Ray Milland (an actor, I will attest, that I have never warmed to) starred in 1949’s It Happens Every Spring, a comedy about a scientist (Milland) who invents a fluid that repels wood. Just go with it. He decides, like Fred McMurray later would, to use his amazing scientific discovery to cheat at sports. So Milland becomes a major league pitcher, and applies his fluid to his baseballs to make them avoid contact with bats. Hijinx ensue.
I guess that film did OK, because two years later Milland would star in another wacky baseball comedy, Rhubarb. The titular creature is a feral street tabby cat who we meet chasing off a much bigger dog. (They repeat this gag three times, with, I thought, diminishing results.) His scrappiness is admired by an eccentric multimillionaire and owner of the major league Brooklyn Rhubarbs. He adopts the cat—a rather strained comedy scene that eventually sees Milland buying a $600 (a big sum back then) cat-catching cage—and is the one to name him, as Rhubarb is a baseball term for a brawl.
A few years down the line, the guy dies. To the consternation of his bitchy daughter Myra, he leaves all his money and companies to Rhubarb, with Milland appointed as his guardian. This results in various comic complications, which are rather episodic in nature, as Myra tries to either kill Rhubarb or proclaim him an imposter cat, and with Milland having periodic trouble actually getting married to his long-suffering fiancée Polly. (Needless to say, good girl Polly is blonde; Myra a brunette.) This comic inability to get married is again a trait seen in McMurrary’s Flubber series.
Moreover, the Rhubarb players initially refuse to play for a cat. Milland plays on their superstitious natures—and it’s true, baseball players are the most superstitious of all sports figures—and convinces them that rubbing Rhubarb brings good luck. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, and soon Brooklyn is heading to the World Series. However, with everybody in Brooklyn now betting on the beloved cat’s team, bookies are desperate to remove Rhubarb from the equation…
This isn’t a great film, and sometimes it tries too hard, as with a music score that often works a little too hard to get us to understand that the events we’re watching are zany. And again, the film seems to move from one plot device to another without really tying together all that well.
At times the film gets a bit crazy, as in a hilariously elaborate effort to stall a game, and frankly it could have used more stuff like that. Other still funny bits include Polly trying to watch the action at a game on TV, only the telecast keeps getting interrupted by an annoying animated commercial. Rhubarb is also introduced in the opening credits roaring, ala Leo the Lion.
Still, it’s an enjoyable time-killer, and if anything, a fun time for people who like to spot character actors. The team’s manager is played by William Frawley, later Fred Mertz on I Love Lucy and Bub on My Three Sons. A shockingly young Strother Martin is the baseball team’s catcher. The woman who sits behind Milland at all the home games and kibitzes is Madge Blake, later the ditzy Aunt Harriet on the Adam West Batman show. If you keep a close eye out, you can see that the housewife who places a bet on the Rhubarbs near the end of the picture is Sandra Gould, who played Gladys Kravitz on Bewitched. Older fans will also recognize as Myra’s lawyer actor Harold Peary, who played the radio and movie character The Great Gildersleeve. I think the movies worked because, unlike many radio actors, Mr. Peary looked exactly like what you imagined Gildersleeve would look like.
Amusingly, one of the actors with the most interesting résumé is Orangey the Cat, who played Rhubarb. This was Orangey’s first film, and he won the very first Patsy Award (the Oscar for animal actors—really) for Picture Animal Top Star of the Year. Orangey won again ten years later, as the mangy cat adopted by Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and remains the only cat to win the award twice. Orangey also had a great career in sci-fi movies, playing the cat that menaces The Incredible Shrinking Man, and appearing in another gigantism flick, Bert I. Gordon’s Village of the Giants.
