Lucille Ball

  • Best Foot Forward (1943)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2021) Conventional wisdom has it that Lucille Ball was moderately famous throughout the 1940s, but truly became an icon with I Love Lucy in the 1950s. Best Foot Forward, considering Ball’s starring role as herself and its superb colour cinematography, may lead you to believe that it is a 1950s musical comedy looking back at the war years, but not so: Released in 1943, it was meant to highlight Ball’s status as one of MGM’s newest contract stars, with the red hair kept from the striking example set in her previous (and first MGM) film Du Barry Was a Lady. The plot revolves around her as she travels from Hollywood to a small northeastern military academy as a promotional stunt, answering the call of a starstruck cadet. Once there, the musical aspect of the film comes to the fore, as various musical numbers and interludes lead to small-scale romantic subplots for the other members of the cast. The result is fine without being particularly good (this being one of producer Arthur Freed’s earliest efforts, you can see the roots of his method that would lead to his first big success the following year with Meet Me in Saint-Louis and then to the streak of terrific musicals culminating in Singin’ in the Rain and The Band Wagon), but few numbers stand out:  Harry James and his Orchestra do good supporting work, with a highlight being a spirited version of “The Flight of the Bumblebee” (immediately followed by the film’s standout number “The Three B’s”). While Ball is also good-but-not-great in the lead role, the film’s scene-stealer is Nancy Walker as a short and spirited “plain” young girl who gets some great lines and a very funny duet dance number in “Alive and Kickin’.”  The result is very much in the solid average of the WW2 military musicals and is perhaps best remembered as a stepping stone in the careers of Ball, Freed and future musical star June Allyson. Even if it’s in the lower tier of Freed musicals, Best Foot Forward is not a bad watch — and it feels like a later film.

  • Meet the People (1944)

    Meet the People (1944)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2021) Don’t mind me, since I was watching Meet the People just for Virginia O’Brien — as her biography goes, she was playing in a local revue of the same name when she was discovered by MGM recruiters and thus got her movie contract. It must have been a return to roots of sorts when, a few years later, she was selected to play in the movie adaptation… even if I gather than the film and the revue don’t have much in common other than the title and a few numbers. O’Brien doesn’t have much of a role here, as the film is a musical comedy featuring Lucille Ball and Dick Powell: she does get a standout musical number (“Say That We’re Sweethearts Again,” a darkly funny song about the decidedly unfunny topic of homicidal spousal abuse — and she even sings the song without her usual deadpan tone) and assorted small comic bits, but she’s once more a supporting player. The rest of Meet the People is a very comfortable wartime musical, designed to both bolster the war effort and provide crowd-friendly entertainment. The plot has to do with a shipyard worker (Powell, before becoming a film noir fixture) becoming a Broadway writer, and getting involved in subsequent hijinks. It’s paced to allow for musical and comedy numbers, pulling the film closer to the 1930s Broadway revues as much as 1940s wartime comedies. It’s funny enough to be watchable, although the blatant propaganda is more interesting than inspiring nowadays (a good chunk of the first fifteen minutes is about characters selling war bonds). Unlike similar films of the era, there aren’t many top musical acts in Meet the People, although Ball is a perfectly charming presence as a showbiz star getting mixed up with blue-collar steelworkers. It probably doesn’t add up to much of a film for those who don’t have a specific affection for the era (or Ball, Powell and O’Brien), but it’s not unpleasant to watch, and it does have its highlights.

  • Two Smart People (1946)

    Two Smart People (1946)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2021) My disappointment at Two Smart People is not without precedent if I look at the less-than-impressed reactions about the film collected upon release and ever since. It’s even worse considering the promise of a Jules Dassin-directed film featuring Lucille Ball — Dassin’s later filmography showed a skill for noir, while Ball’s mid-1940s career was on a comic upswing. But there’s little of those skills in evidence here, as a mixture of overlapping confidence games and a cross-country train trip do little to entertain or amuse. Ball’s comic persona is muted, and the blend of crime and comedy doesn’t quite gel. The title suggests wit and sophistication, but the result is a clear notch under that — at best, Two Smart People is an amiable crime romance but one that’s generally featureless and forgettable. There’s a slight uptick of interest in the end, but it’s really not enough to lift the result out of the doldrums.

