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.

With tremendous home runs and game-saving catches, Joe leads the Senators on a long winning streak into pennant contention and becomes a national hero.

She is ordered to make Joe forget his wife, a task Lola is confident she can carry out ("A Little Brains, A Little Talent").

By the end of the season, the Senators are on the verge of overtaking the Yankees, so the Washington fans hold a lavish tribute ("Who's Got the Pain?").

Gloria, having returned from Hannibal, Missouri, where no residents remember any Joe Hardy, confronts Applegate about the player's true identity.

He must meet with the baseball commissioner for a hearing or else be thrown out of baseball—on the day he plans to switch back to being Joe Boyd.

At the hearing approaches the deadline, Meg and her female neighbors arrive as material witnesses, attesting to Joe's honesty and falsely claiming he grew up with them in Hannibal.

Applegate has planned for the Senators to lose the pennant on the last day of the season, resulting in thousands of heart attacks, nervous breakdowns, and suicides of Yankee-haters across the country.

Uncredited in archive footage are Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle, Bill Skowron, and other New York Yankees baseball players, plus Art Passarella (umpire) The film followed the same template as The Pajama Game in that basically the whole Broadway cast was imported apart from one role given to an established star.

In Pajama Game it had been Doris Day, in Damn Yankees it was Tab Hunter, who had become a pop star in addition to being an actor.

[6] The "Overture" and "Two Lost Souls" are noticeably different from the Broadway production in orchestration, and many of the lines in "Six Months Out of Every Year" were cut from the film.

[8] Variety wrote: "That 10 of the top 11 players, plus creators from writer to costume designer, have been transferred en masse from Broadway just about insures a film that is as least as good as its stage counterpart.

What stands out like an inside-the-park home run is the skill and inventiveness with which the film is coated, thus making Damn Yankees a funny picture",[9] Trade publisher Pete Harrison of Harrison's Reports called the film "a generally entertaining show even though it does not rate a rave notice.

In treatment and presentation it is, for the most part, very much like a photographed stage play, in spite of the fact that the camera allowed for a wider range of activity".

[10] Richard L. Coe of The Washington Post wrote of the play's transition to the screen, "It could be argued that perhaps it follows too closely, that this is too clearly a photographed stage musical.

[11] John McCarten of The New Yorker found Walston and Verdon "just as delightful" on the screen as they were in the stage version, adding, "Although expository dialogue occasionally hobbles the proceedings, Damn Yankees is for the most part commendably brisk, and the music and lyrics, by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, are uniformly lively".

In 2009, Craig Zadan and Neil Meron attempted to produce a remake for New Line Cinema, with Jim Carrey as the Devil and Jake Gyllenhaal as Joe Boyd.