Hello again, all you bee-yoo-tiful sports fans!

Hi there, great thread topic... French director Luc Besson was inspired by his own love of under-water sport, having been a scuba diver in his youth. 
Le Grand Bleu (1988). Besson's film tells a thrilling story of the friendship and sporting rivalry between two leading contemporary champion free divers. 
Based loosely on two of the leading divers of the 20th century, the film gives a fascinating insight into a sport I knew nothing about.
Free diving is a form of underwater diving that relies entirely on breath-holding, from natural origins it has evolved into a competitive sport with varying disciplines.
The current record in the "Constant weight apnea" as depicted in the film, is an incredible 130 m for men & 114 m for women. 
Filmed in picturesque Mediterranean settings and crystal clear waters, in the French Cinéma du look visual style...

 The competition here was Maximum depth following a guide line. The line acts solely as a guide and only a single hold of the rope to stop the descent and start the ascent is permitted. Dropping dive weights is not permitted. Both bi-fins and mono-fin are permitted and the technique is irrelevant, a depth tag is retrieved as proof...

                               
                                                                      

                                                   

                            

I can’t remember when I was *not* a baseball fan. I was never really interested in any other sport although where ever I lived, as in the Chicago area for example, I always had a vague idea of how the local teams – the Bulls and the Bears – were doing. A lot of the most famous baseball movies I haven’t liked too much. Here are five, though, that I highly recommend.

The Winning Team / Lewis Seiler (1952). Ronald Reagan plays early 20th century pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander (“Alex the Great”) who was stricken with the, for the time, feared condition of epilepsy. In fact, the studio (Warner) was so cowardly, they didn’t allow the “E” word to be spoken in the movie although Reagan, much to his credit, lobbied for it to be used

Fear Strikes Out / Robert Mulligan (1957). Fine performances by Anthony Perkins and Karl Malden are featured in this bio-pic of Boston Red Sox veteran Jimmy Pearsall who battled mental health problems.

The Bad News Bears / Michael Ritchie (1976). A fine comedic twist on the old team-of-misfits-compete-for-the-championship trope.

A League of Their Own / Penny Marshall (1992). Too many memorable scenes and lines (see the O.P.) to mention.

Bull Durham / Ron Shelton (1988). Plenty of drama, plenty of comedy and Shelton’s witty screenplay make this a keeper.

Worst Baseball Movie Ever Made:

The Babe Ruth Story / Roy Del Ruth (1947). Most of the blame can be laid to the screenplay but there is plenty for everybody involved. Babe Ruth and his wife Claire attended the premiere but left the theater in the early going. History does not – as far as I can tell – record at what point they made their exit. I got through the first half of the film by trying to guess which episode sent them home. It might be the performance by William Bendix who makes the Babe into a naïve childlike hick. Or maybe it was when the movie-Babe realized that opposing teams where hitting his curve ball because he stuck his tongue out whenever he threw one. Or how about his pursuit of his future wife, a nightclub chorus performer, which included a “comic” piece where he enters the women’s dressing room (maybe the recent ex-White House resident saw this movie) to find her and then follows her out on stage and does a dance for the audience. Or, I bet this is it, he cures a young crippled boy by saying, “Hiya kid,” as he walked by. It takes real stamina to get through this movie.

Small Town Story (1953) 
An entertaining football-related thriller, directed by prolific filmmaker Montgomery Tully. This sporting film was lost after release, on the BFI 75 Most Wanted list for decades it was only a few years back when a copy resurfaced, rereleased in 2016.
Set in the world of UK association football, what I found most interesting was the story of a provincial sport team, here the Oldchester FC and how important/beneficial it is to win the seasons competition. As winners the top team is promoted to a higher-grade division the next season, steps toward the number one goal for an aspiring team the English Premier League.

Bob Regan, a talented footballer, has returned from abroad to his small town, he meets up with an old friend who is managing a local football team, Oldchester FC. Regan discovers that the Oldchester club will inherit a substantial sum of money from a late benefactor if they win promotion to the professional league the Third Division.
Present in the cast, are Arsenal footballers, notably sportsman Denis Compton and commentator Raymond Glandenning. Kent Walton stars as Bob Regan he became a very well-known British television sports commentator and presenter.

