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The Brooklyn Dodgers, from Jackie Robinson's breaking baseball's color barrier to their move to Los Angeles, a dozen years later. The Dodgers epitomize the diverse working-class, in contrast with the white uptown Yankees, and come oh-so-close to winning the World Series before it finally happens in 1955. By then, Ebbets Field is crumbling, ticket sales are off, fans have moved to the suburbs, and Robert Moses is blocking Walter O'Malley's plan to build a stadium at the terminus of the Long Island Railroad. When Los Angeles makes O'Malley an offer he can't refuse, an era comes to an end: in 1958 the Dodgers and cross-town-rival Giants go West, leaving the ghosts of Flatbush. This is a documentary about a baseball team - and 'Titanic' was about a boat ride. 'Brooklyn Dodges: The Ghosts of Flatbush' is a great story, wonderfully told. If you live in the United States, or ever have, you will think this a wonderful investment of two hours.

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It doesn't matter whether you like (or even understand) baseball, or ever set foot in Brooklyn, or whether you were alive in 1957, when the Brooklyn Dodgers suddenly disappeared, and major league baseball came to California. To be sure, this is the story of a baseball club and the community in which it lived. Told not just through beautiful use of film, still photographs, and sound clips, but also through riveting comments from a lot of people who aren't kids any more, but who seem transported back to another era by recalling when life and the Dodgers were pretty much indistinguishable from each other, a time when the priest at Sunday mass would tell the congregants that there would be no sermon on that hot summer day - and that everyone should go home and pray for Dodgers first baseman Gil Hodges to get out of his hitting slump (which he did). The viewer sees and hears present indignation and horror in the voice and the face of a 70+-year-old at the fact that his 5th grade teacher to allow the class to listen to the final game of the World Series. But it is also the story of America, and particularly post-WWII America - the era of 'the boys of summer' that began in 1947, the year that Jackie Robinson became the first black man to play major league ball (and the NL's Rookie of the Year), and President Truman spoke out against discrimination based on race and color and began the first federal study of civil rights.

(Robinson played the lead role. The president followed, at a distance.) Adeptly and entertainingly (though yes, a nearby box of tissues may be necessary), the movie's makers show us effects of suburban sprawl and urban decay, the culture of the highway and the automobile, and the end of cheap and efficient urban mass transportation, and the growth of the United States into a nation whose important cities stretched from sea to shining sea- not just as far west as St. As serious as this all sounds, it is wonderfully entertaining and incredibly moving. 'Brooklyn Dodgers: The Ghosts of Flatbush' is don't miss television.

Ghosts of Flatbush DVD - Brooklyn Dodgers HBOBrooklyn Dodgers: Ghosts of Flatbush was a 2. HBO sports that chronicled the last ten years of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

With: Narrator: Liev Schreiber. On its way to delivering an engrossing docu about the effects of postwar suburban flight on New York City, HBO gets sidetracked a bit by baseball’s finest hour. What makes “The of Flatbush” compelling is underdog Brooklyn itself and the March of Time-like events, including the loss of its beloved ballclub, that stripped the borough of its uniqueness; but the story of Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier seems too tempting — if often told — for the filmmakers to truncate. Docu premieres Wednesday, giving baseball junkies a quick fix, with no games skedded the day after the All-Star tilt. More Reviews The docu’s first hour covers well-worn ground, from the origins of the team’s name (Trolley ) to the Robinson saga, from the feud between co-owners and Walter O’Malley to the team’s gut-wrenching 1951 playoff loss to the rival New York Giants. It includes recent revelations, first made elsewhere, that Dodger shortstop Pee Wee Reese, celebrated for casually putting a friendly arm around Robinson to silence racist fans, didn’t make the gesture until after Robin-son’s tumultuous first season.

