December 12 movie: Take Me Out to the Ballgame. This is Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly's third movie together, in importance if not chronologically. They play vaudeville performers and baseball players in the 1910's. Did that decade have a name? Post-Edwardian but pre-roaring twenties. Anyway, they're players on a baseball team owned by Esther Williams. It's not a great movie, but it's interesting to see Sinatra as a gangly young kid in a nauseatingly wholesome part -- for instance one of the big musical numbers is about the joys of a clambake. William Demerest plays the team coach, if I recall correctly his character is Irish and actually has to dance a jig at one point. The indignity!
There's a cute dance number at the end where Kelly, Sinatra, and the two female leads (Esther Williams and Betty Garrett) razz each other about their real-life professional rivals: Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Ann Southern and .. I forget who they threw in Williams' face. It was funny though.
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