Lucy and Desi famously met on the set of Too Many Girls, though they have few scenes together with Lucy spending most of the film being romanced by Richard Carlson. A Rogers & Hart college musical that opened on Broadway in October 1939, the movie appears to be a pretty faithful adaptation, with most of the cast outside Ball and Carlson reprising their roles for the film version, several of whom quickly became big stars (including chorus boy Van Johnson, who has one line and appears uncredited).

Clint (Carlson), Jojo (Eddie Bracken), and Al (Hal LeRoy) are football stars from Princeton, Harvard, and Yale, respectively, trying to recruit Argentinean sensation Manuelito (Arnaz). Instead, all four agree to attend lowly Pottawatomie U. (in Stopgap, New Mexico), surreptitiously hired by wealthy industrialist Harvey Casey (Harry Shannon) to act as $50/week bodyguards to his irresponsible if beautiful daughter, Consuelo (Ball), just back from finishing school in Switzerland.

Each is attracted to Consuelo, especially Clint, who falls for her after she sings the Rogers-Hart standard "You're Nearer," but all are bound to Casey's contract with its "anti-romance clause (hands-off policy)." Initially this is no problem for there are 10 women to each man at Pottawatomie. But can the boys resist the urge to help out the school's pathetic home team? Who will Consuelo wind up with at the fade-out - Clint, or British playwright Beverly Waverly (Douglas Walton)? ("Remember," says Clint, "the guy who kept getting nearer and nearer?")

Too Many Girls is a fun musical with good songs and an immensely likable cast that also includes Ann Miller and Frances Langford. Arnaz and Bracken are full of charisma in their film debuts, while Hal LeRoy is fine in a knock-out tap routine. Ball, whose familiar persona was still a long way off, plays it coy throughout.

The film is sheer fantasy, set a university with nary a classroom or professor in sight (it's got a big football stadium, however), where the singing and dancing goes on 24/7. The use of elaborate southwestern-style motifs on expansive indoor sets (with painted backdrop skies) adds to the unreality, but this isn't a bad thing.

By the time Lucy and Desi starred in The Long, Long Trailer, I Love Lucy was a ratings sensation. The movie was and is an odd adjustment, partly because the writers erred in calling their characters Tacy and Nicky, an obvious yet awkward bit of alliteration that only draws attention to itself. Audiences kept expecting Fred and Ethel (from the series) to turn up, and though Ball had appeared in her share of Technicolor movies, seeing the pair on the big screen in full color was also a novelty.

The film itself is a surprise, a star vehicle in the best sense of the word. Though often regarded as a slapstick comedy it really isn't, with only about 10 minutes of the entire film falling back on the kind of humor that came to dominate their TV series. Instead, the humor flows naturally from the basic situations and, perhaps most surprisingly, Ball for the most part plays it straight (she's definitely not a dingbat with hair-brained schemes) with most of the laughs coming from Desi's reactions to various situations.

Tacy and Nicky are newlyweds, and because his job involves a lot of traveling, she talks him into buying a massive 32-foot New Moon trailer (cost: $5,345) instead of a house. Tacy thinks this will save them some cash in the end, but it very quickly turns into a money pit, requiring a more powerful car to pull it (they buy a new Mercury Monterey), super-strong trailer hitch, etc. Soon enough they're on the road, and the bulk of the film simply follows their adventures struggling to maneuver the intimidating mass of machinery and adapt to their new lives together.

This is a very good film, handsomely produced with many funny sequences. It wisely keeps to its basic premise without ever straying too far and is singularly about them, with few extraneous characters. Fourth-billed Keenan Wynn is in the picture all of one minute and basically has no lines; both he and third-billed Marjorie Main, who isn't in it all that much either, were added for box office insurance but really aren't necessary.

Though no one would ever think of director Vincente Minnelli as a comedy director, his work here is exemplary, with a keen understanding of how to effectively pull-off the film's big set pieces. A highlight near the end of the film has Lucy and Ricky - er, Taci and Nicky - pulling the trailer up an extremely narrow, cliffside road up the side of a mountain. Both are terrified, and vainly try to make conversation while on the soundtrack (cleverly not underscored) the creaking of the trailer's suspension, fallings pebbles and the like add to the tension. It's very funny. Good too is Nicky's nervousness about hauling such a big trailer, leading to his near-meltdown ("Trailer brakes! Red light!") and later Taci's opposite reaction - she's dangerously over-confident - is also quite amusing.

Looking at it now, more than 50 years after it was made, the film offers added appeal with an incredible retro-value, with great '50s trailers and depictions of trailer life (much of it on fake but elaborate indoor sets representing exteriors) and some nice Yosemite National Park scenery.

Everything that works in The Long, Long Trailer is conspicuously absent in Forever, Darling, a borderline terrible comedy-fantasy utterly lacking in focus, logic, romance, and wit. There's something to be said for big studio know-how over independent production. Where Long, Long Trailer had been both an MGM production and release, Forever, Darling was a "Zanra" production (spell it backwards) for the studio. Though vastly underrated as a television producer, Desi Arnaz's sole feature film credit in this capacity is faintly disastrous.

How long does it take for the story to get underway? Forever, darling. The film is way past the point of no return before the identity and motives of guardian angel James Mason become clear: he's trying to help Susan Vega (Ball) salvage her seven-year, on the rocks marriage to pest-repellent chemist (!) Lorenzo (Arnaz). She's the daughter of wealthy Charles Bewell (Louis Calhern, who died soon after its release) but he insists they live only on his income. Her cousin-best friend Millie (Natalie Schafer, Mrs. Howell on Gilligan's Island) is an obnoxious snob from whom Lorenzo cannot hide his contempt.

