VEB Film Club: Angels in the Outfield – Which Version Hits a Home Run for Your Heart?

The manager ends up seeing the kid a few times, takes a liking to her, the reporter feels bad about blowing up the angel story, so next thing you know, it kind of turns into a family unit. I don’t remember the exact steps it took, but reasonably well done. Except for one small thing. The manager looks like Paul Douglas and the reporter looks like Janet Leigh. You never can quite get over that. I was in disbelief that early 20s Janet Leigh would ever be interested in overweight, foul-mouthed 44-year-old Paul Douglas. Who unfortunately would die at just 52-years-old and not to be too rude to the guy but…. it was not surprising he didn’t have 10 more years on this Earth watching this movie. 44 and 24 isn’t especially heinous to believe, especially at the time, but I have to remind everyone that he does not look like a 44-year-old actor in 2026. He could pass for 60 nowadays easy.

And to be perfectly fair to Douglas, his wife at the time was out of his league, so the real life version of him had ‘game,’ but the way the movie portrays Douglas, that dude would have zero game. Douglas isn’t really miscast and Leigh isn’t really miscast, but the original choice of Clark Cable makes waaaay more sense if you’re going to shoehorn a romance into this. That I can buy. Douglas was borderline too convincing at being a grumpy, mean-spirited loner which again to be fair to him, definitely did a better job than Gable would have on that part. They would have sanded off the edges with Gable. But I would absolutely have zero questions about Gable and Leigh.

And the movie kind of knows this, because boy does it dance around any semblance of romance between the two. She basically just starts cooking for him and the kid and it’s just kind of implied. If it were a modern movie and you filmed it exactly the same way, you would probably assume they were friends or something. There’s not really even a hint that they kissed or anything, except they clearly all live together in the end. This was definitely the right approach given who was cast.

The movies’ baseball scenes are actually kind of great. They had actual baseball players playing baseball. Ralph Kiner and a bunch of real Pirates players you’ve never heard of are really playing baseball. There are cameos from Ty Cobb (before the reporter with a vendetta against him made him poison), minority owner of the Pirates Bing Crosby, and Joe Dimaggio all commenting on the angels helping the Pirates.