Too Many Girls (George Abbott, 1940)

Hal Le Roy, Lucille Ball, Richard Carlson, Eddie Bracken, Desi Arnaz in Too Many Girls

Cast: Lucille Ball, Richard Carlson, Ann Miller, Eddie Bracken, Frances Langford, Desi Arnaz, Hal Le Roy, Libby Bennett, Harry Shannon, Douglas Walton, Chester Clute, Tiny Person, Ivy Scott, Byron Shores, Van Johnson. Screenplay: John Twist, based on a play by George Marion Jr. Cinematography: Frank Redman. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Carroll Clark. Film editing: William Hamilton. Songs: Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart.

When Desi met Lucy -- that's the most memorable thing about this silly college musical that was directed on stage by George Abbott, who brought over several members of the original cast when he was hired to make the film version at RKO. It was designed to be a vehicle for Lucille Ball, an RKO contract player who hadn't been in the stage production and whose singing voice wasn't up to the demands of the Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart songs of the original show, so she was dubbed by Trudy Erwin. Among the cast hired out of the original were Eddie Bracken, Hal Le Roy, and Desi Arnaz, as well as a young chorus boy, Van Johnson, who has a couple of lines but goes uncredited. Although Arnaz is paired in most of the film with Ann Miller, he and Ball hit it off when they weren't on screen and married shortly after the movie wrapped. The story is nonsense about Connie Casey (Ball), a playgirl whose father wants her to settle down and go to college at his alma mater, Pottawatomie, in New Mexico. But he also hires some bodyguards, four young college football players, to keep her out of trouble. And so it goes, as the four bodyguards lead the Pottawatomie football team to a string of victories, and one of them, Clint Kelly (Richard Carlson), falls hard for Connie. It's very loose-jointed stuff, with some lively musical numbers spotlighting Arnaz, Miller, Frances Langford, and a large company of dancers directed by LeRoy Prinz, but a lot of dull filler in between. It's amusing to see Eddie Bracken before he got stereotyped as a doofus in Preston Sturges movies, and a crewcut Richard Carlson before he wound up as the very square star of such 1950s sci-fi movies as It Came From Outer Space (Jack Arnold, 1953) and Creature From the Black Lagoon (Arnold, 1954). 

This Land Is Mine (Jean Renoir, 1943)

Cast: Charles Laughton, Maureen O'Hara, George Sanders, Walter Slezak, Kent Smith, Una O'Connor, Philip Merivale, Thurston Hall, George Coulouris, Nancy Gates, Ivan F. Simpson, John Donat. Screenplay: Dudley Nichols. Cinematography: Frank Redman. Production design: Eugène Lourié. Film editing: Frederick Knudtson. Music: Lothar Perl.

Charles Laughton plays a cowardly mama's boy schoolteacher in a Nazi-occupied country not unlike director Jean Renoir's native France. Albert Lory is secretly in love with his fellow teacher, Louise (Maureen O'Hara), but she's engaged to George Lambert (George Sanders), the administrator of the local railway yard who thinks the best way to proceed under the occupation is to submit to the Nazis under the command of Major von Keller (Walter Slezak). But Louise's brother, Paul (Kent Smith), is a member of the Resistance who tries to assassinate von Keller, provoking reprisals -- and a good deal of plot complications -- when he fails. Some dubious casting -- Sanders and O'Hara make an odd couple -- and a too-heavy reliance on melodramatic posing undermine a film that seems aimed more at Renoir's compatriots than at American audiences, though it was a box office success.