For every great Hollywood musical, there were a score of duds. This is just one of them...
The title, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, is that of a rollicking old-time American musical number. Sadly it's the only thing which rollicks in this creaking old movie, which should have been struck out before it even made first base.
The 1949 cast sound strong enough, with Frank Sinatra in his bobby-sox years, Gene Kelly when he was just starting out as a cinema hoofer (and before he started piling on the pretentiousness), and cinema-mermaid Esther Williams in a role which kept her out of the water for most of the time. And the director was one of the genre's true greats - Busby Berkeley.
Lyrics came from Adolph Green and Betty Comden, who wrote the book for everyone's favourite musical, Three Little Words. Good credentials, everyone. But this is a musical without any decent songs. The story is limp, verging on the inane, and the whole thing amounts to musical blancmange.
It's astonishing that a film with as little merit as this can be deemed worthy of transfer to DVD when truly great musicals such as For Me and My Gal, Meet Me in St Louis, The Gay Divorcee and so many others still languish in untransferred limbo. Someone, somewhere, is making some very strange decisions...
Well, that someone is of course an American, and this film does have something of a cult following in the States, despite its inane plotting, banal acting and lack of worthwhile music. The vision of dancing and singing baseball players is perhaps enough over there to make up for the lack of everything else.
This full-screen NTSC transfer is another example of the great Technicolor years at their most colourful - the various shades leap from the screen in a total riot of extravagant hues.
If you've seen the wondrous transfer of Annie Get Your Gun, then you'll know the type of exuberant colour palette we're talking about. It blooms again at its brightest on this DVD.
In these years of mono soundtracks, the big studios had down as a fine art the task of mixing down their multitrack recordings to give the finest possible single-track result. Strength and clarity were the aims.
This transfer gives us all this, with, I imagine, no loss from the original. The deficiencies I see in this musical aren't deficiencies of video or audio quality - it's the material that doesn't measure up, not the delivery mechanisms.
There are lots of lovers of American musicals who will enjoy this movie a whole lot more than I did. They'll enjoy it for the sight of the early Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly going through their stuff, for the ability to see the great Busby Berkeley's final film, even though they gave him only one big production number in the whole movie, and they'll enjoy the Technicolor extravagance.
Personally, I would have liked some decent songs as well. So unless you have your own special reasons to rent or buy, I'd give this film a miss.