Still, the filmmakers do get one nugget — a photo of aptly named Dodger favorite Dixie Walker looking away from the camera during the team picture in 1947, Robinson’s rookie year, as a silent protest against integration. Walker would be traded from the team in the off-season. Multicultural voices of those who grew up in the borough tie Robinson’s and the ’ groundbreaking accomplishment to Brooklyn, a place of immigrants, who the docu contrasts socioeconomically with the era’s comparatively well-heeled Yankee fans. There are echoes of David Halberstam’s “The ‘50s” in documenting the suburban flight from Brooklyn to Long Island, where Levittown was offering the postwar generation affordable homes, and visionaries like New York City’s nevertheless intransigent planning commissioner Robert Moses were building the roads that enabled the migration. By the late ‘50s, Brooklyn had already begun to slip. The trolley cars for which the Dodgers were indirectly named went belly up in 1956; Coney Island was already in decline; the original Brooklyn Eagle newspaper had folded. It is Moses, not O’Malley, who the docu portrays as most responsible for the Dodgers leaving town, with his refusal to condemn property at the Brooklyn termi-nus to the Long Island Railroad on which the Dodger owner wanted to build a new ballpark to replace the antiquated Ebbets Field.

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The site Moses offered O’Malley was the land on which the Mets now play: Flushing Meadows — in Queens. Former Dodger g.m. Buzzie Bavasi quotes O’Malley as the latter considered his options in L.A. Or Gotham: “ ‘We are not going to Flushing Meadows,’ he said.

‘We’re the Brooklyn Dodgers. Whether we move 3,000 miles or 30 miles, we will not be the Brooklyn Dodgers.’ ” Talking to Dodger fans of the era about the plans to move to Flushing, it’s clear the still-hated O’Malley is right. Either move would rip the heart out of Brooklyn.

Perhaps the docu’s most compelling achievement is unearthing footage of the packed meeting, put together at Gracie Mansion by Mayor Robert Wagner, between O’Malley and Moses at which the Dodger owner, in heavily accented working-class Brooklynese, restates his demand for the new ballpark, and a disgusted Moses, with upper-class diction, accuses O’Malley of holding the city hostage to his plans. Other part-two highlights include the recounting of a fateful note written by O’Malley on a napkin at the 1956 World Series, and Dodger fans’ memories of their individual celebrations after the team won the ‘55 Series — most amusingly a tooth accidentally broken by a crucifix. Colchester mascot 1600 manual. Those interviewed in part two include former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Peter O’Malley and former Los Angeles mayor James Hahn. ( to read Army Archerd’s interview with Vin Scully, a notable absentee.) In painting its most recent images of Brooklyn as a crumbling, jilted neighborhood, however, the docu seems to ignore gentrification in the borough, now grown over more with Starbucks than vacant lots, and less a wasteland symbolized by the image of Coney Island’s rotting Cyclone roller coaster (since refurbished) than the hopeful home to the minor league Brooklyn Cyclones.

Archivists are often the stars here, digging up memorable black-and-white stills of Brooklynites celebrating the Dodgers’ World Series victory as well as the Oct. 8, 1957, memo from O’Malley officially declaring the team’s decision to leave town.

Tech credits are generally exemplary. However, the playing, over opening and closing images, of the overused “There Used to Be a Ballpark Right Here” (which purportedly was written about Ebbets Field) feels cliched, made more jarring by the fact that the song is sung by Frank Sinatra, more associated with another New York team; his version of “New York, New York” is played in Yankee Stadium whenever the home team wins.

Brooklyn Dodgers: The Ghosts of Flatbush Production: Produced by HBO Sports, in collaboration with Major League Baseball Prods. Executive producers, Ross Greenburg, Rick Bernstein, David Check, David Ga-vant; producers, Ezra Edelman, Amani Martin; senior producer, Brian Hyland; writer, Aaron Cohen. Crew: Camera (color), Thom Stukacs; editors, Charles Olivier, Jason Schmidt; music, Gary Lionelli; associate producers, Megan Lardner, Caroline Waterlow. Running time: 120 MIN. Cast: Narrator: Liev Schreiber.