  • Dance, Girl, Dance (1940)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2021) One of Lucille Ball’s better early starring roles, Dance, Girl, Dance has her as a burlesque dancer, competing with a higher-class ballerina (Maureen O’Hara, playing up her distinguished persona) for the affections of a rich heir. In many ways, it’s a very conventional film of its time: Broadway stories were exceptionally commonplace in 1930s Hollywood, and it takes a while for the result to distinguish itself. But it eventually does in its third act — through a (now tame, but then-daring) burlesque striptease from Ball, through a memorable onstage fight between its two female leads, through a script that clearly places the focus on its female characters, and perhaps most visibly through director Dorothy Arzner’s unimpressed depiction of the men attending strip shows. That’s not too bad for a 1940 film — and as a piece of Ball’s filmography, it’s clearly an essential.

  • The Fuller Brush Girl (1950)

    The Fuller Brush Girl (1950)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2021) By 1950, Lucille Ball was on the cusp of superstardom considering that her epochal TV show I Love Lucy was only a year away from broadcast. In a way, The Fuller Brush Girl is the last film of an era for her — by that time, she was widely recognized as a leading comedienne and her mastery of physical comedy was much stronger than her earlier films. The Fuller Brush Girl (a sequel to the Red Skelton vehicle The Fuller Brush Man) lets Ball free to unleash her comic talents as a ditzy woman pressed in evermore ludicrous situations in the midst of a murder investigation. Reuniting several key creative talents from the previous (and similarly funny) Miss Grant Takes Richmond, the film seems tailored to Ball’s strengths. It’s not quite as funny as it could have been, but it’s still a vastly entertaining showcase for Ball, in the midst of a rather ordinary comedy.

  • Her Husband’s Affairs (1947)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2021) Before becoming The Lucy of I Love Lucy, Lucille Ball spent more than a decade working in movies, honing her comic timing in a series of vehicles that made good use of her skills. It’s interesting to see her progressively transforming throughout the 1940s, from a funny but still-generic debutante to the blend of tics, hairstyles and stares that would make up the more fully formed Lucille Ball of the 1950s and beyond. Her Husband’s Affair comes from the latter half of that process, at a time when Hollywood was beginning to understand what an asset Ball was, and was shaping scripts to her strengths. Here, she plays the level-headed foil to Franchot Tone’s eccentric husband, eventually rescuing him from a murder accusation but not before suffering through a long series of comic set-pieces loosely focused on wild and crazy inventions with unforeseen impacts. As far as even light comedies go, there’s a surprising lack of impact to Her Husband’s Affairs. Despite the proto-Lucy Ricardo flair to some of her material, Ball isn’t quite as interesting as she should be — there’s a sense that her character is being held back from the lunacy she could portray. Meanwhile, the same can be said about everything else in the film: despite its potential, Her Husband’s Affairs merely exists contently, getting a few smiles where there should be chuckles and laughs. It’s amiable enough and not a complete waste of time, but there are several much better films from the same time and genre. See it for Ball, maybe, but there’s not much else.

  • Miss Grant Takes Richmond (1949)

    Miss Grant Takes Richmond (1949)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2021) I happened to go overnight from a 1939 Lucille Ball film to 1949’s Miss Grant Takes Richmond and it wasn’t hard to appreciate what ten years did in defining her persona. Going from cute but largely undistinguishable ingenue to the patented look and behaviour that would ensure her epochal TV success, Ball also used the decade to gather her full face and curly hair that still distinguishes her today. In Miss Grant Takes Richmond, she plays a slightly ditzy young woman who graduates last in her secretarial class and is immediately snapped up by a shady bookmaker who puts up a false real estate front to camouflage his illicit business. After all, who really needs a competent secretary when she’s just supposed to be window-dressing? Alas, his plan doesn’t account for a few wildcards: What our protagonist lacks in secretarial competence she more than makes up in drive, goodness and interpersonal skills: before long, she has transformed our bookmaker in a reluctant but authentic real-estate developer, rallying the community around an affordable housing project—even when hilarious mistakes are made along the way. Then there’s the final flaw: Falling in love with her, even as an old flame threatens to pull him back in the shady life. Ball is in fine form here—there’s a moment where she stares wide-eyed at the camera and we can see the almost fully-formed Lucy of I Love Lucy, going for slapstick with an ease that would be remarkable if it wasn’t designed to look effortless. It helps to have William Holden as a co-lead, able to play a leading man that would be plausibly involved with organized crime. The comedy can get very broad at times—such as the construction site sequences—but Ball is better when she can go full-spectrum on verbal and physical comedy. While Miss Grant Takes Richmond is perhaps too basic to live on as a classic comedy, it’s quite entertaining, fun to watch and an excellent showcase for Ball’s talents just on the cusp of her becoming a superstar.

