Jackie Robinson, the great Brooklyn Dodgers player who integrated Major League Baseball, is the subject of Ken Burns' latest PBS documentary.(Photo: Hutton Archive, Getty Images)
A Ken Burns film about Jackie Robinson might seem inevitable, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful — or any less welcome.
Spend just a few minutes with Jackie Robinson (PBS, Monday and Tuesday at 9 ET/PT, *** 1/2 out of four), a four-hour, two-part film from Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon, and you can sense why the story of the man who broke baseball’s major-league color barrier would call out to our greatest film historian. There’s Robinson’s status as one of the greatest players in a sport that is one of Burns’ well-known passions. There’s the involvement of another Burns’ passion, jazz, in both the period music and the score, composed by Wynton Marsalis.
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