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To Hell with the game, cherchez la femme. Baseball season, fixation of the suburban aficionado (Robert Shafer) and chagrin of the missus (Shannon Bolin), "Six Months Out of Every Year" in prismatic split-screen. ("Every night in front of that television set you'd see that big fat slob," snaps Jean Stapleton as the local premature biddy.) A soul for a decent slugger, anything to get the team to victory, the Mephistophelian sharpie (Ray Walston) pushes the deal further, the middle-aged fan himself becomes a young prodigy (Tab Hunter). Nostalgia for home beckons the rookie, the lacy vamp (Gwen Verdon) is recruited: "I've done much more than that old bore, Delilah!" Transposing George Abbott's pop Goethe to the screen, Stanley Donen hews closer to the proscenium than in The Pajama Game but still manages to bottle the lightning of Verdon and Bob Fosse. Her locker-room seduction in "Whatever Lola Wants" is a fine bit of parodic sultriness, an invitation for sin in every thrust of her hips. (Their other highlight is "Who's Got the Pain," a slide-strut mambo pas de deux in yellow hats and toreador pants.) Tuneful mugs, cf. It's Always Fair Weather, they promenade for the camera ("You Gotta Have Heart") and kick up clouds of dust in an infield hoedown ("Shoeless Joe from Hannibal, MO"). Marie Antoinette under the guillotine, Jack the Ripper at work, scalped pilgrims and boiled missionaries, sweet memories of a giddy Devil: "I'd walk a million miles more for some of the gore of those good old days." The Potomac River crepuscular like the Styx dissolves to nightclub phosphorescence, an orgiastic whirl of snapping fingers and swaying torsos for "Two Lost Souls." "Wives! They cause me more trouble than the Methodist church." Bedazzled has Donen readjusting the myth for the following decade. With Russ Brown, Rae Allen, Nathaniel Frey, James Komack, Albert Linville, and Elizabeth Howell.
--- Fernando F. Croce |