SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Connianatu How wonderful it is to see this fine actress carry a film and carry it so beautifully.

PiraBit if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Delight Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

vincentlynch-moonoi No, this ain't Shakespeare! In fact, at least looking back now, it's a slightly below average film. But there are things here that make it interesting.First, this is where Lucille Ball first met Desi Arnaz (in his first film, after appearing in the Broadway play of the same name), and they married soon thereafter. To my surprise, although he's a bit rough around the edges, Arnaz was quite good here. Lucy was very good, also, although I thought that at 29 she looked too old to be a college student.Second, you don't have to look very hard to see a very young (24) Van Johnson, as a chorus boy, in his first film, and he does have a few (very few) lines of dialog.Third, you have one of the most beautiful songs ever written in this sort-of musical: "You're Nearer" by Rodgers & Hart. Wanna hear it done perfectly? Look for Perry Como's 1968 version.But then we get to the problems. For example, a silly plot, but not one you'd hold your nose over. And you've got Ann Miller, who was always a bit too butch for me. They throw in Frances Langford to sing a couple of songs (and she was a good singer), but then give her little to do in the story. Oh, and just out of curiosity, why does Desi Arnaz's character have the Irish last name of Lynch (I ask because I am a Lynch).Richard Carlson is pretty decent as Lucille Ball's love interest. Eddie Bracken is okay as another football player. The other supporting players do their jobs, but not much more.So, as I said, there are some interesting reasons to watch this film even though it's strictly a B-type film (even though it may have been an "A" film to RKO). Let's put it this way, this is not one of those "A" list MGM musicals.

Hunt2546 The flimsy book doesn't help a bit, and Mr. Abbott's inability to translate the stylizations of Broadway to the more naturalistic world of the film pretty much doom this one to pure anthropological significance. Yes, it's the first Lucy-Desi project, even if they have no scenes together and were reportedly unimpressed with each other during the making. So do not look for that Desilu magic, as it was still 10 years in the future. The movie crams together too many genre conventions for its own good: college football pic, zany mix-up, stiff leading man (Richard Carlson!), lost gal drama, fish outta water, south of zee border and worse, it features the dull Francis Langford as chief songbird of lyrics at the edges of the putrid. The dance numbers look like rehearsals for the invasion of Normandy--masses if unskilled, badly co-ordinated extras in clumsy formation-- and for some reason unbilled chorus boy Van Johnson, who can't dance a lick, is in the front row of every single crowd shot. But there are two saving graces. The first is the very young Ann Miller, also 10 years before her glory days at MGM, as Pepe, a racist caricature to be sure but one that can dance. In dark make-up as per cliché, Miller fricassees up a storm, giving a preview of the gifts she was to bring to the Freed unit.. And she's only the second best dancer in the picture! The best is Hal La Roy, and this is his only starring role in a major picture (he is featured in some Vitaphone WB musical shorts, such as "Jitterbut No. 1" but no other movies.) Lord what a talent, and what a crime he never got to do more. Like Gene Nelson of a subsequent generation, he just never got the break his talent warranted. So watch, enjoy and conjure what might have been when he does his loose-legged, spurred solo atop someone's idea of Mexican fountain which is the central architectural feature of Pottowattamie College" in Last Stand, N.M.: What a number, and how did he get those legs not only to bend like that but to bend like that at warp speed? You'll think Industrial Light and Magic computer-generated the number, that's how fast and astonishing it is. Boy, would I have liked to see him in a major film with someone like Hermes Pan or Stanley Donen calling the shots. Too bad and so sad it never happened.

rbrtptrck You can't really appreciate the pace and style of the great movie musicals until you've seen some lousy ones like this. A really awful 1930s or 1940s musical movie can induce a sort of restful trance, and take you into another world of stunned tedium. If you know only Rodgers and Hart's great songs which survived shows and became standards, you'll be astounded by how many strained and stupid ones come in between them in the course of a plotted show. The story-scenes are acted in a stiff and disinterested style. Actors seem just to be waiting for others to stop speaking so they can say their lines, rather than actually listening to each other. And why should they listen? What they say is overwritten, repetitious, and yet often indirect and incomplete as far as telling the story is concerned. The plot manages to be both contrived and clumsy, unlikely to the point of being fantastic--yet who would fantasize such dreariness? This effect is probably partly the result of prudish Hollywood trying to adapt a supposedly "spicy" script direct from supposedly "wicked" and "sophisticated" Broadway, and therefore inserting or deleting lines to keep the script "clean" but still leave the impression that it's "daring." But the prudishness seems hypocritical, and the sophistication way, way overestimated. Trying to convey both attitudes, yet neither, the actors become robotic and stressed. And the sets are so stagy that it's a shock when suddenly one scene is played on a real ball-field. Perhaps the most characteristic moment comes when Lucille Ball makes a remark about a boyfriend which is clearly the lead-in for a song, and then, as mechanically as a wind-up toy, while the other actors in the room watch helplessly, with nothing to do, crosses a whole room, goes out onto a porch, hits a position, stares into a light, and lip-syncs woodenly to a voice obviously not hers. Another: after what seems an endless discussion of the troubled finances of a college (which turn out to have nothing to do with the story at all), one boy donates the three hundred dollars (?) that's needed, and the college is opened, at which point for some reason everyone participates in a production number called, "Cakewalk, 'Cause We Got Cake," possibly left over from some other situation in the Broadway original (some of its lyrics seem to relate to Depression optimism), and performed not as a cakewalk, but a swing number. Also, as is to be expected in a "college musical" of the time, the main characters are far past college age, so their sexual coyness seems retarded. The ultimate effect is one of dreamlike slowness and isolation and illogic, making this trivial nonsense seem related to the existential sadness of De Chirico's paintings or Kafka's novels. The movie may be even more bewildering to younger viewers today because of changed social attitudes. A long scene among four boys is oblique to the point of mystery because in 1940 none of them could actually say that certain girls wearing certain "beanie" caps are virgins (there are a couple of incredibly labored attempts later at jokes about these caps). Lucille Ball, giving an old Native American man a letter to carry for her to a lover, calls the messenger, "Boy," and Latino Desi Arnaz not only has an awkward gay joke early in the film, but later performs a song called "I'm Spic and Spanish."

didi-5 With obvious clumps of studio foliage, this movie must have certainly cost very little to make: however, it does have a few saving graces (Lucille Ball, Ann Miller, and Frances Langford amongst the girls; Richard Carlson, Desi Arnaz, and Eddie Bracken amongst the boys; a handful of good songs from the Rodgers and Hart show - including 'I Didn't Know What Time It Was'). Between the musical numbers it drags quite badly and seems pretty stilted - some of the script has lines like: 'we're handing our strip back'/'you mean you're going to play in the nude?'; 'I'm looking for the Stunted Hag.'/'No, this is the Hunted Stag.'; 'You know, that college that doesn't give its right name - Smith.' and so on.The tale of a wayward girl going to her father's cheapo alma mater and shadowed by four Ivy League students is not that original, or done in a particularly interesting way. But, at the few moments when the music kicks in, it just about saves itself from oblivion.