It Happened in Flatbush

With the beginning of the baseball season last week, I found myself watching a baseball film. Not sure why, these days I have little interest in baseball, and in sports in general. Growing up, I was a rabid Yankees fan. Mickey Mantle was my idol, as he was for many other kids. I watched football (Giants) and basketball (the Walt Frazier, Willis Reed, Dave Debusschere Knicks).  However, somewhere along the way I lost interest in sports; found too many other things I rather spend my time doing.

The Lemon Drop Kid (1951) Sidney Lanfield

The 1951 Bob Hope comedy, “The Lemon Drop Kid,” is based on a Damon Runyon story, the second film of Hope’s to do so. Just two years earlier, Hope made the highly successful, “Sorrowful Jones,” co-starring Lucille Ball.  The film was released in time for the holidays, only as you will see if you check out the newspaper ad below, the holiday in question was Easter and not Christmas. The film also introduced the now standard Christmas classic, “Silver Bells” written by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans. In the film the song is sung by Hope and co-star Marilyn Maxwell, but more on that later.

Hope is a small time grifter known as The Lemon Drop Kid. At a Florida racetrack he unknowingly swindles a gullible woman out of a ton of dough by convincing her to switch her bet to another horse.   Unfortunately for The Kid, the horse comes in dead last and the money the woman bet with belonged to her boyfriend, a hood named Moose Moran (Fred Clark). Moran gives The Kid until Christmas, a few weeks away, to come up with the $10,000 he would have won had his girl bet the money on the winning horse as he wanted.