Very late in the movie Lucy and Desi head back up to Yosemite again (couldn't they have gone somewhere different?) so that Lorenzo can test "383," his new pest spray - "It'll make DDT look like talcum powder!" gloats boss John Hoyt - on the park's mosquito population.

Nothing works in Forever, Darling. The picture lacks heart and emotional truth; where in the earlier film Taci and Nicky believably had behaved like real newlyweds, Susan and Lorenzo spout sitcom-like wisecracks at one another, and the humor is labored throughout. This is best exemplified by the film's Big Joke, an incredibly protracted gag where Susan is reluctant to tell both Lorenzo and psychiatrist Dr. Winter (John Emery) who her guardian angel looks like. The way this is set-up one assumes he must resemble an old beau from Susan's past but no: it's because he resembles - get this - James Mason! Feh.

Almost perversely, Mason's fine voice inexplicably is kept silent most of the time, almost as if on purpose, to drag the story out as long as possible. For most of the picture he simply stands around mooning at Susan with a big grin on his face. After A Star is Born and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, his role here is pretty embarrassing. The fantasy element is so clumsy and unimaginative, one has to feel sorry for director Alexander Hall, the man who made the superb Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), whose last film this was.

The film has no idea what it wants to be. The bickering between Susan and Lorenzo has an uncomfortably genuine edginess (Ball and Arnaz would divorce a few years later), while other scenes offer standard I Love Lucy slapstick, particularly toward the end when the Vegas go camping. There's a fake film-within-the-film, Shadows of Africa, featuring Mason and Marilyn Maxwell, during which for no reason Susan fantasizes she's in Maxwell's shoes, tamed by White Hunter Mason. The real movie is somewhat bolstered by its great cast of character players, many associated with Ball's various TV shows, including Mabel Anderson, Nancy Kulp, Ralph Dumke, and others.

Video & Audio

Too Many Girls is the weakest of the three presentations, an RKO title whose original negative may no longer exist or perhaps proved unusable. The image is less sharp than the best-surviving B&W films of this era, but it's still perfectly watchable.

The Long, Long, Trailer is presented full frame which seems to be the correct aspect ratio. The film was probably shot in the summer of 1953, during the hiatus between I Love Lucy's second and third season, and released during the sweeping changeover of most theaters for CinemaScope, in February 1954, making it one of the last big studio standard size releases. Filmed in dreaded Ansco Color but released with Technicolor prints, the film looks stunning throughout, with great color and clarity.

Forever, Darling is 16:9 enhanced at 1.77:1, with a thin black bar on the left side of the image during the opening titles (modeled after I Love Lucy). Originally released at 1.75:1 (or perhaps 1.66:1), the framing looks perfect. The image, photographed in Eastman Color with original theatrical prints by Technicolor, is a slight notch below The Long, Long Trailer but still very good, with only a reel or two and some of the opticals looking a bit tepid.

The mono sound on all three movies is fine. The Long, Long Trailer offers an alternate French track. All three offer subtitles in English, French, and Spanish.

Extra Features

Supplements on Too Many Girls consist of two shorts from 1940: Frances Carroll & "The Coquettes" and Shop, Look & Listen, a "Blabbermouth Mouse" cartoon from Warner Bros. The former is an okay one-reel Vitaphone short featuring a pretty good all-girl swing band (including drummer Viola Smith) and tap dancer Eunice Healey.

The cartoon, directed by Friz Freleng, is only so-so. Blabbermouth is not one of the great cartoon stars, nor is the feeble W.C. Fields wannabe he's paired with. The short is preceded by a long, politically-correct disclaimer preparing viewers about the short's racial stereotypes, which turn out to be much ado about very little. Ironically, Too Many Girls is guiltier of this than the cartoon. In one scene Ball's character calls a sixty-something Native American "boy," sending him off to run an errand.

Extras on The Long, Long Trailer include Ain't It Aggravatin'? (1954), a Pete Smith Specialty running eight minutes and, surprisingly, 16:9 enhanced for 1.77:1 presentation. The black & white short is fairly amusing, better than average for the often grating series. Dixieland Droopy (1954) is a very good UPA-influenced Tex Avery cartoon with Droopy a Dixieland jazz lovin' pooch who befriends a jazz combo flea circus. Some sources claim this clever short was shot in CinemaScope, but the presentation here is full frame (with window-boxed titles) and appears correct.

Forever, Darling includes a five-minute excerpt from episode 22 of The MGM Parade, the studio's ill-fated entry into television, with Lucy and Desi straining mightily to make their scripted "chat" with host George Murphy sound spontaneous.

Theatrical Trailers for all three movies are included, the latter two leaning heavily on the popularity of I Love Lucy with Forever, Darling even bringing in the animated Lucy and Ricky that used to appear in that show's ads.

Parting Thoughts

The set is a natural for those collecting I Love Lucy but also for more general fans of '40s and '50s Hollywood. Two out of three ain't bad. Recommended.

**It's on TV here in Japan, tonight, on the NHK network in both English and its original Japanese-dubbed track.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf - The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune and Taschen's forthcoming Cinema Nippon. Visit Stuart's Cine Blogarama here.