John Sayles dredges up the Black Sox scandal of 1919 and offers a swallowable explanation for it: the penny-pinching, plantation-master practices of team owner Charles Comiskey, inappropriately nicknamed "Commie." From this explanation, as laid out in the book by Eliot Asinof, it is easy to see what must have appealed to Sayles about the subject in the first place -- and why, in the second place, he would have photographed it as if it were set in the Dark Ages. But as so often when this filmmaker gets through with a subject, it is not so easy to see what was supposed to appeal, in the last place, to us. The central drama of the movie -- the day-by-day progress of the World Series itself -- seems far too drawn out for something so foregone, or at any rate seems far too focussed on the outcome on the field rather than on its impact on the participants. And the actual sports action, invariably viewed too close, with little sense of the unfolding pattern of a play, and with still less sense of space or atmosphere, is as ludicrous as most of this sort of thing on screen. The dialogue, always concerned first to be explanatory, rings clankingly false throughout: not just the writing of it, but the staging of it. Any filmmaker on this subject would of course feel obligated to include the "Say it ain't so" line from Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, but some of them could have managed to orchestrate it more convincingly than by having a gaggle of reporters outside the courthouse all trying to out-yell one another when suddenly a preadolescent soprano pierces through the babble ("Joe!") and a total hush falls over an entire Chicago city block. All heads turn to the source of this cry, hold that pose patiently while the little urchin recites the line not once, but twice, and then in unison swivel back to Joe to hear him say whether it's so or ain't. Sayles, never one to spread himself too thick, has had the added gall to cast himself in the role of one of the true luminaries of American letters, Ring Lardner. For this above all he should never be forgiven. John Cusack, D.B. Sweeney, Charlie Sheen. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd