Friday's Old Fashioned: It Happens Every Spring (1949)

At the conclusion of “It Happens Every Spring” on Turner Classic Movies, Ben Mankiewicz explained that then-Major League Baseball commissioner Happy Chandler, refused to grant his organization's participation in the film, which had planned on using actual team names, ballparks and players. Chandler, ever contradictory to his nickname, explained that the film was “the story of a cheat” and that cheating was not in the spirit of America’s so-called Pastime. Never mind, of course, that Major League Baseball had been embroiled in innumerable cheating scandals (see: “Eight Men Out”), it also had only allowed black players entry to its supposedly plain-jane game but two years earlier. Ah, baseball, always going to absurd lengths to protect the illusion of its noble soul.

It’s baseball season once again here in the States (and a part of Canada) and as always happens this time of spring, men and women, young and old alike, become absent-minded at the sound of the crack of the bat, the fly ball popping against the leather of the glove, the fizzy froth of the Old Style drawn from a Wrigley Field vendor’s tap. This is what happens to Vernon Simpson (Ray Milland), chemistry professor at a St. Louis university, whose work toward a doctorate degree finds trouble post-Opening Day. The degree is crucial because to earn it means he will become director of a new research laboratory on campus and to become director would mean the necessary financial windfall that would allow the University President (Ray Collins) to allow Vernon to ask for his daughter’s, Debbie (Jean Peters), hand in marriage. Money means everything. Just ask Albert Pujols!

Alas, the experiment Vernon expects to catapult him to his doctorate goes necessarily awry, yet it also yields a pitcher’s mound-shaking discovery – a liquid compound, impossible to duplicate as it is impossible to know what created it, that if rubbed on a baseball, propels it to leap up and over a piece of wood (like, say, you know, a baseball bat). Heavens to murgatroyd! So long before Hollywood “rewarded” Lake Bell for her glorious “In A World…” triumph with some head-hanging nonsense called “Million Dollar Arm”, Professor Vernon Simpson discovered the Million Dollar Liquid Compound.

Via analytical chicanery, Simpson always quoting numbers and facts, resisting embellishments, finagles himself a tryout with the local St. Louis baseball team, never referenced beyond its city nor in the context of its league, by guaranteeing he can win 30 games and deliver a championship. And in spite of Manager Dolan’s (Ted de Corsia) and Owner Stone’s (Ed Begley) skepticism, when Simpson’s secretly juiced…er, liquid compounded…ball hops up and over the bat of every player who swings, they sign him to a handsome contract based on per game performance. If Simpson makes good on 30 wins, he will have the money to wed Debbie. There may be joy in Mudville, after all.

In a way, Simpson, who re-christens himself “Kelly” (which inevitably begets "King" Kelly) to avoid detection by the University President who has permitted Simpson to take a leave of absence, is Sidd Finch Before Sidd Finch. Finch, if you don’t recall, was The Great Sports Illustrated Hoax of 1985, invented by the late writer George Plimpton, purported to be an exotic and entirely unknown New York Mets’ rookie who could hurl a fastball at 168 MPH. Needing to keep his real identity a secret, Kelly, employing his pal, roommate and catcher, Monk (Paul Douglas), refuses all photographs and maintains mystery even as he dominates every game in which he pitches.

The premise of “It Happens Every Spring” is, of course, inherently absurd, and yet it still suggests something fundamental about the game we hold so dear. After all, here is a chemist, a man of finite detail, who has come across a startling sort of equation he cannot explain or re-create. And despite his devotion to elemental truths, he props himself up on fabrication, sculpting a myth even if the myth outweighs all the pertinent facts. At the same time, as his baseball literally leaps over bats and leaves batters and umpires and spectators and sportswriters wondering if they’re seeing things, no one follows up or probes deeper or looks to see if this “Kelly” has something secretive squired away in his glove. In other words, they bury their heads in the sand. Not that this ever happens.

Chandler may have been a hypocrite, but he was also right. The film, entertaining though it may be, is the story of a cheat, and the cheat quite plainly gets away with it. This could never happen in a modern day movie which would demand a comeuppance to convey that lessons are always learned and that there is no cheating in baseball. But there is always cheating in baseball. It happens every spring.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Niagara (1953)

I have long thought of Henry Hathaway's fairly standard thriller "Niagara" as the ultimate Marilyn Monroe movie. Please do not misunderstand, it is not a better movie than "Some Like It Hot" and it does not contain an image as iconic as "The Seven Year Itch" and it is not as intriguing a sociological study as "The Misfits." But... The metaphor at which the filmmakers are driving is hammered home in a monologue delivered by Joseph Cotten, playing Monroe's onscreen husband, when he lectures the wife of a young couple: "You're young, you're in love. Well, I'll give you a warning. Don't let it get out of hand, like those falls out there."

