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24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Absent Minded Pitcher, January 29, 2004
This review is from: It Happens Every Spring [VHS] (VHS Tape)
Any fan of classic comedy movies like the "Absent-Minded Professor" will enjoy this movie. The original "Angels in the Outfield" was a classic that lead to a remake. Surprisingly they haven't remade this one, it is a great movie too. Good cast, story, and direction make this fun for the whole family. When a professor comes up with a material from his lab that causes a baseball to avoid wood bats the results are hysterical. Ray Miland, and the rest the cast give good performances. Ray Milland typically did serious roles like his award winning "Lost Weekend", but he does a fine job in this slightly zany comedy. I am sorry to see this is out of print and the scalpers here want your first born to buy it. We can only hope the studio puts this out on DVD soon. Until then I will keep a sharp eye out for it being televised. Great movie or not I'm not paying thirty-five plus dollars for a VHS tape.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
PLAY BALL...!!, June 1, 2003
This review is from: It Happens Every Spring [VHS] (VHS Tape)
Even if you're not a big baseball fan, this good-natured comedy should still grab you. Ray Milland stars as a mild-mannered, but all-American college professor who has a secret passion for baseball, and gets a little nutty every Spring, when the season starts up. His twin passions -- baseball and chemistry -- collide when he accidentally invents a substance that repels wood... just the thing to use if you want to become a major-league pitching star overnight, and rake in the big bucks when every pitcher you come up against gets dusted when you use the super goo. What's weird about this Truman-era film is that Milland is never confronted as being a fraud or a cheat, even though he's obviously behaving unethically and taking unfair advantage of friends and foes alike. He's worried about getting caught by his fiancee (the reason he's trying to raise the money is so he can settle down with her), but when he becomes a national sensation, everybody jumps on the bandwagon and becomes a fan, including her sports-hating father, the campus dean. But nobody ever ever discovers his secret and delivers a big lecture telling him it's not right to cheat, etc. etc., and Milland makes it through the season with his fraud undetected. Setting ethics aside, the screwball elements of this film are quite enjoyable, and even if you're not a big sports buff (I'm sure not) it's a lot of fun. Recommended!
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
and it's contagious, April 10, 2002
This review is from: It Happens Every Spring [VHS] (VHS Tape)
Vernon Simpson (Ray Milland) is a graduate student at a Midwestern university with two seemingly unrelated problems in his life. The first is that he hasn't completed his doctorate in chemistry yet and so isn't qualified for any of the positions, in the academy or in business, that would enable him to marry and support his girlfriend, Deborah Greenleaf (Jean Peters), who just happens to be the dean's daughter. The second is that starting in April and lasting into October he becomes oddly preoccupied and suffers from a strange tendency toward absent-mindedness--it happens every spring. That span of months, of course, coincides with baseball season and Vernon, it turns out, is a die-hard fan of the St. Louis club, which just needs pitching help this season in order to be a contender. So even as Vernon struggles to make his experiments work and to finish his thesis, he hangs on every pitch of every game, oblivious to all around him, including his students and Deborah. But then the hand of fate intervenes and solves all of Vernon's problems--well, kinda. A baseball comes flying in through his laboratory window from the nearby practice field and, though it irreparably damages all his hard work, it quite accidentally creates an entirely new and uniquely valuable formula. This remarkable substance, of which Vernon is only able to salvage one panfull, makes the baseball that landed in it avoid wood. The next morning Vernon tests his discovery on the practice field and finds that his pitches are indeed unhittable (note that his batting practice catcher is Alan Hale, Jr.--The Skipper), swerving around and hopping over the wooden bats. Hastily asking a leave of absence from Dean Greenleaf, Vernon hops a train to St. Louis and presents himself to the club's incredulous manager and the initially hostile owner demanding $1,000 for each of the thirty wins he guarantees. Soon Vernon, calling himself King Kelly so that Deborah's sports-hating father won't know how he's earning a living, is pitching St. Louis to victory after victory. Veteran catcher Monk Lanigan (Paul Douglas) is put in charge of the flaky but valuable phenom and together they lead the team to the World Series. Entirely predictable zaniness follows every step of the way, but it's all great fun. Milland is surprisingly daffy and Paul Douglas is great. The special effects are joyously primitive. The fact that Vernon is cheating is a little disturbing--though a strangely common theme of baseball movies from Angels in the Outfield to Damn Yankees to The Natural--but in the end he is inevitably required to rely on himself, rather than weird science. It remains inexplicable that even a minor baseball movie like this one can be so engaging and entertaining, while other sports (with the exception of boxing) produce almost no good movies. I've no more explanation for this phenomenon than Vernon evers offers for his formula, but this film proves it true once again. Watch it every spring. GRADE : B
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