We are fortunate to have been spared Spike Lee’s take on the Jackie Robinson story, which surely would have been spiteful; emphatic about race grievance and loaded with other Spikey tangents. But Brian Helgeland has made a superb tale about Robinson’s groundbreaking desegregation of baseball through the machinations of Branch Rickey–and about American spiritual history and destiny. The issues and emotions have a beautiful clarity.

42, titled after Robinson’s player number (retired for all teams by the Major League Baseball association yet worn by players every April 15th–Jackie Robinson Day), commemorates Robinson breaking the game’s color bar in 1947 as the first Negro playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Helgeland depicts this world-changing risk as a cultural story–not simply one man’s life story. Instead of biographical depth, 42 sustains the same benevolence as the MLB’s memorial; its lively and vivid narrative goes through the arduous steps of a social and moral revolution.

More than a baseball movie, 42 is a folktale touching on the spirituality evidenced in Robinson (played by Chadwick Boseman) and Dodgers’ General Manager Rickey (played by Harrison Ford). Seeing baseball as the medium of social change; its practice and rituals are understood as basic to America’s sense of capability despite prevailing social divisions. That explains Helgeland’s elastic sense of class. Robinson steps into the roughneck world of sport possessing higher personal principles. He and wife Rachel (Nicole Beharie) are already upwardly mobile; they need only the income and recognition that white Americans take for granted.

Now let’s get rid of the narrow-minded complaint about Hollywood race stories always unequally pairing history’s black sacrificial figures with white cohorts. Helgeland’s even-handed vision of the Rickey-Robinson revolution enlarges it, taking in different aspects of America’s racial reality. Not merely the Jackie Robinson story, 42 relates tandem efforts and transformations by Rickey, Negro sports writer Wendell Smith (Andre Holland), assorted teammates (many brief, perfectly etched characterizations from Max Gail’s captivated retired manager, Chris Meloni’s virile Leo Durocher to Lucas Black’s affable Pee Wee Reese) and the crowds who fill the stands. All profiles in courage.

The back office functioning behind America’s public face rarely gets shown but 42’s story fortunately reveals that it appropriate significance and appeal, primarily through Harrison Ford. Projecting established magnanimous decency, Ford puts Rickey’s risk-taking and persistent urging in perfect balance to newcomer Boseman who portrays Robinson’s circumspect heroism. This isn’t a timed, harmless Black man; he’s self-assured yet resentful of those who want to make him humble. (Jeffrey Wright has played this Poitier complex but Jamie Foxx, Denzel Washington never has). Boseman’s wary intelligence conveys deep pride, a forgotten aspect of black America’s gradual civil rights evolution. 42 revives it.
The way Helgeland balances Ford/Rickey’s courage represents the modern audience’s guileless ignorance of history and the period era’s attitudes. The young black actors–all ebullient, optimistic, determined–represent Blacks’ hopes while the familiar Whites personify fears. When 42 explicates these details, it surpasses Steven Spielberg’s morally compromised Lincoln.

Cinematographer Don Burgess makes 42 the most beautiful movie of 2013 so far. He photographs sunlight and water (when Robinson finally showers with his white teammates) with radiance. Nothing in Lincoln’s political contrivance is as resonant as Rickey confessing “Something was wrong at the heart of the game I loved and I had ignored it.” Kushner-Spielberg’s Lincoln never admitted such sorrowful complex. Lincoln pretended that political opposition was the essence of America’s moral progress when in fact it was only a power struggle; 42 is deeper and more honest in its display of how Americans changed through accepting skill, humanity, sympathy.

This is a better approach to history than George Lucas’ lame Tuskegee Airman tribute Red Tails. Helgeland has made a film totally without cynicism. Cynicism is what ruined Lincoln; cynicism was at the core of Kushner and Spielberg’s self-congratulatory arrogance–which was why liberals overrated it. Will Obama-era audiences appreciate 42’s richness with its deep understanding of how hard-won compassion has greater everyday effectiveness than the rule of law? The splendor of ball field effort? Or a silhouetted fatherly embrace? These images test fairness within the glory of nature without the falsity of The Natural or Field of Dreams like no movie since Robert Aldrich’s The Big Leaguer.

I’d like to describe more of 42’s wonderful scenes such as the shots of Robinson rounding the bases, focused on his “42” uniform imprint like an existential Bressonian icon, but viewers should discover such beauty for themselves. Rickey and Robinson unite over the idea of being “built to last” by doing the right thing. Whether or not 42 conquers the box-office, it is built to last.

Those words are especially significant this winter. Not simply for the Hollywood award-seeking blockbusters but particularly for the cinematic landmarks soon to be available for film enthusiasts who are excited, to put a fine point on it, about exploring the history of human nature, human creativity. Here’s the annual Movies 101.

ACTORS

HARRISON FORD
Replicant or not? Ford’s third best-known role as Deckard in Blade Runner (Warner Home Video) proves how movie-star cool can sustain interest in a dated cult movie. This new multi-disc Blu-Ray set finally includes the original theatrical version (not the awful, confused “director’s cut”). Years later, it’s mostly an art-direction and F/X landmark. Ford (and Rutger Hauer) wear it well.

JEAN-LOUIS TRINTIGNANT
Keep Film Forum’s current retrospective on Trintignant going. The French actor who emblematized every decade since the 1950s is one of the most subtle and best in film history. One of his finest performances is in Patrice Chereau’s Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train (Kino), in which Trintignant played a dual role as a patriarch who shared his family influence with a late twin brother (in flashback), a still-amazing modern epic.