  • Annabel Takes a Tour (1938)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2021) You can take my review of The Affairs of Annabel and use it almost as-is for sequel Annabel Takes a Tour—hurray for consistency in series-making, I guess, but given that my first impression wasn’t good, the second film could have at least improved on the first. But no—once again, we have the peppy young Lucille Ball as a Hollywood actress being manipulated into all sorts of shenanigans by her publicist. More diverting than entertaining, this is recognizably a comedy taking aim at the Hollywood hype machine, except that the comedy feels laborious and half-hearted at best. Ball herself gets a few smiles, but only because she goes beyond what the script specifies. But once again, Jack Oakie mugs for the camera and doesn’t have a fraction of Ball’s appeal—history has it that the Annabel series, which got off to a roaring start with two films in 1938 alone, stopped dead in its track when he asked for too much money for a third instalment. He may have done the world a favour, not only terminating a humdrum series before it went too far, but also freeing Ball to play elsewhere.

  • You Can’t Fool Your Wife (1940)

    You Can’t Fool Your Wife (1940)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2021) Roughly as ordinary a product of Classic Hollywood as it’s possible to get, You Can’t Fool Your Wife is your average potboiler comedy—made by studios to showcase a rising star (Lucille Ball), with straightforward execution in service of a slight story. The film barely makes it to 68 minutes and relies on familiar comedic devices. As the story goes, a loving couple finds itself in a rut after a few years of marriage—not helped by an overbearing mother-in-law and some trouble coming from his office. It takes a long time for this dreariness to become funny—past the halfway point, past an ugly separation, past the point when it should feel like a comedy rather than something too dispiriting to be fun. But the comedy does begin in earnest in the second half, as the estranged wife embarks on a program to regain her husband by passing herself off as someone else at a party. It eventually works itself up to an amiable watch, albeit tempered by some outdated social mores that are not executed well enough to be charming. Ball herself is cute but not quite striking here—a trademark of her early roles. But in the end, You Can’t Fool Your Wife probably would have sunk in deserved obscurity if it didn’t feature her—it’s very ordinary, outclassed by much better similar films and not completely successful in its execution.

  • The Affairs of Annabel (1938)

    The Affairs of Annabel (1938)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2021) I’m always a good sport for Hollywood-insider movies, especially from the 1930s. But The Affairs of Annabel tested my patience. I didn’t hate the film—I just found that it failed to work. I can see the jokes, I can appreciate a young Lucille Ball looking good and playing for laughs, I appreciate the film’s admirably short 68-minute running time and I’m appreciative as always at the time-capsule funhouse look at Hollywood of past decades. But it just doesn’t work. I’m left unmoved by the shenanigans of the young star protagonist and her publicist as they stage elaborate stunts. The Hollywood satire seems toothless, and the character’s mugging for the camera (specifically Jack Oakie) is more annoying than successful. I’ll allow for some mood-related variance here—maybe it would be funnier if I was in a better mood. But as it stands, it’s going to take a while before I revisit The Affairs of Annabel.

