Endearing little baseball pic from director Harmon Jones & writer Jack Sher doesn’t swing for the rafters, happy to connect for a solid single. We’re at Whacker Park, where the Bisons are so terrible fans ignore the team on the field and watch kids in a pickup game just past Right Field. That’s where Billy Chapin, 9-yr-old son of retired pro (and current stadium peanut ‘butcher’) Dan Dailey, coaches, using everything he’s learned from Pop, now a bit of a hard-luck case. The story gimmick, and it’s a good one, is that the kid gets hired as a batboy, and starts giving struggling players tips he gets from dad, passing them off as his own. He’s just a little kid, but heck, the advice works and the team’s on a streak. Maybe he could be the new manager? And it works as a film because Jones doesn’t oversell the cute concept. Even the woman in the picture, co-star Anne Bancroft as a female team exec who’s the owner’s niece, sticks to her boyfriend, aging player Lloyd Bridges, rather than being forced into a messy involvement with single-dad Dailey. The whole silly package is just one smart move after another in a genre known for crass jokes, stupidity & overplayed sentiment. For a change, there really is no crying in a baseball pic.
DOUBLE-BILL: 20th/Fox had a knack for funny/sunny baseball programmers: see IT HAPPENS EVERY SPRING/’49. OR: Busy (but never showbizzy) child actor Billy Chapin as the older brother in Charles Laughton’s lyrical horror classic THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER/’55. (Not seen here, but a 1979 tv remake of KID, with DIFF’RENT STROKES star Gary Coleman, is long buried.)
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Jackie Robinson integrated the ‘majors’ in ‘47, but is this the first Hollywood baseball pic from a major studio to include a black ballplayer on the roster? (It’s Ike Jones, in his film debut. We’re excluding indie pic THE JACKIE ROBINSON STORY, out in 1950, but not from a major studio.)
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