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Took me 20 years to watch. Funny, endearing and wonderfully irreverent. Move over "A Christmas Story", make room for "Elf" and when the kids go to bed play "Bad Santa".

There are very few good baseball films and certainly this isn't one of them but Robert Aldrich somehow makes it all watchable. Edward G. Robinson is so good you actually believe he is baseball veteran Hans Lobert, who really lived and played ball for several teams in the early 20th century. Lobert's real name was Honus but everyone called him Hans, same as Honus Wagner, everyone called him Hans, too. The real Carl Hubbell and the real Al Campanis (who's next appearance was probably on the Nightline Show that cost him his job as Dodger general manager when he maligned African-Americans!)show up in this unknown and odd film which only runs 71 minutes. Richard Jaekel has one of his best parts and shows a real naturalness. It's nice to see him in something other than a war movie. And finally there's Vera Ellen, the smallest waist in Hollywood, doing a movie outside of her husband's, Herbert Yates, Republic Studios. An odd film for fanatical baseball fans only.

Ignore anything or anybody that denigrates Espresso Bongo. It is loaded with period detail and attitude, is singularly risqué for it's time and sports great music and one of the best scripts about England's Tin Pan Alley, wisecracking and inside, besides an unprecedented performance by Laurence Harvey as you've never seen him, a hustler who recalls Sidney Falco in the "Sweet Smell of Success". Maier Tzelnicker is tremendous as the record company executive who calls it "rock dreck". Yolanda Donlan, Val Guest's wife, plays a "Sweet Bird of Youth" like aging diva Alexandra Del Lago who seduces Cliff Richard, whom many called the Pat Boone of England. See the opening strip number when the girls perform a burlesque version of the "Bonnie, Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond". It sets the tone for an overlooked gem. A "B" Movie Classic. Enjoy.