  • The Facts of Life (1960)

    The Facts of Life (1960)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) If you’re watching the Lucille Ball/Bob Hope headliner The Facts of Life and expecting something like the three other films they did together, you’re going to be surprised. Not that surprised, as Hope is still trading bon mots and Ball has occasional moments of comedy, but surprised nonetheless, because The Facts of Life is about two married people grappling with having an affair, and there’s an entire undercurrent of guilt and drama running close underneath the jokes. It’s somewhat reflective of its era in American cinema, where the rigid standards of censorship were ever-so-slightly relaxed in reflection of how society was changing, but not quite blown apart as they’d ben by the end of the decade. As a result, The Facts of Life does feel like a strange halfway film — willing to contemplate a difficult topic, but not able to completely give it the treatment it would have deserved, and possibly held back by the persona of its stars. As a result, it’s not completely satisfying, but neither it a failure — the film was nominated for a handful of Academy Awards and presents Hope in one of his better quasi-dramatic roles. It’s worth a look, especially for Hope fans who are already used to seeing him in other goofier roles.

  • Critic’s Choice (1963)

    Critic’s Choice (1963)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) I probably shouldn’t feel all that surprised that critics are seldom portrayed favourably in Hollywood films. When they’re not ridiculously mean-spirited to compensate for past slights received by the screenwriter, they’re usually played as arrogant idiots as in the case in Critic’s Choice (or the somewhat similar Please Don’t Eat the Daisies). Here, Bob Hope pairs up with Lucille Ball for the fourth and final time: he plays a well-regarded Broadway critic, while she, as his wife, keeps going from one hobby to another, ultimately settling on writing a play. She’s far more successful than either of them imagined, however, and the cracks in their marriage, already exposed while she was working with a playboy director (a young Rip Thorne—surprisingly slim and handsome for those of us used to his late-career looks), are further widened when he insists on panning the play upon opening night. (And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why us conscientious critics are prompted to disclose any real or imagined conflict of interest, to the point of consciously not reviewing works from people we feel close to.)  Critic’s Choice, clearly, works on a comic rather than realistic level—although the relationship issues discussed late in the film feel unusually pointed for what’s supposed to be a silly comedy. Marie Windsor shows up in a small role, but the spotlight remains on the lead hope as they bicker (often unpleasantly) throughout the picture. Hope doesn’t have the good role here—his character, to put it bluntly, acts like an idiot in his third act choices, and the film wraps up in a somewhat unconvincing fashion to try to make up for it. It’s a somewhat by-the-numbers film considering that Hope and Ball are both involved, but it can be fun to have a look back at the 1960s Broadway scene.

  • The Long, Long Trailer (1954)

    The Long, Long Trailer (1954)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) Anyone would be forgiven for thinking that The Long, Long Trailer is an “I Love Lucy” movie spinoff—after all, it does star both Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz as a married couple getting into all sorts of comic situations as they travel around the country with a travel trailer, and it was released ran in the middle of their TV show’s run. But as close as it may appear, it’s its own separate thing—a way for MGM to showcase Ball and Arnaz in colour against picturesque American tourist destinations. Ball being Ball, the physical comedy is top-notch even when it’s predictable—the sequence in which she’s trying to cook inside a movie trailer was inevitable but still a lot of fun to watch. As far as the narrative goes, The Long, Long Trailer often feels like a collection of episodes inspired by a writer’s experience in the 1950s RV lifestyle, from the eye-watering complications of the initial purchase to the sense of aimlessness that not having a fixed address can create. (Indeed, even circa 2020, I can testify that one retirement course recommendation remains “Don’t sell your house to buy an RV!”)  The narrative cohesion is provided by the marital strife between the leads, culminating in a quick conclusion (made longer by a framing device) that perfunctorily ends the film on a happy but not necessarily believable note, as all of the tension factors are still present. Still, the fun of The Long, Long Trailer remains—filmed in colour (although not in bright Technicolor), it offers a look at a specific recreational form of American touring as of the mid-1950s and the performances of the leads are good enough to capture what was special about them.

