Saturdays with the Stars Season 4 Finale

Two of our stars this year, Lucille Ball & Ann Sothern

We ended the year on a Saturday (a first for our series), so I wasn't able to get this recap out in 2022 like we normally do, but I didn't want to finish our fourth season of Saturdays with the Stars without our annual recap.  While we are headed into a new season this coming Saturday focusing on western stars, I would be remiss if we didn't take a moment to talk through actors in television, and what I learned from our fourth season.

This year was really interesting for me for a couple of reasons.  For starters, it was really the first season where I didn't have "stars" at the center, and of course it was our first season with men.  As a result, there were actors this year where I was watching a movie where they barely showed up, character actors in Old Hollywood being harder to track their "most significant" roles.  As a result, our annual discussion below of "favorite performances" I ended up in some cases having less options.

But I also kind of loved that, as it underlined the main thesis of this year: that television gave these performers an opportunity that movies simply couldn't.  Some of these actors had great potential, but the public (or the studio heads) couldn't see it for what it was, and TV brought that talent out in them.  Others, quite frankly, needed the banality of television compared to the "make an impact every time" culture of movies because their star personas weren't as curated.  We'll be getting back to star culture in 2023 (while they might occasionally take supporting parts depending on our film, all 12 of our stars this year are generally considered to be "leading players"), I won't forget that lesson as I continue to watch the twelve stars we watched this past year in other films in the decades to come.  Below, I have created a little list celebrating the best of this year's stars.  Thank you so much to everyone who joined us for part or all of this year's season-I'm excited to have you back for season five's "When Cowboys Ruled Hollywood"!: 

Favorite Performance from Each Star 

January: Lucille Ball-Dance. Girl. Dance.

February: Jack Benny-George Washington Slept Here

March: Eve Arden-Comrade X

April: Ann Sothern-Lady in a Cage

May: Robert Young-They Won't Believe Me

June: Spring Byington-BF's Daughter

July: Loretta Young-Midnight Mary

August: John Payne-Silver Lode

September: Ward Bond-The Wings of Eagles

October: Walter Brennan-Come and Get It

November: Donna Reed-The Last Time I Saw Paris

December: Barbara Stanwyck-Baby Face

5 Favorite Performers (Alphabetical, and based solely on the films we watched as a collective & not on the rest of their careers)

Eve Arden

Lucille Ball

Jack Benny

Ann Sothern

Barbara Stanwyck

5 Favorite Performances of the Year (Alphabetical)

Lucille Ball, Dance. Girl. Dance.

Barbara Stanwyck, Baby Face

Barbara Stanwyck, The Furies

Ann Sothern, Lady in a Cage

Loretta Young, Midnight Mary

10 Favorite Films of the Year (Alphabetical)

Baby Face

Dance. Girl. Dance.

Forty Guns

The Furies

George Washington Slept Here

Lady in a Cage

Rio Bravo

The Stranger

They Were Expendable

They Won't Believe Me

Top 10 Performances of the Year (Not By Our Stars...and Yes, Alphabetical)

Judith Anderson, The Furies

James Caan, Lady in a Cage

Charles Coburn, George Washington Slept Here

Olivia de Havilland, Lady in a Cage

Susan Hayward, They Won't Believe Me

Walter Huston, The Furies

Percy Kilbride, George Washington Slept Here

Edward G. Robinson, The Stranger

John Wayne, Rio Bravo

Orson Welles, The Stranger

Mame (1974)

Film: Mame (1974)

Stars: Lucille Ball, Beatrice Arthur, Robert Preston, Bruce Davison, Jane Connell

Director: Gene Saks

Oscar History: Both Ball & Arthur were cited for Golden Globes, but neither of them translated to Oscar.

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.

Last week, we talked about Lucille Ball's tumultuous marriage to actor Desi Arnaz, which overlapped with the most successful period of her career, where she & Arnaz redefined television as the Ricardos on I Love Lucy, still considered one of the greatest sitcoms of all time.  I Love Lucy went off the air in 1957, and while the two appeared in the successful Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour specials, their onscreen & offscreen relationships dissolved in 1960.  Ball, though, stayed on television for the next 15 years, first in The Lucy Show and then with her children with Here's Lucy.  Not as well-remembered today (particularly Here's Lucy, which thanks to competition from I Love Lucy and The Lucy Show, struggled to gain a foothold in an already crowded "Lucy Reruns" syndication market), both series were massive hits in their days, and from 1951-1972, Lucille Ball had a Top 10 hit every single season (even when it went off the air, Here's Lucy was still in the Top 30).  During this time, Ball tried her hand at other industries, including theater & film, marking one of her bigger successes opposite her The Big Street costar Henry Fonda in the rom-com hit Yours, Mine, and Ours, which finally put Ball in the same stratosphere in cinemas that she had had for years in television.  But all careers have lows with their highs, and today we will talk about perhaps the lowest moment of Lucille Ball's career until that point, and one of the most infamous flops of the 1970's: Mame.

