Eight Men Out Poster

Eight Men Out (1988)

Drama | Sport 
Rayting:   7.3/10 18.7K votes
Country: USA
Language: English
Release date: 2 September 1988

A dramatization of the Black Sox scandal when the underpaid Chicago White Sox accepted bribes to deliberately lose the 1919 World Series.

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User Reviews

Red-125 23 September 2015

Eight Men Out (1988) was written and directed by John Sayles. The movie is a dramatization of the events before, during, and after the 1919 World Series. I found this movie both fascinating and moving.

Director Sayles--who also plays journalist Ring Lardner--has formulated the film as a labor vs. management struggle. Sayles portrays club owner Charles Comiskey as a miserly, selfish, dictatorial boss. His team was the finest in baseball, yet he underpaid them, broke promises to them, and got rich while they remained poor. From this perspective, most of the players were easy targets for gamblers, who arranged for them throw the series and collect the cash offered to them.

The acting was excellent, especially by John Cusack, who played George 'Buck' Weaver. Weaver maintained that he was innocent until the day he died, and Cusack made that position believable. Also excellent was Hugh Fullerton who played journalist Studs Terkel.

If you love baseball, this is a can't-miss movie. If you don't love baseball, I still recommend it. That's because it's very dramatic, and it really is a labor film as much as it's a baseball film. We saw the movie in the wonderful Dryden Theatre in George Eastman House, in Rochester, NY. It was part of the excellent Rochester Labor Film Series.

It was a treat to see an original print of the film projected on the large screen at the Dryden. I think some of the drama of the baseball games will be lost on the small screen, but the film will work well anyway. Find it and see it!

SmileysWorld 26 April 2002

Fmovies: We were a young,innocent nation in 1919,though we did have our troubles. Luckily,we had a relatively new game of baseball to take us away from those troubles.Surely,nothing bad could happen to such a great game,or so we thought.It seems that eight players took bribes to deliberately lose the 1919 World Series,and we did not take it very well.How could they?How could they betray our trust and our fanship this way? This film,which incidentally never has gotten the full credit it has deserved over the years,brilliantly brings to life this scandal which gave our nation one big black eye.It is a must see for any true fan of baseball. Baseball indeed has a mostly colorful history,but there was a time when that color was black.Over the years,the wounds have healed,but the scars remain.A truly brilliant and underrated film.

bkoganbing 24 October 2008

One of the best baseball films ever made was about the sport's darkest hour, the fixing of the 1919 World Series. Eight of the heavily favored members of the Chicago White Sox threw the World Series as a result of payoffs and bigger promises of payoffs to gambling interests. In the background of those interests was the notorious Arnold Rothstein who was never brought to trial. The eight players were the Eight Men Out, banned for life by the newly appointed Commissioner of Baseball, Kenesaw Mountain Landis played here most impressively by John Anderson. Anderson even looks like Landis.

The whole unvarnished truth is laid out there, owner Charles Comiskey a pioneer owner in the American League who treated his players like field hands as he assiduously courted the press and through them the fans. A little more generous with the profits this story might never have occurred. Clifton James plays the greedy and rapacious Comiskey. The incident where Eddie Cicotte is not started so that Comiskey can save on a promised bonus if he pitched and won 30 games has come down in legend. Cicotte and Lefty Williams played by David Strathairn and James Read were the key to the conspiracy. They lost the five games in that best five out of nine series to the Reds to throw the series. The bad play in the field by the others insured the result.

Two things that are not mentioned in the film, but are very important; viewers ought to know. The best pitcher the White Sox had was Hall of Famer Urban 'Red' Faber who had led the team to a World Series win in 1917, the last one they would have until 2005. Faber came up injured and was disabled and was not available to pitch in the 1919 series. Had he stayed honest and not been injured, the result might have been different.

Eddie Collins the second baseman was played here by Bill Irwin and what's not mentioned here is that Collins started out with Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics, part of his fabled $100,000.00 infield. When Mack broke up his team and sold off the players in 1941-1915, Collins got a guaranteed salary of $15,000.00, way above what his teammates were getting. Collins was one of Mack's favorites and he got that salary guaranteed for him by Comiskey before parting with him. That caused a lot of the jealousy you see portrayed in Eight Men Out.

The real ringleaders were shortstop Swede Risberg and first baseman Chick Gandil as is shown here. They roped the others in. They're played by Don Harvey and Michael Rooker.

The two that come down to us as the biggest tragedies are John Cusack as Buck Weaver and D.B. Sweeney as Shoeless Joe Jackson. Weaver knew about the fix, but would not rat out his teammates, hoping they'd come around and play on the square. He was treated as if he were a conspirator himself and suffered the same banishment.

