• Whether its Batter up! or Curtain Up!, Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly are ready when they play early-1900s vaudevillians who spend the winter flinging the on-stage blarney and the summer flinging the ol horsehide for baseball’s defending world champs, The Wolves.Sinatra is a second sacker Dennis Ryan and Kelly is shortstop Eddie O’Brien in this Busby Berkeley-directed romp that combines a baseball s

Whether its Batter up! or Curtain Up!, Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly are ready when they play early-1900s vaudevillians who spend the winter flinging the on-stage blarney and the summer flinging the ol horsehide for baseball’s defending world champs, The Wolves. Sinatra is a second sacker Dennis Ryan and Kelly is shortstop Eddie O’Brien in this Busby Berkeley-directed romp that combines a baseball storyline with that other all-American pastime: romance. Esther Williams plays the new team owner thrust into this pack of baseball Wolves. And Betty Garrett is a Baseball Annie with eyes for blue-eyed Ryan. Kelly and Stanley Donen’s deft musical stagings ranged from a softshoe duet charmer to an exciting barrel roll Kelly solo. Like the film itself, the duo came up a winner. Their work persuaded producer Arthur Freed to green-light their direction of the same year’s On the Town. Year: 1949 Director: Busby Berkeley Starring: Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, Esther Williams, Betty Garrett, Edward Arnold, Jules Munshin”From the moment you picked up that grounder and threw it to third, I knew it was love.” Baseball and romance make a nifty double play in Take Me Out to the Ball Game, a bright bauble from the golden age of MGM musicals. The premise is a stretch: two members of a turn-of-the-century baseball team (Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra) are vaudeville performers in the off-season. Their ballclub is inherited by Esther Williams, causing much consternation among the boys and anticipating the plot line of Major League by 40 years.

Since swimming star Williams was always seen to best advantage dripping wet, the movie finds a way to get her into a hotel pool. Kelly, mugging mercilessly, executes an extended Irish solo dance (take that, Riverdance), and Sinatra, whose skinny frame is the source of many jokes in the script, is pursued by the irrepressible Betty Garrett and croons the ballad “The Right Girl for Me.”

None of this is remotely plausible, and the Comden-Green songs don’t stand the test of time, but the film is buoyant–and the period costumes and dazzling Technicolor are eye-popping. This was a reunion for Sinatra and Kelly after Anchors Aweigh (1945), and they would quickly team up again in the superior On the Town (1949), alongside Take Me Out costars Garrett and looming Jules Munshin. As in those films, Sinatra and Kelly dancing side-by- side are a delightful spectacle: Kelly effortlessly hitting his marks while Sinatra gamely tries to keep up. Take Me Out to the Ball Game was the last film directed by the legendary director-choreographer Busby Berkeley, who gets just one shot at a huge production number, a pseudo-Rodgers and Hammerstein tune, “Strictly U.S.A.” Peanuts and Cracker Jack not included. –Robert Horton

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