Eight Men Out (1988)

Loyalty has its limits, especially when the people at the top keep taking and never give anything back. John Sayles' "Eight Men Out," adapted from Eliot Asinof's detailed book, shows how American sports reached a low point in 1919, the year eight members of the Chicago White Sox conspired to throw the World Series. Sayles wrote his script years before the film was finally made in 1988, a true labor of love, and it proves that a movie can be historically faithful in an era of artistic license. And what a story it is. The "Black Sox" scandal returned to the spotlight a year later in "Field of Dreams," but its details are far less well known. "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, the heart of that film, is portrayed here by D.B. Sweeney accurately as illiterate and batting left-handed, but he isn't the center of this story. Instead, the focus falls on star pitcher Eddie Cicotte (Sayles regular David Strathairn), who took the gamblers' money after the team's penny-pinching owner, Charles Comiskey (Clifton James), cheated him out of a promised bonus, and third baseman Buck Weaver (John Cusack), who refused the bribe but never reported it. The film plays to Sayles' strength, the ensemble drama, introducing stingy owners, notorious gamblers like Arnold Rothstein (Michael Lerner), a stern new baseball commissioner (John Anderson), small-time crooks (Christopher Lloyd among them), crusading sportswriters played by Studs Terkel and Sayles himself and, above all, underpaid players pushed to their breaking point. Charlie Sheen and Michael Rooker co-star. Some may feel it isn't as visceral as it could be, but there's striking authenticity in watching gifted athletes force their bodies to play badly, a true heartbreak on the nation's diamond. Beautifully detailed, like Sayles' earlier labor drama "Matewan," it shows how everyone lost: the players, the gamblers and, above all, the fans who love the game.