2,130 consecutive games.

A record that stood for 56 years.

His accomplishments as a player were remarkable.

He was an all star seven years in a row and won the Triple Crown in 1934 when he led the American League in three batting statistical categories.

Home runs, runs batted in and batting average.

He was with the Yankees when they won six World Series Championships in 1927, 1928, 1932, 1936, '37, and '38.

He was the first athlete to appear on a Wheaties box in 1933.

He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York in 1939, the same year he retired and he was the first major league player to have his uniform number, number four, retired by his team.

Baseball fans know about these and many of Lou Gehrig's other notable achievements during his career, but today he's probably best known by the general public for the disease that ended both his baseball career and his life.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS is an incurable neuromuscular disease that affects strength and coordination, attacking the muscles, and eventually causing problems with speaking and swallowing and difficulties with thinking.

Death is usually the result of respiratory failure as the ability to breathe is lost.

Because of Lou Gehrig's famous ball player and the sudden and dramatic end to his career and his life, ALS is now more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

Early symptoms of the disease increasingly affected Gehrig's ability to play baseball and ultimately led him to take himself out of the Yankees lineup voluntarily on May 2nd, 1939, when he was 36 years old.

He died two years later on June 2nd, 1941.

His wife, Eleanor, who had taken care of him during his illness, devoted the rest of her life to philanthropy, including raising millions of dollars for research on ALS and a possible cure.

She was a fierce protector of her husband's legacy who never remarried and wrote in her 1976 memoir, "I would not have traded two minutes of my life with that man for 40 years with another."

It's ironic that two of the people most responsible for bringing Lou Gehrig's story to the silver screen and making it one of the most iconic movies about baseball ever made, were not themselves fans of the game.

Producer Samuel Goldwyn initially expressed little interest in making a film about Lou Gehrig because he didn't care about baseball and didn't know much about it.

But he did know sports movies didn't make money because they didn't appeal to women who usually determined which movies became popular.

But when director Sam Wood showed him newsreel clips of Lou Gehrig's final speech to his fans, Goldwyn was won over and gave the production the go-ahead.

Goldwyn's and Wood's choice for the lead, Gary Cooper, was hesitant to accept the role because he, like Goldwyn, didn't care for baseball and reportedly had never seen a game or even swung a bat before taking the part as a favorite to Goldwyn.

Nor was Cooper particularly well suited to the physical skills necessary for baseball, and he was further hampered by injuries he had suffered in the course of his acting career.

Most notably, he was right-handed, while Lou Gehrig was well known to be left-handed.

Cooper worked diligently with former Major-Leaguer Lefty O'Doul to develop sufficient skill to be convincing as a left-handed hitter and first baseman.

He did well enough with the hitting, but O'Doul told him, "You throw a ball like an old woman tossing a hot biscuit."

There are many printed reports that the filmmakers solved the problem by having Cooper bat and throw right-handed, and flipping the film.

But Tom Shieber, a senior curator at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, has argued persuasively that this isn't true, and that doing so would've been both unnecessary and overly complicated.

In the event, Cooper's hitting was good enough for cinematic purposes, and his throwing was done by his stand-in, Brooklyn Dodgers southpaw Babe Herman.

In fact, there isn't a whole lot of baseball action in this baseball movie.

When it was made, almost everyone knew about Lou Gehrig, about his accomplishments on the field, his illness, and his untimely death.

Audiences didn't need to see that in the motion picture.

They wanted the story behind the remarkable baseball career, something about Lou Gehrig himself away from the diamond.

The focus on his romance and marriage with Eleanor Twitchell may have been in part Goldwyn's way of appealing to the all-important female audience, and may also explain the presence of nightclub performers Veloz and Yolanda, and Ray Noble and His Orchestra in the middle of the picture.

The emphasis on Lou Gehrig's romance with Eleanor was not lost on the critics.

"Variety" called the movie a sentimental romantic saga well worth seeing.

In its review, "Time Magazine" characterized "The Pride of the Yankees" as a grade-A love story, done with taste and distinction.

But it also noted, baseball fans who hope to see much baseball played in "Pride of the Yankees" will be disappointed.

Baseball is only incidental.

Their hero does not win a home run and win the girl.

He's just a hardworking, unassuming, highly-talented professional.

The picture tells the model story of his model life in the special world of professional ball players.

Bosley Crowther of "The New York Times" chided the film for its length and what he called, "Its devotion to genial details."

"The Pride of the Yankees" was one of the top 10 films of 1942, garnering over $4 million at the box office.

It was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including best actor, best actress, best original story, best adapted screenplay, and best picture, but won only for best editing.

In 2008, the film was ranked third among the top 10 sports movies of all time by the American Film Institute.

When "Pride of the Yankees" premiered in the summer of 1942, it was accompanied by a Walt Disney cartoon, "How to Play Baseball."

The cartoon was made at Samuel Goldwyn's special request, and was rushed out in 12 weeks.

In it, Goofy demonstrates the basics of the game leading to a World Series game between the Blue Sox and the Gray Sox, with the team members and umpires all played by Goofy.

The cartoon short proved a major success and led to a series of nine other how-to cartoons featuring Goofy over the next 11 years.

It also proved, if there was any doubt, that Goofy was no Lou Gehrig.

Please join us again next time for another "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm Glenn Holland.

Goodnight.