Main      Site Guide    
At-A-Glance Film Reviews

It Happens Every Spring (1949)

Rating

[3.5]

Reviews and Comments

Ray Milland is one of the most watchable actors of the forties and fifties. He adds a lot to It Happens Every Spring, a precursor to Disney's The Absent Minded Professor. Milland is a chemistry professor whose months of research is destroyed by a stray baseball. The various chemicals mix together and create a compound with some, shall we say, peculiar properties. This prompts him to take a leave of absence from teaching to play professional baseball, leaving his fiancee and boss scratching their heads. It's improbable even if you believe the fantasy part of the story -- the particular chemical he discovers -- but it's all in good fun. I felt that the properties of the chemical weren't thoroughly mined of its comic possibilities; yet what the movie does do it does well. This is one of those pleasant cinematic fantasies that leave behind a lingering taste of humor and good nature that movies from the forties so often do.

Links