Take Me Out to the Ball Game

Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949) is an MGM musical comedy you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Busby Berkeley. Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly play the Wolves' star double act — Dennis Ryan and Eddie O'Brien, ballplayers by season and vaudeville performers by instinct. The new season brings news of a new team owner named K.C. Higgins, and neither man is prepared for what that turns out to mean.

K.C. Higgins is a woman (Esther Williams) who knows the game better than anyone on the roster. Dennis falls for her immediately. Eddie has a more pressing problem: gamblers are circling the team, and fixing is in the air. The two plotlines — romantic competition and actual corruption — run in parallel until the film ties them together with characteristic lightness.

This was Sinatra and Kelly's first picture together, and Berkeley directed while Kelly and Stanley Donen staged the musical numbers — a dry run for On the Town, with the chemistry already in place. Stream Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949) online on iFILM.