Inaccuracies/artistic License
As the film opens, Gehrig is depicted belting a home run through the window of his alma mater's athletics department. Actually, his farthest hits smashed not into the athletic department, which was located on the north end of campus, but through the windows of the nearby Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Gary Cooper, who was right-handed, could not master a convincing left-handed swing, and was filmed swinging from the right side. Editors then created the appearance of left-handed batting by reversing the film negative. During filming Cooper would run to third base instead of first to complete the illusion.
In one of the film's more memorable scenes, a physician matter-of-factly informs Gehrig of his tragic diagnosis, dismal prognosis, and brief life expectancy. In fact, the Mayo Clinic doctors painted an unrealistically optimistic picture of Gehrig's condition and prospects, reportedly at his wife's request. Among other things he was given "a 50–50 chance of keeping me as I am" for the foreseeable future, and was told that he "...may need a cane in 10 or 15 years." Deliberate concealment of bad news from patients, particularly when cancer or an incurable degenerative disease was involved, was a relatively common practice at the time.
Read more about this topic: The Pride Of The Yankees
Famous quotes containing the words artistic and/or license:
“Well then! Wagner was a revolutionary—he fled the Germans.... As an artist one has no home in Europe outside Paris: the délicatesse in all five artistic senses that is presupposed by Wagner’s art, the fingers for nuances, the psychological morbidity are found only in Paris. Nowhere else is this passion in questions of form to be found, this seriousness in mise en scène—which is Parisian seriousness par excellence.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“It is a misfortune that necessity has induced men to accord greater license to this formidable engine, in order to obtain liberty, than can be borne with less important objects in view; for the press, like fire, is an excellent servant, but a terrible master.”
—James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851)