In reality, the most interesting metaphors in "Niagara" are the ones unspoken, the ones viewed through the prism of time. Niagara Falls has always been fascinating to me, a place of unfathomable natural beauty and simultaneously a place overrun by tackiness and souvenir shops and yellow rain slickers. Don't you wish you could have viewed Niagara Falls as God intended, all on their lonesome, just you and the water and the roar, way back when in the 16th century? Oh, that must've been a sight to see. And isn't that, sort of, a woman named Norma Jeane? As beautiful a woman as God ever intended but ruined and ravaged by the hangers-on and the trauma and turmoil that surrounded her at every turn.

More to the metaphorical point, "Niagara" is not really even a Marilyn Movie. Oh, she's splattered all over that elegantly trashy poster and her name is billed first because of course it is. But if you simply read the screenplay without knowing who was playing who you would view her part as critical, a good part, but not the starring role. Cast Marilyn, though, and just like when she strolls into that posh party in "All About Eve" and guilelessly wrests the film right outta Bette Davis's overlord hands for a few moments, "Niagara" becomes hers. And then, just like her real life, she is moved out of the picture much too soon. (I mean, Spoiler Alert!!!)

"Niagara" technically belongs to Jean Peters. She is Polly, one half of a married couple that comes to the Canadian side of the Falls for their overdue honeymoon. Her husband is Ray, the kind of guy who hopes to "catch up on my reading" ON HIS HONEYMOON and never.stops.smiling. Seriously. Never. He is played by Casey Adams and the original New York Times review notes he is "a mite too enthusiastic." A mite? Just a mite? He is six million cubic feet more than a mite too enthusiastic, I assure you.

They roll into a romantic lodge with a romantic outlook over the Falls and wind up right next door to George (Cotten) and Rose (Monroe) Loomis. He is ex-army and just discharged from a military mental hospital. She is simply scandalouz, trotting around in high heels and curve-amplifying dresses and seeing a Casanova on the sly. At one point she coolly invades a party happening in the motel parking lot and while you don’t actually hear the obligatory record scratch, you will swear you do.

The driving plot point is that Rose and her Casanova are scheming to off George, but this seems more out of story necessity than any sort of acute psychology. There is no real exploration of George's mental breakdown aside from the traditional Throwing The Table Over Scene. Rose's Casanova has no personality whatsoever, established entirely through his shoes and his tune-whistling which are really just tiny pieces of story. Rose mostly gets by on her Marilyn-ness, which is considerable, waking up mornings already in full lipstick and staging a phony if glorious mental breakdown.

Meanwhile Polly and Ray find themselves dragged into this whole sordid affair simply on account of their proximity to the Loomis Cabin. Poor Polly. To her right is a murder mystery, to her left is a grinning jack-o-lantern of a husband who is more concerned about meeting up with Jess Kettering – the Vice President of his firm back home who is also at Niagara for some theoretical R&R – than he is with rubbing suntan lotion on his wife’s back. As such, the film sort of becomes a push & pull for the fate of fair Polly, and I can’t help but wonder if this was more apparent in the original script pre-re-writes to punch up Monroe’s part.

She tells George, returning to metaphor-speak, that she’s one of those logs in the river that just hangs around in the calm, resisting the allure of the rapids. Ah, but she seems curiously drawn to the marital parlor game of Mr. & Mrs. Loomis, as if desperate for some sort of drama. Can you blame her? Notice how every tourist attraction they attend, Ray over-protectively latches onto Polly’s arm and escorts her at a rate of speed at which she almost seems uncomfortable. He pours her a glass of water and puts it right to her lips and tips it downward, essentially forcing her to sip until, finally, she grabs that glass outta his damn hands to sip at her own chosen speed. CAN’T HE GIVE HER SOME SPACE???

The film’s inevitable conclusion involves an out-of-gas houseboat drifting down river, threatening to plunge right over the Falls and into the froth below. Naturally, Polly is aboard, placed in peril. She doesn’t care for the rapids, see, she wants the calm. Eventually she is rescued (spoiler alert!). But is she really? I’m not saying in twenty years when she reflects on the monotony of her marriage she will literally wish she had gone over the Falls, I’m just saying she will make that claim in a spousal argument.