Saturdays with the Stars: Lucille Ball

Each month of 2022 we will be taking a look at one-time film actors who became foundational figures in the early days of television, stretching from the early 1950's into the mid-1960's.  For our first month, I figured it was important to start out with someone who would become the personification of this trend of actors who had tried for movie star glory, but couldn't gain the stature of someone like Ginger Rogers or Clark Gable, and were largely beyond their days as a cinematic headliner when television gave them a new lease on their career, and in the case of January's star, an immortality as the first superstar actress of the small screen.  This month's star is Lucille Ball.

The daughter of Jamestown, New York, Ball's life is akin to Marilyn Monroe's or Elvis Presley's at this point, it's so well-known to cinephiles.  In the past year, in fact, Ball has been the subject of a major podcast from Turner Classic Movies and a big-screen look at her life from director Aaron Sorkin starring Nicole Kidman.  For those unfamiliar, though, Ball's career started in New York, where she had some success as a model & chorus girl before she went to Hollywood, spending much of the 1930's scrounging around the RKO lot (even at one point, as hard as it is to believe, screen-testing for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind) before gaining a contract with MGM that would lead her to gain the snarky nickname "Queen of the B's"-getting first billing in second rate fare from the studio throughout the 1940's.

This all changed when Ball would sign with CBS for a radio program (after her contract with MGM had run out) called My Favorite Husband, which was a big enough hit that CBS tried to land Ball for a TV show.  Ball put in the condition that her husband Desi Arnaz would be the co-lead of the show, and after CBS acquiesced, she started to make I Love Lucy.  This resulted in arguably the most successful run of hits for an actress in American television history-I Love Lucy in its heyday was seen by over 40 million people a week, an unthinkable number particularly when you consider that in 1951 only 12 million households in America even had a television.  Literally everyone seemed to watch I Love Lucy, and in the decades that followed Ball had The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, The Lucy Show, and Here's Lucy as major television hits for 20 straight seasons.

This month, though, we're going to take a look back at the forgotten era of Ball's career.  I'm a huge fan of I Love Lucy (I, like so many others, grew up watching reruns of it on Nick-at-Nite and TV Land), but I haven't seen a lot of her earlier work.  We're going to take a peak at a few of the most noteworthy films she made when she was "Queen of the B's" as well as one film she made after she became one of the most famous figures in America, trying to understand why it took so long for the world to realize they loved Lucy.