The Great American Pastime (1956)

An attorney (Tom Ewell, THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH) accepts an offer to coach his son's (Rudy Lee) little league team. A decision he comes to regret when he discovers the parents of the children are far more competitive and unreasonable than the kids but also when his wife (Anne Francis) suspects one of the boys' mother (Ann Miller) has designs on her husband. This is the kind of low key B&W comedy that was quickly supplanted by TV sitcoms. It's not a bad film, just innocuous and without much flair. After romancing Monroe and Mansfield in his previous movies, the hangdog faced Ewell gets gorgeous Anne Francis for a wife ..... only in the movies! Miller is surprisingly adept in a rare non musical role, her last at MGM (it would be 20 years before she did another film). As a film, it's no better or worse than, say, the popular THE BAD NEWS BEARS which came twenty years later. Directed by Herman Hoffman from an original screenplay by Nathaniel Benchley (THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING). With Dean Jones and Raymond Bailey.