Too Many Girls (1940)

Film: Too Many Girls (1940)

Stars: Lucille Ball, Richard Carlson, Ann Miller, Eddie Bracken, Frances Langford, Desi Arnaz, Hal Le Roy

Director: George Abbott

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Lucille Ball click here to learn more about Ms. Ball (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We are not going to go very far into Lucille Ball's career compared to last week's Dance, Girl, Dance, so you might wonder if you only look at the title of this article as to why I'm using another feminine-monikered film from 1940 to continue on our month.  After all, Lucille Ball did spend a full decade making movies before I Love Lucy came along (and she made several after that).  The reason, though, is evidenced in the cast list.  Lucille Ball was married to her husband Gary Morton for thirty years, but it was her first marriage that would attract the attention of the public, and make her a part of one of Classical Hollywood's greatest super couples.  Yes, Too Many Girls is where Desi Arnaz met his future wife Lucille Ball.

(Spoilers Ahead) Too Many Girls is a pretty standard RKO musical of the era.  It features four men (led by Carlson, but including Bracken, Arnaz, & Le Roy) who are hired by a wealthy tycoon to secretly bodyguard his daughter Connie (Ball), who has become something of a celebrity in the society pages for her romances & goings-on.  She is moving to New Mexico to attend her father's alma mater, but little known to him, she also intends to marry a much older writer.  While there, she begins to fall for Carlson's Clint, but there's a catch.  The contract that he's signed (which Connie doesn't know about until late in the film) includes an "anti-romance" clause which requires that the bodyguards not fall in love with Connie.  This is clearly a problem, as Connie & Clint do just that, and while they have to hash it out over Clint's secret job and the clause, they eventually find their happy endings.

The film is weird for a couple of reasons.  For starters, despite getting top billing, Lucille Ball (our star of the month) is hardly in the film.  The focus is more on the randy bodyguards, who are all romancing a series of women (including Ann Miller) at a university that is populated by "virginal" women (they wear a white hat to signal their virtue), but whose flirtations signal that this might be pretense.  Ball is good in this movie, but she's not really in it, which is a pity as Carlson is a charisma drain, and certainly not enough to make up for stealing screentime from proper showstoppers like Ball & Miller.

As a result, it's actually Arnaz who steals the picture.  Impossibly debonair & youthful (he was just 23 when this was made), Arnaz is, well, dead sexy as the most memorable of the four bodyguards.  It's easy to see why Ball, six years his senior, fell for him.  He's in full-throated glory (even is his main musical number is pretty racist in its lyrics), and excellent.  Arnaz, whom we'll talk about a bit in the next couple of articles in conjunction with Ball, was never the generational talent his wife was, but it's nice to see him get out of Lucy's shadow here, as he delivers well even if they rarely share the screen.