As for Shoeless Joe Jackson, his lifetime average of .356 and the fact that he is one of the select group of .400 hitters would put him in the Hall of Fame. During the teen years he was overshadowed by Ty Cobb in the American League, but in the Twenties might have come into his own. He showed signs of adapting to the lively ball era that Babe Ruth was just inaugurating.

He was also illiterate and was easily manipulated into the fix. Despite that his play like Weaver's was outstanding in that series, he hit the only home run recorded by either side in that next to last series of the dead ball era. What you see with D.B. Sweeney is exactly how poor Jackson was.

Base

RNMorton 12 January 2001

Eight Men Out fmovies. Everything's right in this period piece on baseball's darkest moment. Film eschews standard Hollywood overkill and presents things as they actually happened [you won't see Shoeless Joe talking like a Harvard grad in this one]; also avoids taking sides between greedy players and greedy owner, and lets you decide who screwed who. Fantastic atmosphere. Cusack as Buck Weaver, on the fringes of the scandal, and David Strathairn, as ace pitcher Eddie Cicotte, lead a cast which is solid through the whole lineup.

rmax304823 6 July 2004

I especially enjoyed Studs Terkel and John Sayles as the two sportswriters, Fullerton and Lardner. They're very droll. They act as a kind of Greek chorus, making cynical wisecracks, keeping the audience clued in on what's supposed to be going on. As the White Sox play out yet another crooked game, Sayles said to Terkel, "Nothing but fast balls." "Nice, sloow ones," adds Terkel. It gets better. Terkel writes a column for the Chicago paper accusing gamblers of corrupting the game of baseball and Sayles is reading it aloud. "Writers are tainting the game," or something, says Sayles. "Keep reading," says Terkel. "The game would be better off without the long-nosed, thick-lipped Eastern element preying on our boys in the field." Terkels smiles around his cigar and says, "Makes you proud to be a sportswriter, doesn't it?"

The rest of the movie is pretty good too, although I sometimes get the characters and their motives a little mixed up. The baseball scenes are very well done. I say this, being no big fan of the sport myself. Charlie Sheen (a true aficionado) looks like he's heaving a heavy bat as he clunks out a hit, not a rubber prop. I admired too the way the series games swung back and forth as the players on the take tried to figure out if they were playing for the money or for themselves. It's tough to throw a game because part of one's self always wants to do what one does best -- in this case, play baseball well. The German ethologists call it "Funktionslust." In the end, despite some indecision, they do however lose.

The movie isn't kind to the gamblers or to the owners. Comisky was incredibly cheap and greedy. The script gives this as one of the reasons why the players agreed to throw the game. As Strathairn says when someone offers him a part payment, "I don't care about the money." He's throwing the games to foul up Comisky who has just denied him a promised bonus because Strathairn, playing the pitcher Cicotte, has only played 29 games instead of the 30 they'd agreed upon. Comisky has made him sit on the bench for the last few games so he wouldn't cross the bonus threshold. (Question: Given that Comisky cheated Cicotte of the contracted bonus, was Cicotte morally justified in throwing the games?)

The movie isn't nice to the gamblers either. Not only don't they pay off but they treat the players with contempt. Arnold Rothstein ("A.R.") treats EVERYBODY rudely. He never says hello when he enters a room, never says good-bye when leaving, and never smiles.

I kind of liked this. Sayles may not be a master but his films are always highly individualized. I cannot visualize him directing "Die Hard With A Sardonic Grin."

mjneu59 15 November 2010

When the team that couldn't be beat threw the World Series in 1919 they did more than deliberately lose a few baseball games; they corrupted the National Pastime and ushered the sport out of its age of innocence. Writer director John Sayles succeeds in showing exactly how and why eight players on the best team in baseball set in motion what had to be one of the most poorly conceived, organized and executed conspiracies in the whole history of graft, and in his usual role as a champion of the working class portrays the guilty players as victims of money-grubbing corporate exploitation (represented both by team management and organized crime).

But it's all the cynical wheeling and dealing behind the Black Sox scandal which make the film so fascinating. The story might have been unbelievable if it wasn't entirely true, but like any aspect of real life the details are messy and inconclusive. Most of the film recounts the mechanics of the fix; events during the subsequent exposure and trial are telescoped too quickly into the final forty minutes or so, which makes sense: in any conspiracy the crime is always more interesting than the punishment.

It helps to be at least slightly familiar with the huge cast of characters involved: players, gamblers, reporters and so forth. A few scenes have been added for dramatic unity, and others were abbreviated to maintain a consistent pace, but all the facts are there, and Sayles manages to pull them all together in an entertaining history lesson from our collective adolescence, re-creating that fateful moment when the boys of summer grew up for good.

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