About the film
Damn Yankees is a 1958 American musical supernatural sports romantic comedy film. It was directed by George Abbott and Stanley Donen from a screenplay by Abbott, adapted from his and Douglass Wallop's book of the 1955 musical of the same title with music and lyrics by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, itself based on the 1954 novel The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant by Wallop. The story line is a take on the Faust legend and centers on the New York Yankees and Washington Senators baseball teams. With the exception of Tab Hunter in the role of Joe Hardy (replacing Stephen Douglass), the Broadway principals reprise their stage roles, including Gwen Verdon as Lola.
A notable difference between the film and stage versions was Gwen Verdon's performance of the song "A Little Brains". Verdon's suggestive hip movements (as choreographed by Bob Fosse and performed on stage) were considered too risqué for a mainstream 1958 American audience, and so she simply pauses at these points in the film. The title was unacceptable in the United Kingdom, where "damn" was a vulgarism and "yankees" was a derogatory term for Americans. The British branch of Warner Bros. Pictures changed the title to What Lola Wants.