(Spoilers Ahead) For those unfamiliar with either the original Auntie Mame film with Rosalind Russell (which I had seen) or the smash Broadway musical which has been revived many times (which somehow I haven't seen), Mame is the story of Mame Dennis (Ball), an eccentric (and wealthy) spinster who is made the legal guardian of her nephew Patrick (Davison as an adult) after her brother's death.  Mame raises Patrick unconventionally, inviting him to the "school of life" rather than a more traditional, conservative upbringing given his status.  She also goes broke early in the film, but finds a loophole around that when she marries Beauregard Burnside (Preston), a wealthy Southern gentleman.  The back half of the film shows, after Beauregard dies in an avalanche, the once-again wealthy Mame trying to save Patrick from the doldrums of life by sabotaging his relationship with a snobby society girl who is only interested in money.  As this is a feel-good movie, Patrick eventually sees the light & marries Mame's Irish maid, with their kid now spending time with Auntie Mame, completing the cycle from Patrick's childhood.

It's important to understand a few things about Hollywood in 1974 when considering this picture.  For starters, musicals like Mame weren't really something that Hollywood was making anymore.  While there were films that had been made that had mirrored the level of success of previous generation's of musical, they weren't usually comedies (think Fiddler on the Roof or Cabaret, both pretty dramatic pictures), and so Mame already felt dated.  Warner Brothers also was sinking a fortune into the film, and as a result they wanted a known commodity.  Though they picked several key players from the Broadway production for the big-screen adaptation (including Bea Arthur & Jane Connell), for the lead role they felt that Angela Lansbury, who had been a Tony-winning sensation in the part, wasn't a big enough name to lead the film, and instead chose television's biggest icon instead.  There's a famous (potentially apocryphal) legend that Ball went to see Lansbury in the role, with Lansbury initially flattered before she noticed Ball watching the play while taking notes in the balcony...and that was when Lansbury realized she was never going to get to play the role for Warner.

Ball, though, was all wrong for the part of Mame.  In her early 60's at the time (a decade older than Lansbury), she couldn't sing (at all), and vanity seemed to get the best of her as she was frequently shot in soft focus to make her look younger (there are moments in the film that looks like the lens of the camera was covered in vaseline).  As a result, she was basically unwatchable & off-key in the musical numbers.  Even a part like Mame, which doesn't require a huge range (she's not Sally Bowles or Mama Rose), was too much for her, and it shows onscreen.  Ball isn't as bad in the scenes where's she's talking (she's still Lucille Ball-there's charisma to spare), and lord knows there are other problems with this movie (the sound mixing is excruciatingly bad), but the critics were right-Warner had made a foolish calculation in trading Lansbury for Ball, and what had looked like a potential Oscar player quickly became an industry punchline.  Ball would never work in movies again.

This was sadly not the last noted failure of Ball's career.  A decade later, despite having more money than she needed & her legacy firmly cemented thanks to her previous series playing in perpetuity in reruns, Ball wanted to take one last stab at television, which she did in 1986's Life with Lucy.  The show, though, didn't work-the jokes weren't funny and Ball's brand of humor felt dated in an era where Miami Vice and Moonlighting were hits (ironically, one of the biggest shows of that season was Murder, She Wrote, starring Angela Lansbury in the role that would make her a global TV superstar).  It didn't last the season, and Ball would die three years later, with the unfortunate knowledge that her last two major projects had been high-profile flops.  Luckily for Ball, though, her legacy is secure.  Decades later, we're still in love with Lucy, an actress synonymous with television in the way Marilyn Monroe is with movies or the Beatles are with pop music.  Next month, we're going to take a look at a different star (and good friend) of Lucille Ball's whose brief career in film never took off, but that led him to become of the biggest names in radio & the early days of television.

