We watched “42” for the first time the other night.
The Jackie Robinson biopic had been out since 2013, and we intended to catch it in theaters, then on television, but the timing never seemed to be right. If we had the time, it wasn’t available, or it was 30 minutes in by the time we could sit down to see it.
Although we had read biographies since childhood of the first man to break the modern color barrier in Major League Baseball, we were interested in seeing the 21st-century treatment of the 1946-1947 events.
Plus, several of the scenes had been filmed at Engel Stadium, so we wanted to see how Chattanooga’s former minor league ballpark was used. And the film’s young star, Chadwick Boseman, who was in his mid-30s (but looked much younger) when he played the mid-20s Robinson, had since died at only 43 of colon cancer.
We’re no film critic, but we thought Boseman little resembled Robinson in looks, the movie was over-dramatic in places and it presented a fairy-tale ending that was inconsistent with Robinson’s life. But that’s not why we were interested in the first place.