These films were released in 1942

The Pride of the Yankees

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On July 4, 1939, it seemed like all of New York City plus most of baseball paused between games of a doubleheader to say good-bye to the career of Lou Gehrig, the “Iron Horse” who had played 2,130 consecutive games before the effects of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, now known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, ended his playing days. His farewell speech, beginning with the sentence “Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth,” remains one of the most moving moments in sports history.

Just over a year after his death in June, 1941, Hollywood had a movie version of Gehrig’s life in the theaters. While it was well received at the time and garnered a whole rack of Academy Award nominations, time has not been kind to this shallow look at the baseball legend’s private life.

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Saboteur

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Alfred Hitchcock‘s first film for Universal, Saboteur follows his favorite theme of the innocent man falsely accused and on the run. This time Barry Kane (Robert Cummings) a young worker at a wartime aircraft factory is suspected of setting the fire that killed a close friend of his. Fleeing the police, he sets off in pursuit of Frank Fry (Norman Lloyd), a surly character who gave Kane the gasoline-filled fire extinguisher that resulted in the man’s death.

Compared to later Hitchcock films, this is a fairly straight-forward wartime potboiler, although the director’s hand does help elevate Saboteur about the crowd. It reworks the basic plot of The 39 Steps, which would also be foundation of Hitchcock’s later classics like The Man Who Knew Too Much and North By Northwest. Many of the standard Hitchcock trademarks are here, most notably the blonde heroine. Pat Martin (Priscilla Lane) is not, however, the frigid, distant, psychologically damaged figure that would dominate later Hitchcock films.

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