Leo Cleary Movies

Despite the lighthearted promotional campaign mounted by 20th Century-Fox when the film was first released, The Kid from Left Field is not a comedy. The title character is young Christy Mathewson Cooper (Billy Chapin), the son of former big-league ballplayer Larry Cooper (Dan Dailey), who is now reduced to hawking peanuts at the ballpark. Securing a job as a batboy with a team called the Bisons, Christy amazes the players and management by giving them tips on how to win games. What no one knows is that Christy is passing along information provided by his father. Impressed by Christy's apparent expertise, third baseman Pete Haines (Lloyd Bridges) tells team secretary Marion Foley (Anne Bancroft) about the boy. She, in turn, tells Bisons owner Whacker (Ray Collins), a "Bill Veeck" type ever on the alert for a new publicity gimmick. Whacker promptly appoints the pint-sized Christy as manager of the team, replacing the ill-tempered Billy Lorant (a truly venomous performance by Richard Egan). Larry is about to spill the beans concerning Christy's baseball knowledgeability, but he decides not to, considering himself a burnt-out has-been. And that's all that can be revealed without giving away the ending. Its whimsical premise notwithstanding, Kid from Left Field is treated as a straight drama, with several near-noir long shots of the shadow-drenched ballpark. The film was remade for television in 1978 as a vehicle for Gary Coleman. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Pride of St. Louis is the story of one of baseball's most colorful characters, Jerome Herman "Dizzy" Dean. While playing amateur ball in 1928, Dizzy (Dan Dailey) is hired by the St. Louis Cardinals. He spends a year or so playing with the Cards' Texas farm team, during which time he woos and wins department-store clerk Pat Nash (Joanne Dru, who ironically was the real-life aunt of pro baseball player Pete LaCock!) Once in the majors as a pitcher, Dean is joined on the Cards lineup by his younger brother Paul (Richard Crenna), whom the press nicknames "Daffy." Through a combination of spectacular ballplaying and zany publicity stunts, Dizzy and Daffy become nationwide favorites. Their popularity really soars after they help the Cardinals win the 1934 World Series. After this triumph, things begin to go downhill for Dizzy, who endures several injuries and finally "loses" his pitching arm. Dean is rescued from a binge of self-pity by his old friend Johnny Kendall (Richard Hylton), whose dad is a brewery executive. Johnny convinces his dad to sponsor a series of St. Louis Browns radio broadcasts, and to hire Dizzy as a play-by-play announcer. Ol' Diz gets in a lot of trouble with local schoolteachers because of his eccentric grammar ("he slud into third base," etc.) but things eventually turn out A-OK. Pride of St. Louis takes any number of liberties with the facts, but the real Dizzy Dean didn't care so long as 20th Century-Fox ponied up a huge sum of money for the rights to his life story: "Jeez," he said at the time, "they're gonna give me 50,000 smackers just fer livin'!" Future NBC news commentator Chet Huntley shows up in one of the closing scenes as sportscaster Tom Weaver. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Allan "Rocky" Lane is cleverly cast as Allan "Rocky" Lane in the Republic western Desert of Lost Men. The story finds Lane going undercover to trap the leader of an outlaw gang. His scheme is complicated by the fact that heroine Nan Webster (Mary Ellen Kay) is the daughter of a doctor who is deeply involved in the gang's activities. Veteran character actor Irving Bacon is second-billed as the film's comedy relief, an ineffectual sheriff named Skeeter Davis (no relation, of course, to the country-western star of the same name). Though nothing new, Desert of Lost Men is expertly assembled. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In Storm Warning, Ginger Rogers stars as a model visiting relatives in an unnamed small town. She happens to witness the beating death of a man at the hands of the KKK. Rogers soon discovers that the whole town is controlled by this vigilante group, and that her loutish brother-in-law Steve Cochran is one of the group's members. D.A. Ronald W. Reagan is the man who breaks the stranglehold of the hooded terrorists--through the simple expedient of walking into one of their meetings and calmly identifying each of them by name. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

One of the most famous of the anti-communist tracts of the late 1940s, Republic's The Red Menace plays like a merciless lampoon of the genre when seen today. After a portentous introduction by one Lloyd G. Davies, described as a member of the Los Angeles City Council, the film concentrates on disgruntled ex-GI Bill Jones (Robert Rockwell). Having been victimized by crooked real estate agents, Jones turns to the government for help, only to come away empty-handed and mad as a wet hen. Obviously, the susceptible Jones is ripe for plucking by the American Communist Party. Using slogans, bribes and even sex to recruit disenfranchised souls like Jones, the dirty Reds hope to spread their poison to the entire U.S. of A. Fortunately, Jones and another commie dupe, schoolteacher Nina Petrovka (Hanne Axman), smarten up just in time. The HUAC and Joe McCarthy needn't have searched so diligently for subversives: according to The Red Menace, all they would have had to do was arrest anyone wearing a baggy suit or sporting a bad haircut. Some modern-day viewers begin laughing the moment the opening title of Red Menace, wherein an animated octopus wraps its tentacles around the Free World, fades into view. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In later years, James Cagney regarded White Heat with a combination of pride and regret; while satisfied with his own performance, he tended to dismiss the picture as a "cheap melodrama." Seen today, White Heat stands as one of the classic crime films of the 1940s, containing perhaps Cagney's best bad-guy portrayal. The star plays criminal mastermind Cody Jarrett, a mother-dominated psychotic who dreams of being on "top of the world." Inadvertently leaving clues behind after a railroad heist, Jarrett becomes the target of the feds, who send an undercover agent (played by Edmond O'Brien) to infiltrate the Jarrett gang. While Jarrett sits in prison on a deliberately trumped-up charge (he confesses to one crime to provide himself an alibi for the railroad robbery), he befriends O'Brien, who poses as a hero-worshipping hood who's always wanted to work with Jarrett. Busting out of prison with O'Brien, Jarrett regroups his gang to mastermind a "Trojan horse" armored-car robbery. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Based on a story by Vicki Baum (of Grand Hotel) fame, Dance, Girl Dance finds innocent young Judy (Maureen O'Hara) journeying to the Big Apple in hopes of gaining fame as a classical dancer. Instead she ends up as the "stooge" for raucous strip-tease artist Bubbles (Lucille Ball), who attempts to perform ballet before leering, catcalling, unappreciative burlesque audiences. Eventually, Judy and Bubbles both fall for playboy Jimmy Harris (Louis Hayward), a rivalry that culminates in a hair-pulling, eye-scratching cat fight. Eventually, Harris's ex-wife (Virginia Field) reels him back in, and Judy is hired by ballet producer and entrepreneur Steve Adams (Ralph Bellamy). In recent years, Dance, Girl, Dance has been canonized as a feminist manifesto, due to the fact that Dorothy Arzner was the director and because of Maureen O'Hara's climactic burlesque-house speech, in which she lambastes the male spectators for their puerile chauvinism. It should be noted, however, that Arzner became director only after Roy Del Ruth pulled out of the project. Uncertain how to promote the film, RKO Radio elected to sneak it into its first-run houses without fanfare, and the result was a $400,000 loss for the studio. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi