Warts-and-nothing-but portrait by Ron (Bull Durham) Shelton of Tyrus Raymond Cobb, brawler, wife-beater, gun-wielder, whorer, boozer, pill popper, reckless driver, cusser, racist, anti-Semite -- oh, and once upon a time baseball player. It concentrates on the seventy-second and last year of his life, witnessed close up by his handpicked biographer-cum-chauffeur-cum-nurse, Al Stump, and supplemented by the infrequent flashback and counterfeit newsreel. Robert Wuhl, as the scribe, quickly wears out his gamut of expressions in the range between disbelief and disgust: the look of a throttled gobbler. And Tommy Lee Jones, too young and spry in the present tense and too old and creaky in the past, quickly wears out our eardrums: voice of steel file on lead pipe. From a hospital deathbed he provides a concise critique: "The greatest ballplayer that ever lived was also the greatest bastard. Who cares?" Quibbles shall be confined to the declarative sentence only. (1994) — Duncan Shepherd
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