The Slugger's Wife (Region 1 Import DVD)

When a famous comic playwright like Neil Simon writes a movie called THE SLUGGER'S WIFE, one might suspect that he's jealously thinking about that other famous, although not so comic, playwright, Arthur Miller, whose wife, Marilyn Monroe, had previously been a real slugger's wife. Is this a thinly veiled rehash of the story of Jolitin' Joe and Marilyn Monroe? Absolutely. A slugger, Darryl Palmer (Michael O'Keefe), falls for a singer, Debby (Rebecca DeMornay), but every time he tries to get a date with her he fails, and each failure is mimicked by his performance on the baseball field. But when they finally do come together, his average goes up and they get married. But she's bored and frustrated staying at home and hanging around with ballplayers; she wants to continue her own career. So, in spite of a surfeit of athletic sex peppered with Neil Simon's jokes about pitching and catching and hitting a home run, they break up. She sings, he slumps. The Yankee Clipper and the Blonde Bombshell never got back together, but that's American life, in which, as Scott Fitzgerald said, "There are no second acts." But this is a movie, so they give it another try.