Take Me Out to the Ball Game Reviews

Dennis Ryan (Frank Sinatra) and Eddie O'Brien (Gene Kelly) are a popular song-and-dance team on the vaudeville circuit who spend their summers playing baseball in a semiprofessional league. Ready to begin a new season, the pair are surprised and delighted to find that a woman, K.C. Higgins (Esther Williams), is the new team owner as well as their manager. Both men find her attractive, but K.C. is only interested in fielding a good team. When Eddie is benched for moonlighting as a dance director for a nightclub chorus line, he falls under the spell of Joe Lorgan (Edward Arnold), a seemingly benevolent man who in reality is a big-time gambler, and trouble brews for Eddie and his team. While there's not much baseball played here, this is an amiable film, marked by the enjoyable cast and some lively, if not memorable, music. TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME was Sinatra and Kelly's follow-up to ANCHORS AWEIGH, and the two are again well-matched partners. The film was based on an original idea of Kelly and Stanley Donen's that closely resembled a minor 1930 film, THEY LEARNED ABOUT WOMEN. After concocting the story, Kelly and Donen asked for the chance to direct, but it was decided to bring in the legendary Busby Berkeley--who had fallen on hard times--and the film turned out to be his last directorial effort. Kelly and Donen, however, were allowed to direct TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME's musical sequences and producer Arthur Freed was impressed enough to allow them to direct the next Kelly-Sinatra film, the classic ON THE TOWN, later that year.