Lured (Douglas Sirk, 1947)

Lucille Ball in Lured

Cast: Lucille Ball, George Sanders, Charles Coburn, Cedric Hardwicke, Boris Karloff, Joseph Calleia, Alan Mowbray, George Zucco, Robert Coote, Alan Napier, Tanis Chandler. Screenplay: Leo Rosten, based on a screenplay by Jacques Companéez, Ernst Neuback, and Simon Gantillon. Cinematography: William H. Daniels. Production design: Nicolai Remisoff. Film editing: John M. Foley. Music: Michel Michelet. 

Lured gave Lucille Ball a chance to break out of -- or at least transcend -- the wisecracking dame roles in which she had been cast. She plays Sandra Carpenter, an American dancer who came to London with a show that swiftly closed and is now forced to make ends meet by working as a taxi dancer, the profession immortalized in the Rodgers and Hart song "Ten Cents a Dance." When a chum of hers, a fellow dancer, disappears, she finds herself aiding Scotland Yard in an investigation of similar mysterious disappearances of young women: She plays bait, a role that puts her in contact with all manner of unsavory characters, including a crazed fashion designer played in a cameo role by Boris Karloff. But it also puts her in touch with Robert Fleming (George Sanders), a nightclub entrepreneur, with whom she falls in love. Eventually, Fleming himself will become a prime suspect in the case. It's a busy, semicomic crime story with few surprises for anyone who has seen this sort of thing before, made memorable by Douglas Sirk's crisp direction and Ball's smart, attractive presence -- one of the few substantial film roles she found before becoming a major star on television. William H. Daniels's cinematography helps give Ball the kind of glamour she seldom found on the big screen, somehow making her hair look orange even in black-and-white. There's not a lot of chemistry between Ball and Sanders, who is trying to transcend his own stereotype, the world-weary cad, but even in their separate ways they're always fun to watch.   

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). 

Du Barry Was a Lady (Roy Del Ruth, 1943)

Du Barry Was a Lady (Roy Del Ruth, 1943)

Cast: Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, Gene Kelly, Virginia O'Brien, Rags Ragland, Zero Mostel, Donald Meek, Douglass Dumbrille, George Givot, Louise Beavers, Tommy Dorsey. Screenplay: Nancy Hamilton, Irving Brecher, based on a play by Herbert Fields and Buddy G. DeSylva. Cinematography: Karl Freund. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Blanche Sewell. Music: Daniele Amfitheatrof, songs by Cole Porter, Burton Lane, Ralph Freed, Roger Edens, E.Y. Harburg. Costume design: Gile Steele.

Natalie Kalmus must have been in heaven. The ex-wife of Technicolor founder Herbert Kalmus, and the contract-designated "color supervisor" for any film using the process (as well as the bane of any directors or cinematographers who wanted to do it their own way), was surely delighted when MGM chose Red Skelton and Lucille Ball to star in Du Barry Was a Lady, thereby ensuring that Technicolor's most vivid hue, red, would be on display throughout the film. Ball's hair stylist, Sydney Guilaroff, even devised a new red hair dye for the star, one that she would continue to use -- even to make jokes about -- for the rest of her career. The movie itself is nonsense, one of MGM's second-string musicals, based on a Broadway hit that had starred Bert Lahr and Ethel Merman, but jettisoning not only its stars but also most of Porter's songs. Before it gets to the central gimmick -- Skelton accidentally gets slipped a mickey and dreams he's back in the court of Louis XV -- it's a string of night club routines, including a trio of singers who imitate the famous but now-forgotten big bands of the day, but also featuring one of the best big bands, Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra. Skelton mugs a lot, but Zero Mostel, cast as a fortune-teller, mugs even more. At least Gene Kelly, the nominal romantic lead, gets to dance a bit. Ball was still in that stage of her career in which nobody seemed to know what to do with a beautiful woman who was also a gifted clown. Her best moments in the film come when she gets to do her clowning, as in a sequence in which Skelton (as Louis XV) chases her (as Madame DuBarry) around a bedroom and across a trampoline disguised as a bed. She also gets some funny moments in the film's closing number, Porter's "Friendship," goofing around with the rest of the cast. (It's also the one number in which her own singing voice is heard; the rest of the time she's dubbed by Martha Mears.) This is one of those movies for which the fast-forward button on the remote control was designed: Skip anything savoring of plot, most of the tedious mugging, the calendar-girl fashion show, but stop for the Dorsey numbers, the Kelly dances, and any time Ball is allowed to show what she did best.

