Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ron Briley. The Film in Postwar America: A Critical Study, 1948-1962. Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2011. 214 pp. Paper, $40.00. Ron Briley, editor of two previous collections of essays for McFarland on baseball and American culture, has just published first book-length critical study devoted solely to baseball film in postwar America. And while there is much in this volume of interest to popular readers and fans interested in role of baseball in popular American culture, unfortunately as an academic study this work is of limited value. In study's preface, Briley notes that the baseball film genre of postwar era was more than just a nostalgic enterprise in which young people [...] I could seek to escape reality (3). Accordingly, Briley reads films from period as evincing various tensions that had beset postwar American society, in particular tensions related to gender, race, and class. Further, this preface sets up a useful thematic organization for following films, though this organization is not employed by study itself. Such an organization, in this reviewer's opinion, would have strengthened reading of films and provided better, more fluid connections between individual chapters. This is especially case with biopics, as Briley is often referencing earlier discussion in his later chapters. Instead, chapters are arranged mostly chronologically, with notable exception of chapter 8, Baseball and Supernatural Intervention: It Happens Every Spring (1949), Angels in Outfield and Rhubarb (1951), a chapter organized thematically by discussing three of four supernatural films included in study. Other than resulting length of chapter, this reviewer sees no reason why discussion of Damn Yankees (1958) could not have been included in this chapter. In a similar vein, all of biopics could have been included in one larger section, given Briley's particular strength in individual chapters for establishing importance of biopic as a subgenre within baseball film. All that said, there is much value in discussion of various movies. The individual chapters (with one exception, noted above) focus on one film and read that film both within context of American social anxieties of time as well as against historical figures and events depicted in films. This, of course, would be of particular interest to fans of players whose biopics are included in this study: Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Jim Thorpe, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Dizzy Dean, and Jimmy Piersall. It is this reviewer's opinion that chapters focusing on biopics are strongest chapters because they demonstrate best balance between discussion of film, situation within social/cultural contexts, and comparison to historical record. Fans of individual players whose lives have been depicted (or romanticized, as Briley smartly demonstrates) in these films will find much valuable discussion in these pages. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".