It Happens Every Spring (1949, Lloyd Bacon)

I know nothing about baseball, but I’m pretty sure it’s against the rules to doctor the ball to guarantee no one can hit it….

The discussion of that dishonesty never comes up in It Happens Every Spring. Otherwise, it’s a nice little late 1940s Fox feature with the cast to match–Paul Douglas, Jean Peters, and Ray Collins. Douglas and Peters are particularly good, with Peters in the thankless girlfriend role that I don’t think she played often or at least, I’ve never seen her in it before. She and Douglas only have a scene together, but it makes you wish they’d done a movie together. Douglas is, of course, great.

It’s Ray Milland, as the forty-seven-year old “kid,” who comes off worst. He’s not particularly charming and the film’s incredibly dull when he’s moving the story along. It’s not even his obvious maturity that makes him so boring, it’s his distance from the whole thing. Spring doesn’t have much of a story (it fails to be either an American baseball film or a character piece), but it’s got a cast. Milland seems to have no interest in it. He’s not putting anything into the picture.

The writing is all right in spots–I particularly love how Douglas can get any piece of dialogue out and make it sound good–and it’s by Valentine Davies, who worked on The Bridges at Toko-Ri, which is great. Still, he couldn’t make this film move. It’s less than ninety minutes and it drags.

It occurs to me that I’ve only ever seen two other Milland pictures: Dial M for Murder and The Big Clock, both years ago. I don’t remember him ever impressing me. Spring does nothing to contribute. He’s just so ineffective, kind of like they wanted Cary Grant and couldn’t get him.

But Paul Douglas is great.

Boys’ Night Out (1962, Michael Gordon)

Ah, the 1960s sex comedy. I guess Hollywood was ecstatic to be able to use the word sex in a film back then. Actually, watching the film, I thought it was later, maybe 1966. But it couldn’t have been, because Kim Novak wasn’t making films in ’66 (according to IMDb). Kim Novak has always gotten a bad rap (I thought Maltin said she’d never delivered a natural performance, but that’s not the case according to IMDb’s reprint of his bio of her, so it was probably Ebert). Kim Novak’s a good actor. She comes out best in this film, though Garner has a few good moments and Tony Randall does an interesting precursor–in body language–of Niles Crane.

The film is mildly amusing, not particularly good or well-made. William Bendix is in it for a bit as a bartender and he’s great (Bendix is usually great). These “sex comedies” didn’t understand how to construct a good conclusion, even though the romantic comedy conclusion had been in place since the mid-1930s. It’s like they forgot them for a bit and you got stuck with bad endings, without rising music and such. The “morals” of the film–the intent on the husband’s part can translate, after he gets caught, into a better marriage–are incredibly offensive, another aspect of the “sex comedy,” one best exemplified by A Guide for the Married Man.

The 1960s are an incredibly odd period of cinema (not just American). They didn’t quite know what to do–Lolita was the same year as Boys’ Night Out and the same studio too. You had two forward-moving film movements, both arguably aimed at the mass market, both building on what came before, but one a little bit less self-aware (the sex comedy). Odd how it all worked out. I wonder if there was ever a specific breaking point where the pendulum got stuck….