Month: August 2018

IMDb meta-data runtime is 1 hour and 27 minutes, rated way too high 7.0 by 1401 cinemitizens.
Genre: Sports, Comedy, Romance, Sy Fy, Nothing

Verdict: Odd and off.
The set-up is this. Ray is a college chemistry professor engaged to the dean’s daughter, working on a consultancy to treat timber to repel pests, borers, fraternity brothers, insects, boors, and any and all of the above. This job will win the dean’s approval by bringing much needed funding to the college and so his consent for the hand and what is connected to it of his daughter.
Into this neat plan intrudes a baseball, hit through a window in the Chem Lab, that obliterates the project, including note books, etc. Depressed, Ray cleans up and notices that the baseball, which got soaked in a solution, is now repelled by wood. It just so happens that Ray is a baseball fan of the First Water and decides this is the way to fortune. He will become a baseball pitcher no one can hit, make dosh, marry daughter …. the end.
While the supporting players were dandy, including the very young skipper from ‘The Minnow,’ the story left me cold. Very cold. There were two reasons, one odd and the other off.
The odd one first to get it out of the way is this. When Ray got on the team in St Louis everyone refers to him as the Kid. He becomes Kid Kelly. Right. A 44 year-old kid, making him older than any other player on the St Louis rosters the time time. Yes, I checked for both the Browns and the Cardinals. Some kid. By the way, Ray was 44 and his romantic interest, Jean Peters was 23 at the time. Make of that what one will.
The 44 year-old kid.
The off irritant is that Ray’s secret was ball tampering. Such ball tampering as Ray gets up to when he rubs the solution on the baseball was outlawed in 1920. End. Illegal. This dead obvious fact any baseball fan in the theatre would know is never broached, skirted, or implied. Huh?
That ball-tampering solution is what gets it a Sy Fy tick.
A slight redemption occurs at the end when Ray notes he made more money in one baseball game than a year of teaching chemistry. Think about that today when athletes make more money individually than entire colleges faculties put together and then tripled.
Ray seems hopelessly inept pretending to be a baseball player. Clearly, like Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig, he had never played baseball in his youth. Yet Ray at least had been as sportsman in his native Wales, and become a member of the Household Cavalry in 1928. That is indicative of his horsemanship. The Great Depression ruined his family and he took to acting for a crust. It seems he slept his way into pictures. He wore a toupee from his mid-thirties and so would have sported it in this picture.
Jean Peters sparkles in this small role but she quit when she married Howard Hughes and disappeared into Santa Monica hills seldom to be seen again. Though the ever reliable Wikipedia has it that the hilltop life was boring and under aliases she did one or more degrees at UCLA.
But the best performance in this movie, and in most others he graced, comes from Paul Douglas whose blue collar approach seems so fresh and direct compared to the ever twitchy Milland. Blue collar Douglas came to affect, but he was born to a wealthy Philadelphia surgeon who sent him to Yale where Paul rebelled, as sons do, and instead played semi-professional football. That led to sports journalism, newspapers and then radio. He liked an audience and soon dabbled in amateur theatrics…and made his way to Hollywood. Many of his films involved sports, like the whimsical and much redone ‘Angels in the Outfield’ (1951).
My glance fell on some of the reviews linked to the IMDb entry and I am moved to remark again on the human condition. One opinionated reviewer huffed and puffed about the film, and was particularly critical of the title because it is never explained. That reviewer needs to get out from under the rock more often. What happens every spring? Even the fraternity bothers know that. Well, two things. One it is the mating season and hence Ray’s round-about courtship of daughter. More importantly here, the baseball season starts!

IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 1 minutes, rated 4.6 by 510 cinemitizens.
Genre: Horror

Verdict: Only for completists.
Set-up. Veda is dead. (What a waste since she is usually a corker.) But then John Carradine is her husband so maybe that explains her preference. He is Dr Max Heinrich von Altermann. Get it? Look at the release date, 17 September 1943. Max and Veda live in foggy Louisiana on the German Coast.
Veda’s brother, Stupid, comes to mourn her and vents his suspicious on anyone with a German name. He brings along Handsome. Neither one of these dorks can drive a car or carry a bag so they have Black Stereotype to look after them. There they find Gale Storm straight from secretarial school typing away, oblivious to everything.
Turns out Max has seen ‘Revolt of the Zombies’ (1931) and ‘King of the Zombies’ (1941) and mashed them together. From ‘Revolt of the Zombies’ he got the idea of an invulnerable (and cheap) army of the living dead and from ‘King of the Zombies’ he got a Germanic mad scientists to unleash such an army on YankeeLand, well, in this case DixieLand. Is that creative thinking, or what? Hmmm
So diabolical is Max that he is experimenting on Mrs Veda in life and in death. The fraternity brothers thought the worst. For them situation normal.
Now Stupid, Handsome, and Stereotype arrive to gum up the works. Stereotype realises almost instantly some creepy things are happening but when he tries to tell Stupid and Handsome they dismiss his reports as the hysteria, foolishness, and ignorance of a black man. The duty of being the butt for the arrogance of superior white men to kick often went to women.
Mantan Moreland
Stereotype investigates and finds out more and more but his information is rejected, ignored, and disregarded even while Stupid and Handsome investigate matters by smoking cigarettes. In this case it is very like, though no doubt unintended, ‘King of Zombies’ where the same black stereotype was far ahead of his white, superior masters.
Bob Steele is there, he of distinctive voice and mien that made him a delightful villain in Westerns, here partly in parody of that sort of role, as a double and triple secret agent to paper over the script holes.
Also in the cast are Uncle Remus and Madame Sul-Te-Wan who played maids, slaves, and natives in countless Hollywoodisms, going back to W. D. Griffith’s ‘The Birth of a Nation’ (1915) and ‘Intolerance’ (1916) and including ‘King Kong’ (1933).
Mantan Moreland has 130 credits on the IMDb. He and other black actors of the era were later reviled for embodying stereotypes as noted above. Madame Sul-Te-Wan said, her choice was to work as a maid and earn $7 a day or to play a maid in a movie and earn $70 a day. She found it an easy choice.
Even at 61 minutes, it seems padded. Carradine sleep walks through this one without any of the intensity and malevolence he could muster. There is not much Veda can do as a corpse,

though she tries. The only energy comes from Stereotype. There are a couple of good one-liners but the fraternity bothers were dozing when they came. The ending in the swamp is neat but leaden in execution.