Redwarmin This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

Kirandeep Yoder The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Zandra The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

thejcowboy22 Ray Milland although an academy award winning actor always plays a dour, serious kind of actor. This film is sort of an aberration for Milland taking part in this baseball fairy tale comedy. Milland plays a college professor Vernon Simpson who is a baseball fan. One day while running an experiment in his lab, a baseball crashes through his window breaking beakers and glassware. The fluids combined with a fictitious substance methylethylpropylbutyl creates this holy grail that only major league pitchers were looking for in the quest of greatness, a chemical that repels wood. The mild mannered Vernon takes leave from the university and goes into obscurity. Vernon immediately tries out for the St. Louis club as a pitcher. On first impression by the owner and coaches was not a good one despite his slow delivery and lack of velocity until the teams top slugger was whiffing at ball soaked pitches after pitch. Catcher and second banana Paul Douglas plays the room mate Monk to the green Major Leager/ professor King Kelly as his alias. Meanhile back at the Campus Vernon's fiancé Deborah (Jean Peters) is worried as there's no word on his whereabouts. Our new phenom King Kelly is making headlines across the country setting strikeout records and victories using a sponge inserted in his catching glove. Reporters try to find out where he's from. Protected by Monk, King Kelly's personal catcher who is constantly harassed by his wife via the telephone borrows that formula mistaking it for hair tonic. The results are astounding as at one point the hair goes one way and the opposite way when using a wooden brush. This baseball fantasy plays itself out and in 9 beautiful innings.

zardoz-13 "Kill the Umpire" director Lloyd Bacon's sci-fi sports saga "It Happens Every Spring" is a frivolous but entertaining baseball comedy. Ray Milland plays a bespectacled college chemistry professor who invents a mysterious liquid during a sabotaged experiment that he is conducting to develop a substance that repels insects from wood. Everything comes to a screeching halt after a baseball shatters the window of his laboratory and smashes his glassware equipment. Vernon K. Simpson (Ray Milland of "Dial M for Murder") cleans up the debris and discovers that the fluid applied to a ball swerves around wooden objects. The initial test looks extremely flawed because Simpson hangs the baseball by a string and passes wood in close proximity to it and the ball bounds. Problem is you know that somebody had to be tugging the string off-screen because we are not shown in the medium shot where the string is attached to a stick. (This didn't bother me that much but some may object to it. Anyway, this enables Simpson to throw a pitch that with which no batter can connect. Vernon rushes over to see university president, Professor Greenleaf (Ray Collins of "Perry Mason"), to persuade him to approve his request for an impromptu leave of absence. Greenleaf agrees, and our baseball-obsessed hero tears off so he won't miss his train. Greenleaf had been warned by a colleague that Vernon goes flaky during the summer months, but nobody knows exactly what governs Vernon's erratic behavior. He just loves baseball, and a radio broadcast from a baseball game during his class lecture distracts him. Meantime, Vernon visits the main offices of a non-specific St. Louis baseball team and struggles to convince hostile club manager Jimmy Dolan (Ted de Corsia of "The Steel Jungle") and club owner (Ed Begley of "Hang'em High") that he can win the pennant for them if they allow him to hurl. Naturally, these guys are astonished that he can throw a ball that nobody can swat. The complication is that Vernon doesn't want anybody, particularly the president of the university, Professor Alfred Greenleaf, to find out what he is doing. Furthermore, what he doesn't know is that catcher, Monk Lanigan (Paul Douglas of "Fourteen Hours"), has been sneaking his stuff to grow hair. The scenes of Monk and later Dolan combing their unruly hair is funny. As it turns out, Vernon and Professor Greenleaf's daughter Deborah (Jean Peters of "Apache") are romantically involved, and Vernon is hoping that his scientific discovery will land them a fortune because his university teaching position pays peanuts. Nevertheless, Vernon proves his value to St. Louis and they sign him to a contract. Vernon comes up with a fake name King Kelly to throw anybody off the scent of his identity. He dazzles everybody until the smashes his fingers, and he cannot catch Vernon's pitches. Eventually, Monk meets Deborah and learns about Vernon's secret identity. Things take a turn for the worst when Vernon finds out that the last bottle of his stuff is gone. Director Lloyd Bacon believes in playing comedy with emphasizing the humor. Nobody in the cast behaves as if they were in a comedy, and this makes these shenanigans doubly invigorating. The final catch is that Vernon snags a line drive during the pennant game and it fractures his hand so he can no longer play baseball. The theme of the discrepancy between the salary of athletes and college professors crops up repeatedly. Interestingly enough, the filmmakers could care less that what Vernon is doing raises ethical questions. Vernon's discovery allows him to take advantage of the opposing team rather than steroids enable an athlete to grow bigger muscles. Vernon's special ability strikes me as being at odds with good sportsmanship. "It Happens Every Spring" qualifies as wholesome but amusing hokum.

