It Happened in Flatbush

Lloyd Nolan brightened up a lot of movies in supporting roles. The rare occasions he did get to be a lead were mostly in the B movie series as the detective Michael Shayne. One other movie with Nolan in the lead is It Happened in Flatbush. FXM is running it tomorrow at 8:45 AM, and again on Saturday at 4:35 AM.

Brooklyn's baseball team (not called the Dodgers although Ebbets Field was used for establishing shots) is lousy again, to the point that the current manager has up and quit in the middle of the season. The owner, Mac McAvoy (Sara Allgood) is looking for a new manager, and she has just the person in mind. However, she's going to have to go looking for that man....

Frank Maguire (Lloyd Nolan) is in the independent minor leagues, managing a no-name team of no-name players when McAvoy shocks the players by entering the locker room. She's looking for Maguire because she has fond memories of him, and wants to give him a chance to redeem himself. Maguire, for his part, isn't so certain he wants to go back to Brooklyn. Seven years earlier, in a pennant race, he committed an error that cost the team a title, earning him the nickname Butterfingers and the opprobrium of all the Brooklyn fans.

Still, Maguire does take the job. But when he gets to Brooklyn, he finds out that McAvoy has died, bequeathing the team to a consortium of family members, headed by McAvoy's niece Kathryn (Carole Landis). She's an heiress from one of McAvoy's siblings, living as a socialite in Manhattan and knowing next to nothing about either Brooklyn or baseball. She'd just as happily go with the rest of the family and sell the team, but press agent Sam Sloan (William Frawley) convinces them to hold put for at least the rest of the season.

Two things happen. One is that Maguire and Kathryn begin to fall in love. The other is that Maguire shakes things up in the locker room to the point that the team starts winning. But that winning comes at a bit of a price as Maguire's focus on the team causes him to miss a date with Kathryn, who promptly falls out of love with him and is perfectly willing to sell the team out from under him again.

Amazingly, the result is that things suddenly start to go south for Maguire and the team just as the critical final three-game series against the Cardinals is about to begin. Maguire is willing to leave the team for no good reason, and when he does come back to the team, he's somehow unable to manage the team properly unless Kathryn is in the stands. But with this being a feel-good movie released early in the USA's involvement in World War II, it's quite easy to figure out how the movie is going to end.

Nolan and Landis do the best they can with the material, but in the end it's fairly slight and lets them down. Baseball fans may be interested in some of the vintage footage of Ebbets Field, but they'll also be interested (or cringing) in spotting all the baseball-related plot holes, with the most egregious being the climax ignoring that Brooklyn would bat in the bottom of the ninth inning if St. Louis does score the tying run.

In the end, It Happened in Flatbush is utterly pedestrian material that you might want to watch once if you're a Lloyd Nolan or Carole Landis completist, but it's nothing particularly memorable. Judge for yourself, however. The movie has been released to DVD courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme.