Bookshelf Review: Rawhide

Rawhide Poster I’m am the poster child when it comes to falling down the rabbit hole. Whenever a book by a writer I especially respect refers to additional material, I will seek it out more often than not. While going through The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, Keith Law’s latest, I bought a copy of Thinking, Fast and Slow, which he frequently mentions throughout the book.

Similarly, after reading Dan Joseph’s Last Ride of the Iron Horse: How Lou Gehrig Fought ALS to Play One Final Championship Season, I felt compelled to watch Rawhide, a 1938 B-Western featuring the famed Yankee. For those unfamiliar with the term, a B movie is kind of like the mid-to-low minors. The actors are not that good, the scripts are not that good, the production values,… well, you get the idea. (In the case of Rawhide, “B” might be charitable.)

The movie — weighing in at less than an hour — is easily available online. Here, I’ll save you the trouble.

First of all, I love westerns. Most of the storylines are the same: the good guy — usually a loner, sometimes with “a past” — happens upon a bad situation. He faces stiff opposition from the villains, who are frequently aided by corrupt lawmen and/or politicians. The hero can’t find much support at first, but he prevails in the end, thanks to a good woman and the townsfolk who come to see the light.

It’s not a stretch to say that Gehrig is one of the better performers here. At least he doesn’t seem to take himself too seriously, as do the nominal stars of the picture. In fact, Gehrig has some of the funnier lines in this otherwise nondescript pic. For example, when climbing on a horse for the first time, he’s advised to carry himself as if he’s done it before. “I couldn’t be that deceitful,” he replies.

Joseph and Jonathan Eig (Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig) both point to Rawhide as possibly offering the first symptoms of the disease that would one day claim Gehrig’s life but to the uninformed observer, the powerful athlete seems in top form. He does his own stunts (although I’m not so sure about falling off the horse or a wagon later on) and acquits himself convincingly in a bar fight.

Gehrig plays himself, a ballplayer fed up with haggling over his contract and seeking a restful spot to relax, so the setting was contemporary. I was a bit surprised, therefore, to see most of the men carrying six-shooters, including Gehrig. What, do they just hand these things out when you arrive in town? Second Amendment aside, were things so dangerous that this was considered necessary? I suppose so because the amount of violence, perpetrated or threatened, is amazingly high. Someone standing in the way of the villain’s plot to control the farmers and cattlemen? No problem; just steal their goods, wreck their transportation, or simply get rid of them. (There’s that corrupt law man I was talking about.)

Did I mention this is a “singing western?” It gives the star — Smith Ballew — a chance to croon unnecessarily. Even Gehrig warbles a bit, although his voice was dubbed. So many elements.

All in all, though, Rawhide is surprisingly not that terrible. One can only imagine what it was like when it came out. We tend to think of things as they apply to modern day, but remember, there was no TV and comparatively little radio at the time. Movies were the main source of entertainment. Plus there was the novelty factor of seeing an athlete of Gehrig’s magnitude on the big screen when major league baseball was still confined to a handful of cities. So put aside any notion of how it plays today. Well worth the hour.

BONUS: Since theaters back in the day used to show double-features plus a newsreel plus a cartoon, I thought I’d follow suit.