Tad Pole . . . but this yarn concerning a college chemistry instructor who pitches 1.000 (38-0 with one no-hitter for the Cards, plus 3-0 against the Yankees in the World Series) is such a stretch that MLB required the producers of IT HAPPENS EVERY SPRING to make all the teams and stadiums "generic" (at least to Martians). This story asks the question, "What if there were some magical chemical hormone that could make a geezer in the twilight of his career--say, Roger Clemens or Barry Bonds--suddenly perform better than ever before: Would such a geriatric has-been risk The Game's Integrity and his own Legacy by cheating, and could be get away with it?" Obviously, young Roger and Barry saw IT HAPPENS EVERY SPRING many times growing up, and noticed that clever cheaters such as Vernon, a.k.a. "King" Kelly, not only get away with transgressing--they're given a hero's welcome complete with marching bands when they return home. In movie life, Vernon breaks his pitching hand catching a line drive to end the World series (as well as his career). It's a safe bet MLB wishes that Roger had permanently thrown his elbow out winning Game #299, or that Barry had suffered a career-ending knee injury rounding first on home run #754, but Real Life doesn't work so neatly. Sadly for this film, Ray Milan (Vernon) and his girl Debbie (Jean Peters) have NO chemistry together (which is more than you can say for Roger and Barry).

dougdoepke Forget all those great spitball artists of baseball's past. Chemistry professor Simpson (Milland) has come up with a lab substance that guarantees batters will never connect. So what does he do with it. He does what all us baseball fantasists would do—he becomes a major league superstar and gets the girl (Peters) at the same time. Okay, at least we can dream, can't we.Mildly amusing little entry from TCF that qualifies as modern-day Disney fare. Good special effects—I'm still wondering how they got the dipsy-do ball effect in digitally-deprived 1949. Milland has pretty good pitching form for a supposed major-leaguer. Still, It's a bit of a stretch when 42-year old catcher Paul Douglas calls 44-year old Milland "kid". I'm guessing TCF producers went for the over-age actor for his marquee value 3 years after the Oscar for Lost Weekend.Good supporting cast. Douglas supplies the comedy as the lovable roughneck, as good at fracturing English grammar as he is at catching the ball. Then there's the un-lovable roughneck Ted de Corsia as the tough-talking team manager, along with the omnipresent Ray Collins who seems to have been in every-other movie made during this period. And, of course, there's the winsome Jean Peters. In real life, she even got the notoriously elusive billionaire Howard Hughes to actually slip a ring on her finger. Seeing her here, I can understand why.No, this minor exercise in baseball fantasy was not going to win an Oscar for anyone. Charming as it is in an old-fashioned way, the movie lacks director Bacon's usual snappy way with comedy material—he may not have been comfortable with the sports theme. Nonetheless, it remains a pleasant two-base hit for those of us overloaded on today's hard- swinging movie fare that too often pops out.