At the height of their TV fame, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were contracted by MGM to make two theatrical films. The first of these, The Long, Long Trailer, stars Lucy and Desi as an upwardly mobile couple who decide to buy a trailer so they can live together while his job takes him around the country. Thanks to their naivete in such matters, they ...
This story is taken from the real-life marriage of two people in the early 1960s. Helen North (Lucille Ball) is a widow with eight children who falls in love with Naval officer Frank Beardsley (Henry Fonda), a widower with ten children of his own. The two marry as comedy ensues from the sheer numbers and diverse age groups of the offspring. ...
Though it was hard to top the "pregnancy" throughline that permeated the second season of I Love Lucy, the series maintained its ranking as America's favorite TV program throughout its third year on the air. Back for more fun and laughter were Lucille Ball as wacky housewife Lucy Ricardo, Desi Arnaz as her long-suffering Cuban bandleader husband ...
Lucille Ball stars in this film version of the hit Jerry Herman Broadway musical, which featured an electrifying performance by Angela Lansbury. As Patrick Dennis' plucky and resilient Auntie Mame, Ball's low-pitched, growling moan of a voice (a spine-chilling reminder of the sound of Linda Blair's demon-possession in The Exorcist) and her gaudy ...
Even though I Love Lucy was still America's top-rated series as it entered its fourth season, the producers -- including Desi Arnaz, who also starred as Cuban bandleader Ricky Ricardo -- decided it was time to freshen up the format a bit with a change of scenery. Thus, Ricky, his zany wife Lucy (Lucille Ball) and their friends Ethel and Fred Mertz ...
The presence of William Powell as legendary showman Flo Ziegfeld at the beginning of Ziegfeld Follies might lead an impressionable viewer from thinking that this 1946 film is a Technicolor sequel to the 1936 Oscar-winning The Great Ziegfeld. Not so: this is more in the line of an all-star revue, much like such early talkies as Hollywood Revue of ...
America's third most popular TV show during its first season, I Love Lucy skyrocketed to number one during Season Two -- no small thanks to the fact that the real-life pregnancy of Lucille Ball was brilliantly written into the script (though such was TV censorship at the time that the would "pregnant" could never be spoken). On January 19, 1953, ...
Five original cast members of the hit Broadway musical Best Foot Forward appear in this Technicolor MGM screen adaptation. Set at a small town military prep school, the story gets under way when movie star Lucille Ball (played by movie star Lucille Ball) pays a visit to the campus for publicity purposes. Several of the students, led by Bud (Tommy ...
Ira Levin wrote the stage comedy Critic's Choice as a good-natured retort to a comment made by critic Walter Kerr. In his essay How Not to Write a Play, Kerr noted that the worst possible scenario would involve a drama critic forced to review a play written by his wife (we should mention that Kerr's own wife was noted playwright Jean Kerr). Levin ...
I Love Lucy boasted a new sponsor (General Foods, taking over from Philip Morris Cigarettes), a new director, and new addition to its writing staff for its fifth season on the air. Otherwise, it's the same old zany redhead Lucy Ricardo (Lucille Ball) making life hilariously chaotic for her Cuban bandleader husband, Ricky (Desi Arnaz), and the ...
Lucille Ball is Miss Grant, an efficient but naïve secretary hired by William Holden. Ostensibly a legit real estate salesman, Holden is actually the brains of a bookie ring. It takes forever for Ball to tumble to what's going on, but when she does she settles matters in the same fashion as her later I Love Lucy character would--by adopting a ...
In their third film together, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn created one of the box-office sensations of 1945, a sparklingly witty wartime comedy about a marriage entered on the theory that love only gums up a relationship. Invited by a drunken Quintin Ladd (Keenan Wynn), devoted scientist Patrick Jamieson (Tracy) moves into the Washington ...
This second of four film adaptations of Damon Runyon's Little Miss Marker is tailored to the talents of Bob Hope. A shifty Broadway bookie, Sorrowful Jones (Hope) becomes a reluctant foster parent when an anxious gambler leaves behind his little girl Martha Jane (Mary Jane Saunders) as a "marker," or IOU. When the father is killed by mobster Big ...
When Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz beat the odds against TV stars succeeding on the big screen in The Long, Long Trailer (1954), MGM contracted America's favorite couple for a second theatrical feature. Forever Darling casts Desi as Lorenzo Xavier Vega, a brilliant scientist and Lucy as Susan, his neglected wife. Wishing out loud that her husband ...
By the time the first 35 episodes of I Love Lucy had been shown on CBS' Monday night lineup, virtually everybody in America loved zany redhead Lucy Ricardo (Lucille Ball), her Cuban bandleader husband Ricky (Desi Arnaz) and their landlords and best friends, Fred and Ethel Mertz (Vivian Vance, William Frawley). The series admirably set up most of ...
Lucille Ball is an American taxi-dancer living in London whose roommate has disappeared. The missing girl had left to answer a job offer in the "personal" column of the Times...just like several other women who've vanished without a trace. Scotland Yard detective George Zucco suggests that Ball answer the personals herself in hopes trapping the ...
The ads for The Stone Pillow tended to suggest that this TV movie was Lucille Ball's dramatic debut--completely ignoring the fact that Ball had started out as a "straight" actress in the 1930s who only occasionally played comedy until I Love Lucy came along. Whatever the case, the Ball we see in Stone Pillow is a cranky bag lady, fiercely ...
Based on a story by Vicki Baum (of Grand Hotel) fame, Dance, Girl Dance finds innocent young Judy (Maureen O'Hara) journeying to the Big Apple in hopes of gaining fame as a classical dancer. Instead she ends up as the "stooge" for raucous strip-tease artist Bubbles (Lucille Ball), who attempts to perform ballet before leering, catcalling, ...
The racy, ribald Cole Porter musical Du Barry Was a Lady is here given a thorough dry-cleaning by prudish MGM. Richard "Red" Skelton takes over the role of Louis Blore (played on Broadway by Bert Lahr), while Lucille Ball steps into the shoes of the original play's Ethel Merman. The story proposes that Blore is a men's room attendant in a New York ...
Lucille Ball delivers the finest dramatic performance of her career in this satisfying adaptation of Damon Runyon's The Big Street. Ball is cast as Gloria, aka "Your Highness," the vain and thoroughly selfish star attraction of gangster Case Ables' (Barton MacLaine) New York nightclub. Henry Fonda costars as busboy Little Pinks, who worships ...
Having paid $255,500 for the rights to John Murray and Allen Boretz' Broadway hit Room Service, RKO Radio then scouted about for a "perfect" cast. Thanks to the persistence of show-biz agent Zeppo Marx, RKO was able to secure the services of Zeppo's brothers Groucho, Harpo and Chico Marx for $100,000. The result is an uneven but entertaining blend ...
Lucille Ball offers a seminal version of her Lucy Ricardo TV character in Her Husband's Affairs. Ball is cast as Margaret Weldon, the wife of advertising executive William Weldon (Franchot Tone). Though Weldon is successful, Margaret can't help but feel that he'd be more successful if she were to take an active part in his business affairs. The ...
This Technicolor musical remake of the 1936 comedy classic Libeled Lady isn't quite up to the standards of the original, but on its own terms is quite entertaining. Van Johnson, Esther Williams, Lucille Ball and Keenan Wynn expertly assume the roles originally played by William Powell, Myrna Loy, Jean Harlow and Spencer Tracy. Faced with a libel ...
Hot on the heels of such Red Skelton slapstick comedies as The Fuller Brush Man and The Yellow Cab Man came The Fuller Brush Girl, starring Lucille Ball in a fascinating dry run for her wacky "Lucy Ricardo" TV character. Unable to hold a job because of her tendency to get into trouble, Sally Elliot (Ball) hires on at the Fuller Brush company as a ...
Now immortalized as the film on which Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz met, Too Many Girls is a faithful adaptation of the Richard Rodgers-Lorenz Hart-George Abbott Broadway musical hit. The light-as-a-feather plotline finds four football players hired to escort dizzy heiress Connie Casey (Lucille Ball) when she goes off to attend a southwestern ...
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