Today’s film is a musical comedy with a scene that happens on September 25. Watch it tonight and enjoy the show.
DAMN YANKEES!
Joe Boyd is a long-suffering fan of the perennial doormats of the American league, the Washington Senators baseball team. This is driving a wedge between him and his wife Meg. After he exclaims he would sell his soul is the Senators could win the pennant, the Devil(who calls himself Applegate) shows up and offers him just such a deal-Joe will become the younger Joe Hardy, baseball phenomenon and help the Senators win the World Series, in return Applegate gets his soul. However, Joe is smart enough to insist on an escape clause to which Applegate agrees. Joe can back out before midnight on September 24th. Joe becomes Joe Harper and the Senators start winning, while reporter Gloria Thorpe investigates Joe’s past. Joe realizes he misses Meg and keeps visiting his old home to catch a glance of her. Applegate brings in Lola, who had sold her soul to him in return for an eternally youthful appearance to seduce Joe, but he resists her advances. Gloria Thorpe has learned that no one in Joe Hardy’s alleged hometown has ever heard of him and names him as really being Shifty McCoy a corrupt minor leaguer playing under a pseudonym. The commissioner calls in Joe for a hearing on the day he plans to exercise the escape clause and return to Meg. Meg and her friends lie and say they grew up with Joe Hardy, so he wins the case. However, in the excitement the deadline for Joe to exercise the escape clause passes. The next day, September 25, 1958 [1:31:50 – 1:50:14] Joe commiserates with Lola. She has fallen in love with Joe and drugs Applegate, so he will miss the last game of the season and be unable to carry out his plan of having the Senators lose the last game of the season and the pennant to the hated Yankees. However, Applegate wakes up and makes it to the ballpark in the final inning, having first returned Lola to her hag-like appearance. As Joe Hardy is going back to catch the final out, securing a Senators win, Applegate turns him back into Joe Boyd, but he makes the catch anyway. As the Senators celebrate Joe returns home to Meg, where he resists Applegate’s entreaties to become Joe Hardy again and lead the Senators to a World Series Championship, and decides to stay with Meg as Applegate angrily departs for good.
The date is given in the film at 11:48-49
Producers and Directors - George Abbott and Stanley Donne
Screenwriters - George Abbott and Douglass Wallop
Awards – The film was nominated for the Best Original Score for a Musical Picture at the 31st Academy Awards.
Runtime – 1 hour 51 minutes Released – September 26, 1958
Starring - Tab Hunter as Joe Hardy, Gwen Verdon as Lola, Robert Shafer as Joe Boyd, Ray Walston as Applegate, Russ Brown as Benny Van Buren, Shannon Bolin as Meg Boyd, Jean Stapleton as Sister Miller, Rae Allen as Gloria Thorpe
Copyright by Ivan Walters in 2015
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