On the sidelines a subplot of romantic and criminal intrigue with Susan Shaw as the femme fatale…

                    Some great on field soccer action throughout...
                        
                                                      

manfromplanetx

"The Damned United" (2009) is a Based On A True Story movie about the English Leads United football team. It is not particularly distinguished or oddball-ish, but was a pleasant watch and I like the lead actors Michael Sheen and Timothy Spall.

Welcome to baseball! And thanks for the "Foul Play" notice. A few weeks ago on the weekly thread I posted a review of another excellent Japanese mystery, "Points and Lines" (1958).

Baseball has been very popular in Japan since the early 20th century. A brief flashback in Kurosawa's "Ikiru" shows the protag watching his son play baseball.

In 1934 there was a grand tour of Japan by top American baseball all-stars including Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Dom DiMaggio and other future hall-of-famers. Japan had already begun its military aggression by this time, having invaded Manchuria in 1931. Major league catcher Moe Berg was recruited by military intelligence to gather any information he could about Japan. There still exists an 8mm film of the Tokyo skyline taken by Berg from a office building rooftop.

Berg’s story can be told in a great documentary called “The Spy Behind Home Plate” (2019). That same year another film about Berg, a Hollywood bio-pic (“The Catcher Was A Spy”) was released but I didn’t bother with it.

Documentaries are given short shrift by the Oscars and most other movie awarding organizations. They rarely, if ever, appear on Top Movies Of The Year lists, but there are a handful that deserve Best Picture respect right alongside fictional feature films. “The Spy Behind Home Plate” is one of them. I should have had that film on my Best Baseball list.

Ride the Wild Surf (1964) Dir. Don Taylor
Breaking away from the typical beach party surfer movie of the era Ride the Wild Surf is an excellent drama of big wave surfing, filmed in part on location on the North Shore of Hawaii, making famous the iconic big wave break at Waimea Bay.
A showcase of big wave surfing the film aimed to portray surfers and the sport of surfing sincerely. The Waimea footage in the movie was shot by the producers/writers of the film Jo Napoleon and Art Napoleon in late 1962 through March 1963. They experienced a period of historically gigantic swells, as seen in their spectacular film footage.

The story follows Californian surfers Jody Wallis (Fabian), Steamer Lane (Tab Hunter), Chase Colton (Peter Brown) and Eskimo (James Mitchum) who have come to the Hawaiian island of Oahu to ride the world's biggest waves and compete against surfers from all over the world. With macho rivalry the line-up pecking order is soon established, each surfer is pushed to their limits. On the beach some modest romantic drama with some very camp dialogue. Hunter was honest when he said the film "may not have had dialogue by Tennessee Williams but it was work and I was glad to have it… Laughable also are some of the scenes of surfers sitting on boards shot on the Columbia backlot, using back projection.

The sport film is of great interest as it seems to be loosely based on the pioneering surfers, the first ones who braved the giant swells previously considered too dangerous to ride.
Featured as doubles to the actors, are the famous big wave surfers Greg Noll, Mike Dora and Butch Van Artsdalen, the film story could be theirs…

James Mitchum’s Eskimo wears trunks that replicated his stunt double Greg Noll’s famous black & white "jailhouse stripe" boardshorts. Noll who passed away this year was one of the first to ride Waimea Bay. A photo of Noll wearing a similar pair on the beach before a massive wave at Waimea Bay is one of the classic images of big wave surfing.

Ride the Wild Surf is an important surf film, in an era before tow-ins and jet ski rescues, these brave pioneers paddled out on their own taking the sport of surfing to an extreme and thrilling level.
The first film feature for Don Taylor, with distinguished cinematographer Joseph Biroc, in the cast the surfer with the Aussie accent Olympic swim champion Murray Rose as Swag, and a bonus also vivacious beach girl Augie Poole is played by bikini clad Barbara Eden.

                                        

               
 Looking much like his dad... James Mitchum as Eskimo
                             
                                                                                                    
   
From the film Greg Noll doubling as Eskimo