Dance, Girl, Dance (Dorothy Arzner, 1940)

Lucille Ball, Maureen O'Hara, and Virginia Field in Dance, Girl, Dance

Cast: Maureen O'Hara, Louis Hayward, Lucille Ball, Virginia Field, Ralph Bellamy, Maria Ouspenskaya, Mary Carlisle, Katharine Alexander, Edward Brophy, Walter Abel. Screenplay: Tess Slesinger, Frank Davis, based on a story by Vicki Baum. Cinematography: Russell Metty. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Alfred Herman. Film editing: Robert Wise. Music: Edward Ward.

Dorothy Arzner's film about chorus girls struggling to make lives for themselves in a milieu dominated by males and their gaze earned its place in the National Film Registry by being one of the few movies of the era to take the women's point of view seriously. It has its melodramatic excesses, but it steadily keeps its focus on the characters played by Lucille Ball and Maureen O'Hara instead of yielding time to its male leads, Louis Hayward and Ralph Bellamy. 

Follow the Fleet (Mark Sandrich, 1936)

If Swing Time, as I suggested yesterday, has too little plot, then Follow the Fleet has a bit too much. Dwight Taylor and Allan Scott based their screenplay on a 1922 Broadway play, Shore Leave, by Hubert Osborne, which later became a musical, Hit the Deck. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers of course spark real heat when they're dancing together: As the remark attributed to Katharine Hepburn about the team says, she made him sexy and he made her classy. But I don't find them terribly convincing as a romantic pair when they're not singing and dancing together, and this criticism was not uncommon even in their heyday. Which may be why RKO decided to try to spice things up by creating a parallel romantic team in Follow the Fleet, casting Randolph Scott and Harriet Hilliard as the lovers whose problems echo those of Astaire and Rogers. The trouble is, Scott and Hilliard generate much less chemistry than the lead couple. Scott had always been a sort of second-string Gary Cooper, but without Cooper's charm or acting ability, and Hilliard was best known as a singer with her husband Ozzie Nelson's band when she was signed for this film, her first feature. She sings, rather ineffectively, two of the lesser-known of the seven Irving Berlin songs in the score, "Get Thee Behind Me, Satan" and "But Where Are You?" Follow the Fleet did nothing for her film career. It wasn't until she teamed with Ozzie for the radio series The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet in 1944, and later with their two sons, David and Ricky, for the long-running TV series of the same name, that she became really famous. Fame was in store, however, for several other members of the cast: Betty Grable and a blond Lucille Ball have small parts in the film, and Tony Martin, one of the sailors backing up Astaire, would later star in the film version of Hit the Deck (Roy Rowland, 1955), bringing Hollywood's use of Osborne's play full circle. As for Astaire and Rogers, Follow the Fleet contains two of their most memorable numbers. They do a slapstick dance routine to "I'm Putting All My Eggs in One Basket" that shows Rogers's great gift for physical comedy to full advantage. And then there's  "Let's Face the Music and Dance," which is one of their most balletic routines. Astaire does some remarkable footwork and Rogers is clad in an amazing dress that, thanks to weights in the sleeves and hem, swirls around her hypnotically. Once or twice, to be sure, you can see Astaire try to avoid getting swacked by her sleeves. (The designer credited with "gowns" is Bernard Newman.) At the end of this sublime routine, Astaire and Rogers slowly make their way off-stage and then suddenly exit with a breathtakingly unanticipated strut. But why try to describe it?