by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched an intriguing 1934 MGM movie called Death
on the Diamond, an odd little
baseball-themed thriller in which Robert Young plays star pitcher Larry Kelly,
who’s recruited by St. Louis Cardinals owner-manager Pop Clark (David Landau)
to perk up an otherwise ailing franchise (coincidentally — or maybe not — the
legendary pitcher “Dizzy” Dean led the Cardinals to a World Series berth that
year). Kelly meets Clark’s daughter Frances (Madge Evans), who also serves as
the team’s secretary, and has one of those hate-at-first-sight meetings with
her that we know, as hardened
moviegoers, will soon blossom into love. Alas, the Cardinals are beset by
gamblers led by Joseph Karnes (C. Henry Gordon — who else?) who at one point,
unbidden, leave $10,000 to get Kelly to throw a game (he responds not only by
pitching to win but racking up a no-hitter!); by an unscrupulous businessman
named Henry Ainsley (John Hyams), who has a mortgage on the franchise that will
enable him to take it over if Clark’s team doesn’t win the pennant and thereby
make enough money to pay him off; and by a string of mysterious assaults on the
team members that ends with one of them being murdered in the middle of
important games. The sequences showing the shootings look surprisingly modern —
just the muzzle of a gun mysteriously appearing from behind a column in the
stadium and then a cut to the ballfield, where the intended victim falls and is
assumed to have simply collapsed until the tell-tale bullet hole indicates foul
play. The first shooting is aimed at Kelly and the Cardinals’ star hitter, Dunk
Spencer (Joe Sauers) — who can’t stand Kelly and also has the hots for Frances
— the shooter aims not at them but the tire of their car, causing it to
overturn and laying them both up so they miss several important games.
Then
“Truck” Hogan (Nat Pendleton), who until now we’ve thought of only as a
comic-relief character, is fed a poisoned hot dog (we’ve previously seen that
non-toxic hot dogs are his favorite food) because he witnessed the strangling
of pitcher Frank Higgins (Robert Livingston) before the second game of a
double-header, which Higgins was going to pitch in Kelly’s place at the
insistence of Frances, who’s in love with Kelly and doesn’t want to see him killed. Clark doesn’t want to put Kelly in the game
either but is persuaded by Larry himself that the only way to flush out the
killer is to let Larry pitch — and the bad guy actually throws an exploding
baseball into the game, only Larry realizes what it is and hurls it out of the
field just in time so it explodes harmlessly in mid-air. Then the assassin
tries to shoot Larry but is caught and is revealed to be Patterson (DeWitt
Jennings), a former Cardinals player whom Clark demoted to groundskeeper even
though he thought he should have been hired as manager when he was too old to
play. The film ends with Patterson arrested and safely in custody, and the
Cardinals needing one more run in the bottom of the ninth to win the final game
of the season — and the pennant; it’s Larry Kelly’s turn at bat, though, and
Clark wants to send in a pinch-hitter but Kelly persuades him he deserves the
chance to bat himself, drives in a home run and everyone — except Ainsley and
the gamblers who bet so heavily on the Cardinals to lose — is happy. Based on a
similarly titled novel by Cortland Fitzsimmons (a writer I’ve vaguely heard of), Death on the Diamond could have been considerably more exciting than it
is; as it is, it’s an amiable thriller written by the usual committee — Harvey
Thew, Joe Sherman and silent-era veteran Ralph Spence — and directed in O.K.
but not spectacular fashion by Edward Sedgwick, who made great movies with
Buster Keaton as his star (though those were probably good because Keaton still
had the interest and the clout essentially to direct himself) but seemed out of
place outside the realm of comedy. The film does feature a lot of comedy, including the ongoing
arguments between a Cardinals player and an umpire who’s always threatening to
fine him and/or throw him out of games, and it was shown by TCM — oddly — as
part of a “Summer Under the Stars” tribute to, of all people, Mickey Rooney,
who’s in it, all right, as a bat boy in one scene.
