It Happened in Flatbush 
                                 
Director: Ray McCarey
Year: 1942
Rating: 6.5
1942. When baseball was king. When baseball and America went together like pie and ice cream. When games were still played in the day time. When there were only two leagues and no Wild Card teams. Before the Designated Hitter or a pitchers clock. When kids would wake up in the morning to grab the paper and study the box scores. When complete games by the pitcher were the norm. When people listened to the commentary, the crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd on hot lazy days on the stoop as the radio played upstairs. When baseball was pure and no other sport really mattered. I always like to watch at least one baseball movie each year during the season. This was a good nostalgic one.



It takes place in Brooklyn. Flatbush is just down the street from my apartment. Ebbets Stadium would be nearby if it still existed. If. It was the home to the Brooklyn Dodgers from 1913 to 1957 when the skunk Walter O'Malley moved the team to Los Angeles. Ebbetts Field was torn down two years later to be replaced by apartment buildings. A crime that it wasn't preserved. Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, Roy Campanella. Memories of them erased.




Brooklyn (Dodgers is never mentioned) are at the bottom of the heap in the National League. The female owner (Sara Allgood) decides to hire a new manager, Frank Maguire, run out of Brooklyn six years previously for bumbling a ground ball and costing them a pennent. Not a popular hire. Then the team gets a new owner. A female Manhattan socialite who doesn't even know what a pinch hitter is. Maguire is only too happy to teach her since she is played by the lovely Carole Landis. They pick up a few players and begin to contend. A B film but for a baseball fan, a fun bit of time travelling. Apparently, some of the extras were real Dodgers. They had in reality won the pennent in 1941 but then lost to the damn Yankees in the World Series. Showing up also are William Frawley, Robert Armstrong and Jane Darwell (mom in the Grapes of Wrath). Nolan as Maguire is perfect as he always is. His gruff working class accent and every man face, made him a regular tough guy in B films as a cop, detective and occassional crook during the 1940s. His Michael Shayne series is terrific.