  • Easy to Wed (1946)

    Easy to Wed (1946)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) Considering that Libeled Lady is one of the great comedies of the 1930s, I wasn’t sure that a decade-later remake could be all that good. But Easy to Wed turns out to be one of those remakes under the form of a musical comedy, and a much more farcical tone thanks to actors going for laughs over fidelity to the first film. Van Johnson, Esther Williams and Lucille Ball sing and strut their stuff (in and under water, in Williams’ predictable case) to end up making something so pleasantly different from the original that it becomes its own thing. As a bonus, you can see in Ball’s scene-stealing performance the kernels of her later Lucy character. If you like musicals, Easy to Wed is not a bad remake—but be sure to see Libeled Lady for a better movie.

  • Du Barry was a Lady (1943)

    Du Barry was a Lady (1943)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2020) Like many other hobbies, movie-watching gets more rewarding the more you put into it. If you’re the kind of person who watches a film a year, then go ahead and enjoy the film on its own merits. But if you’re the kind of cinephile who enjoys tracking down filmographies, sub-genres and how movies exist in context, then a film can become far more than the sum of its parts. While watching Du Barry Was a Lady, for instance, I was struck by how it brings together many people that I liked elsewhere. It has one of Gene Kelly’s earliest roles, for instance—and even at this early stage, he gets play the likable cad, singing and dancing even if it’s not (yet) to his own cinematography. It has one of Lucille Ball’s foremost movie roles, where she gets to be strikingly beautiful and funny. It has Red Skelton, semi-restrained from his usual comic tics and funnier for it. It has one of my favourite supporting actresses of the era, Virginia O’Brien, lovely and hilarious as she sings in her usual deadpan style. (“Salome” has funny lyrics, but half of the song’s many laughs come from O’Brien’s side glances, facial expressions and hand movements.) It has Zero Mostel playing small-time hustler, Tommy Dorsey as (what else?) a band leader and an entire song dedicated to Vargas pin-ups girls (Happily, Miss September is the best). Du Barry was a Lady is also, perhaps more significantly, one of Arthur Freed’s early MGM musicals and you can see bits and pieces of it as inspiration for the tone and content of his later movies. Compared to this thick web of associations and context, it does feel as if the film itself is not as good as its components. Much of the first half is a nightclub comedy (giving generous time to the on-stage acts) paying particular attention to Ball, Kelly and O’Brien, while the second loosens up by going back to Louis XV-era France for some sillier comedy focused on Skelton. It’s not bad, but the film is more interesting for its numbers and showcases than by itself—as mentioned before, “Salome” is worthy of an anthology reel, and it’s a treat to see Ball, Kelly and Mostel in early roles. I liked Du Barry was a Lady a lot, but I suspect that I’m getting a lot more out of it by virtue of having seen, in rapid succession, many of the other movies with which it shares a web of associations.

    (Second Viewing, On Cable TV, November 2021) What I like about revisiting classic Hollywood films is that even a few months can mean a world of difference in how you approach a film knowing more about its stars and their careers. You can watch Du Barry was a Lady (as I did the first time) without knowing much about its players and still appreciate the film on its own terms. But come back to it with a greater appreciation for Red Skelton, Gene Kelly, Lucille Ball, Virginia O’Brien, Zero Mostel and Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra, and the film becomes nothing short of a quasi-miraculous union of distinctive talents. Skelton delivers another of his usual performances here, and stays (mostly) under control for the first half of the film. Ball was on the upswing at the time, distinguishing herself as a dependable comic performer – but this was the film (her first as an MGM star) that changed her hair colour to red… a distinction she’d keep the rest of her career. Kelly was barely known at the time, but here gets a terrific solo dance number that clearly wowed others enough to give him bigger roles as a dancer. Gorgeous O’Brien gets an anthology number in “Salome” (sung deadpan, but complete with hilarious acting) as well as a decent supporting role. Zero Mostel makes his big-screen debut here, whereas Tommy Dorsey (aka D’Orsay in the French Royalty sequences) and his orchestra get a welcome showcase. Finally, who can resist the rather wonderful “I Love an Esquire Girl” featuring no less than twelve terrific Vargas girls? (Miss September being my favourite, even the second time around.)  The film itself is uneven: the first present-day half is not bad, but the second historical one is rather dull. But it’s by bringing together several talented performers that Du Barry Was a Lady finds its true calling. It’s not a completely satisfying film, but it’s well worth another look, possibly fast-forwarding from one great sequence to another.