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.

My Gal Sal

I've been recording a bunch of movies that have recently started showing up in the FXM rotation. One of them is My Gal Sal. It's going to be on FXM again tomorrow (August 3) at 11:25 AM and again Tuesday at 7:30 AM.

Victor Mature plays Paul Dresser, born Dreiser and, yes, the older (by about 14 years) brother of writer Theodore Dreiser (who has a writing credit on this movie having written about his elder brother). At the start of the movie, Dresser is living in Indiana with his parents and younger siblings, about the right age to go off to seminary, which is something his father wants him to do, but something in which he has no interest. So Paul decides he's going to run off and try to make a name for himself.

He winds up as an unwitting prop in the medicine show run by Col. Truckee (Walter Catlett), who also bilks people in small towns in other ways. One of those small towns results in Paul's being tarred and feathered, only to be Mae Collins (Carole Landis), another member of the show. This gets Paul a full-time job in the show, doing novelty piano numbers playing songs he's written.

At one of these shows, a carriage shows up at the edges of the show. In the carriage are actress Sally Elliott (Rita Hayworth), and her boyfriend/manager Fred Haviland (John Sutton). Sally is the more respectable type of actress, who would be in New York if she could make it there but is instead doing a national tour; she and Fred are pretty clearly slumming by watching this small town show during a break in her Chicago performance. But she likes Paul's piano playing, so she gives him two tickets to the Chicago show.

Paul and Mae attend, and they've obviously never been to such a show, as the laugh at all the wrong times, this being a musical revue and not a comedy. Their overly loud laughing and otherwise uncouth manners enrage poor Sally, who decides that she hates Paul. Of course, the movie to this point has been set up such that we know that attitude is ultimately going to change by the last reel. But at this point, Sally hates Paul enough that she's perfectly OK stealing one of his songs.

Paul eventually leaves the medicine show and makes his way to New York, where he meets music publisher Pat Hawley (James Gleason). He's heard the big hit from Sally's new show, she now being in New York as well. And Paul realizes that it's the melody he wrote back in Indiana, with her having set new words to it! Paul is pissed, but thankfully, he's got the manuscript to prove that he wrote the song. So Sally is forced to join forces with Paul and put her face on the sheet music, along with both of their names.

Paul has by this time fallen in love with Sally, not realizing that Fred has already planned to propse marriage to her. Paul is also so obnoxiously forward with Sally that it's no wonder that Sally doesn't particularly respond well to his advances. It doesn't help that there's a Countess (Mona Maris) apparently trying to pursue Paul even though she's married. Along the way we get a bunch of musical numbers, on the way to Paul and Sally winding up together at the end.

My Gal Sal was released in early 1942, a couple of months after the US entered World War II. The movie is sentimental and old fashioned, considering that Dresser was at his peak of success in the Gay Nineties, but with a nation at war, you can understand why a certain segment of the population would love this sort of nostalgia. It fits in well with the sort of musical Fox was producing in the 1940s, although it's not quite as good as the musicals that featured Betty Grable. It's also not particularly true to history; as far as I could tell, there was no such actress as the Sally Elliott character in Dresser's life. (Dresser's life also ended badly once his brand of music fell out of style. That, of course, is not shown.)

My Gal Sal is available on DVD on two different Fox box sets if you don't have FXM.