In this first film of the director-producer team of Robert Mulligan and Alan Pakula, Anthony Perkins plays Jimmy Piersall, inching toward the major leagues under pressure from his tyrannical father (Karl Malden). The theme of a delicate psyche under stress was to become a Mulligan perennial (Up the Down Staircase, Bloodbrothers), though at this point he hadn’t fully developed the subjective technique that made the later studies more insinuating. Absorbing, but rather clinical, in the rubber-gloves style of 50s television drama. Perkins turns in a good, gangly performance, done a few short years before Psycho sealed his fate. With Norma Moore and Perry Wilson (1957).
