Yes, it happens every spring - baseball fever. And it hits us sports fans hard. For Professor Vernon Simpson, he becomes a different person altogether when baseball season starts. As the dean of the college where he works says, "Every spring he seems to undergo a peculiar change, he becomes absent minded to a degree. It's like spring fever - only it lasts all summer."20th-Century-Fox released a number of comedies in the late 1940s-early 1950s, many of which featured plots involving some kind of fantasy element. It Happens Every Spring (1949) is all about a chemistry experiment gone wrong.
Vernon Simpson (Ray Milland), a college chemistry professor, is working on a formula that repels insects from wood when a baseball crashes through the window and knocks over his experiment. The ingredients to his formula get all messed up and eureka! a new discovery is made. The baseball sitting in the fluid acts like a magnetic repulsion to any object of wood that it gets in contact with - including wooden baseball bats! Being the clever professor he is, he requests a sudden leave of absence from the college, takes his invention to the big league, and offers himself as a pro pitcher who can strike out any hitter. He gives his name as Kelly and hopes to stay anonymous, but naturally that doesn't happen when "King" Kelly becomes a pitching sensation.
Why is he attempting all of this? Well, back in the day, college professors were underpaid and Vernon wants to marry his girl Debby (Jean Peters).... one season of baseball would set them up for years. The only trouble is, Kelly's roommate Monk Lanigan (Paul Douglas) keeps using Kelly's "hair tonic" (his formula) and when their St. Louis team head to the World Series, Kelly finds he has no more of his magic potion left and attempts to pitch a clean game himself.
It Happens Every Spring is one of those laid-back kind of comedies that is entertaining to watch no matter how many times you've seen it. Ray Milland does a great job in the role of Vernon, even though he seems a bit old for the part (the other characters refer to him as a "young man" and "kid"). Also in the cast is Ray Collins as Debby's father and the dean of the college; Jessie Royce Landis as her mother, and a young Alan Hale Jr. Oddly enough, the film would have worked equally well even if the entire cast was changed. One can imagine Charles Coburn taking the role of Ray Collins, William Bendix playing Paul Douglas' part, Jean Hagen in Jean Peters place, and Robert Cummings or Danny Kaye as King Kelly and it would still be fun.
Vernon is actually a cheat for using the fluid to win the ballgames but, refreshingly, this isn't addressed in the film and even to the end, he calmly lets everyone think he was the greatest pitcher of the season.
Lloyd Bacon, a veteran Hollywood director of dramas, did a great job filming this comedy. It Happens Every Spring premiered on May 26th in St. Louis and then opened in theaters across the country on Memorial Day weekend and reaped a comely profit for Fox studios. They followed it up with films like Father was a Fullback, Everybody Does It, and Monkey Business. Walt Disney Studios would later adapt experiments-gone-wrong plots similar to this in such classics as The Absent-Minded Professor and Now You See Him, Now You Don't.
