Joseph "Shoeless Joe" Jackson

The movie Field of Dreams was based on W. P. Kinsella's book Shoeless Joe and starred Kevin Costner and Amy Madigan as Ray and Amy Kinsella. The Kinsellas are Iowa farmers who sit on the porch and watch the corn grow, but when Ray hears a voice telling him, "If you build it, they will come," he carves a baseball diamond from a corn field, and the first to appear is Shoeless Joe Jackson, played by Ray Liotta. Burt Lancaster plays Dr. Graham, who always wanted to play pro ball, and James Earl Jones is writer Terence Mann. "Jones and Lancaster create small, sharp character portraits," wrote movie critic Roger Ebert, "two older men who have taken the paths life offered them, but never forgotten what baseball represented to them in their youth." Ebert said, "This is the kind of movie Frank Capra might have directed, and James Stewart might have starred in—a movie about dreams."