DEAN MARTIN
The singer’s Hollywood career is balanced by an acting career full of famous classics and obscure ones like Mr. Ricco (Warner Archives), Martin’s swan-song entry in the Dirty Harry tradition. He plays tough and principled, an unbeatable, charismatic combination.

ALAIN DELON
One of the ultimate romantic icons contributes to Zorro (Sommerville House DVD), a little-known, delightful version of the perennial action-film franchise. This one directed by spaghetti Western adept Duccio Tessari adds to the legacy.

NINO CASTELNUOVO
European cinema’s slyest sex god has an alternate identity as a macho satirist. In 5-Man Army (Warner Archives), Nero joins a team of badasses including Peter Graves and James Daly. A slyly comical buddy movie.

AUTEURS

FRITZ LANG
Pity those Peter Jackson fans who don’t know the great epics of Fritz Lang. Still the most astonishing cinematic treatment of legends, Lang’s Die Nibelugen saga Siegfried and Kriemheld’s Revenge (Kino) pioneered the mystical grand narrative, producing the link between imagination and human memory. Even Lang’s now-antique special effects are wondrous in ways that have nothing to do with improved technology and everything to do with artistry.

Kino has also released a triple-pack, “Fritz Lang: The Early Works,” that preserves the master director’s first forays into original storytelling. Harakiri (1919), The Wandering Shadow (1920) and Four Around the Woman(1921) show the beginnings of Lang’s genius, which is also the commencement of cinema’s combined psychological and visual intensity.

ROBERT ALDRICH
Although known for hard-boiled action films, Aldrich also made eloquent studies of American milieu and American character. It began with his 1953 debut The Big Leaguer (Warner Archives), maybe the most serenely beautiful baseball movie ever made. Set at a New York Giants training camp, it stars Edward G. Robinson and the young Richard Jaeckel in scenes of open-air endeavor that apotheosize American competition and achievement.

JOHN FORD
Winning his record-setting fourth best-director Oscar for The Quiet Man (Olive Films), Ford challenged his own renown as the auteur of Westerns with this great, fond British romance. It complements his classics The Informer and How Green Was My Valley with more innate humor than any of his other films. The John Wayne-Maureen O’Hara love story is also a heritage story; a film of inspiring pictorial and emotional beauty. There’ll be more to say when the DVD is released in early 2013.

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI
In “Trilogy of Life” (Criterion) Pasolini’s exploration of medieval literature links his modern political vision to the classics, finding parallels in medieval literature: Boccaccio’s Decameron, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and The Arabian Nights. This early-1970s trilogy contains intellectual curiosity and erotic daring; Pasolini focuses on ribaldry to concentrate on the idiosyncrasy of human nature. (It’s especially striking in Blu-Ray.) Removing the veil from various cultures, Pasolini explored timeless qualities of life. Our contemporary cinema would do well to catch up to this artist’s unusual and major achievement.

Follow Armond White on Twitter at 3xchair

The screen is already up for this year’s Bryant Park Film Festival, and we’re very excited to indulge our nostalgia and catch some classics this year.

Bryant Park - photo courtesy of Flickr Commons

As part of a tradition since the early 90s, HBO, starting May 18, is set to deliver quality oldies on The Great Lawn every summer Monday at 5 PM. The festival, a staple of Midtown, draws huge crowds all summer long, providing films for the most casual watcher and also for the most discerning cinephile. The festival runs for ten weeks throughout the summer, and there are plenty of great films to catch –evidently, HBO knows its movie stuff.

It’d be great to have the time, but given that it might be tough to open up your schedule every Monday, we at New York Press have compiled a list of the best Bryant Park Film Festival movies to make time for this summer:

Psycho- May 18 – Alfred Hitchcock, 1960

Arguably Hitchcock’s most influential and scariest film, the seminal fright-fest has had viewers scared to shower for over 50 years (or is it just me?). Norman Bates, the movie’s villain has become a cultural icon –Patrick Bateman in American Psycho isn’t just coincidence– and Hitchcock’s incessantly-studied shower scene is simply awesome. Bring a friend for the walk home after this one.

Wizard of Oz – July 2 – Judy Garland, Toto, 1939

If only because it’s summer, and you might dance into the sunset like Dorothy, you should definitely get around to the park during the festival’s third week. Flying monkeys can be somewhat scary, but the music and imagination, as you’ve probably witnessed before, is perfect to see during the summer.

On the Waterfront – July 9 – Marlon Brando, 1954

This starts off a bit slow, maybe too slow, but picks up to become one of the best crime dramas in cinema. Brando is great, plain and simple. In the year of its release, Elia Kazan and his crew won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Director. Bear through the beginning and the muffled dialogue, and you won’t be disappointed.

Raiders of the Lost Ark – August 20 – Harrison Ford, George Lucas – 1981

My personal favorite. Whenever I flip the channels and this is on TNT (it happens very often) I never flip again until it’s done. Non-stop action and a bunch of super-loud punches and whip cracks always make for greatness.

According to Bryant Park’s site, there are no chairs, tables, or dogs allowed. The lawn opens up at 4 PM, so bring your blanket and enjoy a fun night every Monday this summer.

–Nick Gallinelli