I know nothing about baseball, but I’m pretty sure it’s against the rules to doctor the ball to guarantee no one can hit it.…
The discussion of that dishonesty never comes up in It Happens Every Spring. Otherwise, it’s a nice little late 1940s Fox feature with the cast to match–Paul Douglas, Jean Peters, and Ray Collins. Douglas and Peters are particularly good, with Peters in the thankless girlfriend role that I don’t think she played often or at least, I’ve never seen her in it before. She and Douglas only have a scene together, but it makes you wish they’d done a movie together. Douglas is, of course, great.
It’s Ray Milland, as the forty-seven-year old “kid,” who comes off worst. He’s not particularly charming and the film’s incredibly dull when he’s moving the story along. It’s not even his obvious maturity that makes him so boring, it’s his distance from the whole thing. Spring doesn’t have much of a story (it fails to be either an American baseball film or a character piece), but it’s got a cast. Milland seems to have no interest in it. He’s not putting anything into the picture.
The writing is all right in spots–I particularly love how Douglas can get any piece of dialogue out and make it sound good–and it’s by Valentine Davies, who worked on The Bridges at Toko-Ri, which is great. Still, he couldn’t make this film move. It’s less than ninety minutes and it drags.
It occurs to me that I’ve only ever seen two other Milland pictures: Dial M for Murder and The Big Clock, both years ago. I don’t remember him ever impressing me. Spring does nothing to contribute. He’s just so ineffective, kind of like they wanted Cary Grant and couldn’t get him.
But Paul Douglas is great.
CREDITS
Directed by Lloyd Bacon; screenplay by Valentine Davies, based on a story by Davies and Shirley W. Smith; director of photography, Joseph MacDonald; edited by Bruce B. Pierce and Dorothy Spencer; music by Leigh Harline; produced by William Perlberg; released by 20th Century Fox.
Starring Ray Milland (Prof. Vernon K. Simpson), Jean Peters (Deborah Greenleaf), Paul Douglas (Monk Lanigan), Ed Begley (Edgar Stone), Ted de Corsia (Manager Jimmy Dolan), Ray Collins (Prof. Alfred Greenleaf), Jessie Royce Landis (Mrs. Greenleaf), Alan Hale Jr. (Schmidt) and William Murphy (Tommy Isabell).
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