Damn Yankees confuses a viewer. A person tries to figure out who plays Ted Nugent, Tommy Shaw, Michael Cartellone and Jack Blades. They wonder if the band members started out as a baseball team. A deal with the devil happens, so that makes sense from a rock’n’roll perspective, but everything else is a conundrum.
By the time they realize Damn Yankees isn’t about the 1990s supergroup at all, they’re in too deep to bail. Modern Hollywood should employee this trick to sucker people into the theaters. For example, they could have titled Supergirl something like “Chuck Norris vs. Godzilla.” They’d clear a billion easy.
Yet, we can salvage something from this mistake. Let’s look at Damn Yankees (1958).
Damn Yankees
Damn Yankees started out as a 1955 Broadway musical of the same name. George Abbott and Douglass Wallop supplied the story. Abbott was involved with theater and films for eight decades. He even wrote the screenplay for the 1930 version of All Quiet on the Western Front. To go from men dying horribly in trenches to men prancing daintily about the infield displays a lot of range.
Meanwhile, Douglass Wallop was a novelist and playwright. He worked with Dwight D. Eisenhower while the president wrote his memoirs, Crusade in Europe.
Music and lyrics came from Richard Adler and Jerry Ross. The two of them worked mainly on Broadway productions.
All four of these men were heavily involved with the film version. George Abbott directed, assisted by Stanley Donan, who directed such classics as Singin’ in the Rain, Charade and the original Bedazzled. He was also married to the lovely Yvette Mimieux.
This crossover between the film version and Broadway version at the top level filtered down to the cast, as well. Most of the Broadway performers starred in the film version, except for Tab Hunter, who was a pop star at the time.
Damn New York Yankees
The plot of Damn Yankees is based on the Faust legend. An old man sells his soul to become a young baseball star and help his beloved Washington Senators wrest the pennant away from the hated New York Yankees.
This is interesting because people hated the Yankees even 70 years ago.
Tab Hunter portrays the baseball star. Hunter looks like a cross between Mike Nelson from MST35 and Robert Shaw from From Russia with Love.
With genetics like that, one expects Hunter to either be really good at making Swedish Meatballs or participating in Kristallnacht. Unfortunately, Hunter did not sow his seed. To put it in baseball parlance, he played for the other team…
Since this sort of lifestyle was not celebrated at the time, Hunter participated in studio-concocted romances to keep him popular with the teenage girls. Some women Tab was linked to include Debbie Reynolds and Natalie Wood.
This subterfuge was not wildly successful, however. Insiders even developed their own headlines for such faux relationships: “Natalie Wood and Tab Wouldn’t.”
Tab never broke into superstardom, but he had a quiet movie career that lasted more than 40 years and appeared on TV shows like The Six Million Dollar Man and The Fall Guy. This sort of limited credit list makes sense. His work on Damn Yankees is earnest but unremarkable.
Jean Stapleton (Edith from All in the Family) has a bit part in Damn Yankees and shows more life than Tab even in those miniscule bursts.
Likewise, Ray Walston owns the camera whenever he appears onscreen as the devil. He even won a Tony Award for the role in the Broadway musical. Walston’s credit list is long and robust. The man loved to work. He appeared in pretty much every type of movie and TV show possible. He even showed up in Roger Corman’s Galaxy of Terror. For that alone, he deserves lasting respect.
Hot Damn Yankees
The real star of the show is Gwen Verdon. Verdon’s first major scene in Damn Yankees is to seduce Tab Hunter’s character. Visually, this elicits a guffaw. Hunter is corn-fed hunk. Gwen is 65-year-old Carol Burnett.
But then Gwen starts performing. Some people were born to be on stage and in front of the camera, and Gwen is definitely one of them. The amount of charisma she projects is magnetic. If you went on a blind date with Gwen, your initial impression would probably be ho-hum. By the end of the night, you’d think, I need to marry this woman…
Speaking of which, Gwen was the wife of Bob Fosse. Fosse was a hugely influential American choreographer, dancer, actor and filmmaker. This is not a joke: Fosse is probably the reason we make fun of “jazz hands” to this day. Fosse was also the subject of 1979 Best Picture nominee All That Jazz. Roy Scheider played Fosse and was nominated for his performance, as well. Fosse directed and received an Oscar nomination for his work.
It is no exaggeration to say that Gwen carries Damn Yankees on her surprisingly versatile shoulders. She also brings a great deal of comedic physicality to one of her dances that borders on Jim Carrey behavior.
This makes sense because Jim Carrey was in talks to star in a remake of Damn Yankees in 2009. Ultimately, it was postponed indefinitely, but I’d bet dollars to donuts that Carrey is a Gwen fan.
Rita’s career loomed large behind the scenes before stepping in front of the camera. She taught actresses like Jane Russell, Fernando Lamas, Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth, Betty Grable and Marilyn Monroe to dance. She also helped bring the famous musical Chicago to life and originated the Roxie Hart character, played by Renee Zellweger in the movie. Later Gwen went on to appear in movies like The Cotton Club and Cocoon. She even did some voice work for Creepshow.
Frankly, My Dear, I don’t Give a Damn Yankees
How does Damn Yankees compare to a legendary musical like West Side Story? Not well (although it is worth nothing that Tab Hunter was up for the role of Tony in West Side Story but lost out to Richard Beymer).
When it comes to songs, Damn Yankees does not boast any super memorable tunes beyond You Got to Have Heart. The dances are not particularly elaborate either. Likewise, the story seems unfocused. The screenplay continually bounces between different characters who seem to have nothing more to do than mog for the camera.
Where Damn Yankees really suffers is in its visual appeal, however. The bulk of the film is shot in a studio, which gives it a very television-like appearance. Large portions of West Side Story were shot on sound stages, as well, but West Side Story had a legend working behind the camera: Robert Wise (The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Sound of Music and Star Trek: The Motion Picture). Wise managed to make everything appear epic despite working within enclosed spaces.
George Abbott is no Robert Wise. For this reason, Damn Yankees is not a classic of the genre, but it has its charms. Plus, it was a pleasure to meet Ms. Gwen Verdon.
While the rest of the film struggled to get on base, Verdon hit a homerun every time she was onscreen.
