A quarter century before Oh, God!

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for a bit is the 1951 MGM version of Angels in the Outfield. It's getting another airing on TCM, somewhat surprisingly not as part of a day of baseball movies considering that baseball season is right about here. That airing is tomorrow, March 28, at 1:45 PM.

The movie was filmed in part on location in Pittsburgh, at the old Forbes Field which I think went away in 1970 for Three Rivers Stadium, one of those dual-use monstrosities which has since been demolished itself and replaced with purpose-built stadia for baseball and football. The Pirates were a perennially poor team, and the version here is even worse, with a good portion of the blame being given to manager Guffy McGovern (Paul Douglas). They're so bad that the newspaper is putting a bunch of its writers, including the women's editor Jennifer Paige (Janet Leigh) on the story to try to figure out what's ailing the team. This, even though she doesn't know anything about baseball.

Jennifer goes to a game and discovers that Guffy is incredibly irascible and prone to harsh language, which we of course don't hear since there was a Production Code. (Instead, special effects are used to obscure whatever dialogue is used when Guffy is chewing out his players or the umpires. Also blaming the manager is the sports reporter who handles the radio broadcasts of the games, Fred Bayles (Keenan Wynn). For this, Fred gets fired and becomes an even more ardent opponent of Guffy's.

One day after a game, Guffy is alone out on the field when he hears a voice coming out of nowhere. That voice (voiced by James Whitmore), claims to be an angel, chiding Guffy for his bad language among other things. Indeed, heaven has decided that the Pirates are going to continue to be lousy cellar dwellers until Guffy changes his ways. Unsurprisingly, Guffy doesn't believe that this voice is that of an angel, so the angel responds by sending a bolt of lightning down even though there's only like one cloud in the sky. So Guffy does believe it's an angel, not that he's going to tell anybody considering the obvious fact that nobody's going to believe him.

Amazingly, the team does start doing better. And then one day the nuns from the girls' orphanage (played by Spring Byington and Ellen Corby) take a group of girls to the ball game. One of them, Bridget, excitedly declares that she can see angels! The nuns don't believe her since they can't see the angels. But Jennifer overhears the story from an attendant at the field, and writes it since it's an obvious human interest story. That makes the whole angels thing a national story, although again nobody really believes that there are angels guiding the team, do they? Except maybe Guffy and Bridget. Jennifer, by this time, starts becoming a bit of friends with Guffy as he's been reforming himself in rather strange ways like reading Shakespeare so he can chew the umpires out in Shakespearean language. He even thinks about adopting Bridget, although he realizes that's not really going to happen since they don't normally let single men adopt orphaned girls. You can guess where that part of the story is going, of course.

Matters hit a head when Guffy gets hit in the forehead by a line drive during a game. Concussed, he confesses after the game that there really have been angels helping him. Obviously, nobody believes this any more than they believed Bridget. In the case of a little girl, it's harmless, but when it's the team manager, there's a rather more pressing issue. It leads to an investigation, with Commissioner Hapgood (Lewis Stone) brought in. Guffy causes a ruckus, and that leads the angels to decide jsut before the big game that they're no longer going to help Guffy and the Pirates.

Angels in the Outfield has a lot of the tropes that are common to the more family-friendly sports movies, so it's not to difficult to see what's going to be happening. But it's done with the sort of earnest charm that old Hollywood had, and, thanks to the professionalism of stars like Paul Douglas, Angels in the Outfield actually works.

Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone

Some time back TCM did a prime-time spotlight on some of the films of Marjorie Main. One that I had seen quite a few years back, but did not blog about at the time -- it might even have been before I started blogging -- was Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone. So with that in mind I recorded it and eventually got around to watching it so that I could do this post on it.

Marjorie Main plays Mrs. Hattie O'Malley, a widow living in Proudfoot, MT and running some sort of boarding house; the Montana setting at the start is basically an excuse for Main to do a version of the rustic Ma Kettle character. She gets a sudden call from a radio program in New York which plays her a mystery song for a chance to win a cash and prize package of $50,000, which is a pretty darn big sum for 1950 when the movie was released. She's able to recognize the song, and she's invited on an all-expenses paid trip to New York to receive her winnings.

Cut to Chicago, where John J. Malone (James Whitmore) lives. He's a struggling lawyer, who owes a bunch of money largely because his big client, Steve Kepplar (Douglas Fowley), owes him. Malone had defended Kepplar on an embezzlement charge where Kepplar stole $100K from the firm run by Myron Brynk (Don Porter). Kepplar was convicted, but is about to be paroled now, and Malone would like the money he's owed for his services defending Kepplar. But Malone needs to get in line: Kepplar has an ex-wife Connie (Ann Dvorak) who wants alimony. And, besides, that $100K was never returned to the Brynk business. Still, Brynk offers Kepplar his old job back and to celebrate, they'll go to the same hotel lounge where Mrs. O'Malley is staying on a stopover in Chicago. This, as you can guess, is how the two title characters meet.

Kepplar is a no-show at the big reunion, and the natural suspicion is that he's fleeing the jurisdiction, and absconding with the $100K. His probation officer, Marino (Fred Clark), has good reason to believe that Kepplar is on the train to New York, so he gets on the same train that Mrs. O'Malley will be taking. Malone also gets on the train because he wants his $10,000, even though he should know that the money Kepplar embezzled can't be touched. The ex-Mrs. Kepplar shows up too.

Sure enough, Kepplar is on the train, disguised as a sailor and hiding in the compartment of his girlfriend Lola (Dorothy Malone). But wouldn't you know it, that night Malone returns to his compartment, which conveniently enough for the plot happens to be right next to Mrs. O'Malley's. In that compartment he finds... the undressed body of Steve Kepplar, who has been stabbed to death! Who would want to stab him, and why would the murderer want to remove his clothes? All Mr. Malone knows is that since the body was found in his compartment he's going to be the prime suspect. Mrs. O'Malley sees Malone and the body, and is willing to help in a murder mystery.

Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone is another of those movies where it's easy to see why the people involved in it would want to make it; the premise of another comic murder mystery is one that has obvious appeal. Unfortunately, this one comes across as a bit too manic. Worse, Mr. Malone is just too dishonest to be a sympathetic character, as opposed to a charming person like Nick Charles. I also think it doesn't help that 1950, when the movie was released, was just about the time when stories like this would have started moving to television. So Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone was underwhelming at best.