Forever, Darling (1956)

Film: Forever, Darling (1956)

Stars: Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, James Mason, Louis Calhern, Natalie Schafer

Director: Alexander Hall

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 last left Lucille Ball in 1942, when her contract with RKO was expiring and she was signing with MGM.  It is entirely possible that Lucille Ball's career might've ended roughly at that time, a lot of promise but only a few brief years of stardom.  Ball's time at MGM wasn't particularly successful-she led a few movies, but she stayed in her genre of forgettable B-Movies, and by the end of the decade she was floating from studio-to-studio.  It was about that time, though, that fate intervened and Ball was hired on the radio show My Favorite Husband, which became a hit.  This led CBS to hire Lucille Ball for a TV show.  Ball had one major demand when she agreed to sign, though-that her husband Desi Arnaz would be her fictional husband on the show.  CBS, desperate to get a name as big as Ball's, agreed, and Ball (largely doing this to save her struggling marriage), signed on to make I Love Lucy.

It's hard to grasp exactly how big I Love Lucy was in its day, particularly in an era where TV hits are less about universality and more about streaming revenues.  But when I say pretty much every person in America watched I Love Lucy, I mean everyone watched it.  44 million people watched Lucille Ball give birth, roughly 14.4 million homes watching it.  To put that into perspective, nearly 74% of all American homes with TV sets watched Lucy Ricardo give birth (for comparison's sake, the Super Bowl, the quintessential American television get-together got barely half that last year).  Ball & Arnaz, through talent, smarts, & a bit of luck, had gone from being a B-Grade movie star and a night club act (respectively) to being two of the most famous people in the country.  And so it obviously made sense that when they asked MGM to sign a two-picture deal, the studio jumped at the opportunity.

(Spoilers Ahead) Forever, Darling features Arnaz & Ball in familiar roles, playing husband-and-wife.  Lorenzo Vega (Arnaz) is a chemical engineer working on creating a new type of insect repellent who marries a socialite named Susan (Ball).  The two have an idyllic marriage at first, but as time goes on they grow to like each other less-and-less, with Susan wanting a grander life with her high society friends, while Vega dislikes this and wants a simpler life with his wife, focusing on his research.  Things come to a head when Susan's Guardian Angel (Mason), shows up, telling her that she needs to look after her marriage & try harder to become interested in her husband before the union eventually falls apart.  Hijinks ensue, with Susan initially having moments where the Guardian Angel (invisible to all but her) causes many around her to think she's gone mad, but eventually she takes his advice, and goes with Lorenzo on a work trip.  While they have some calamities (it wouldn't be Lucy & Desi without some physical comedy bits, including a particularly funny one with a sinking boat), they end up making up & going back to their true romance.

Forever, Darling is not a great movie, and it wasn't a hit in 1956.  Part of the problem for audiences at the time was that everyone wanted Lucille Ball to just be Lucy Ricardo; this was, in fact a problem that she'd endure her whole life, though we'll get to that a bit more next week.  Forever, Darling is not the happy-go-lucky Ricardos though...if anything, it was more what Arnaz & Ball's marriage was like in real life, as Arnaz's alcoholism, gambling, & infidelity (not to mention both of their tempers) regularly put their successful professional partnership at risk.  No one wanted to see Lucy & Ricky unhappy, and the two-picture deal with MGM dissolved.

I don't have as much problem with seeing Ball, a talented actress, do something other than Lucy Ricardo (as we've seen throughout this month, she was a pretty versatile performer).  But Forever, Darling is too long & too boring to be of much interest beyond being a curiosity.  Ball & Arnaz, probably aware that the public didn't want to see them too unhappy onscreen (I Love Lucy was still on the air and they would continue working together until their divorce in 1960), can't fully commit to the rougher patches of the movie, and so a modern viewer feels like they are getting whiplash.  This would end up being the third and final theatrically-released movie to feature Arnaz & Ball.  Next week, as we close out our month with Ball, we will take a peak beyond I Love Lucy, and the decades that Ball would continue to work in, with many hits (and two notorious bombs).

The Big Street (1942)

Film: The Big Street (1942)

Stars: Henry Fonda, Lucille Ball, Barton MacLane, Eugene Pallette, Agnes Moorehead

Director: Irving Reis

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 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.

Initially when I planned this month's look at Lucille Ball, I had a film later in her career for our third week.  Ball spent most of the 1940's under contract not to RKO, where she made most of her most famous films, but instead to MGM.  But, both because it is a key plot point in the recent biopic Being the Ricardos (which looks increasingly likely to win Nicole Kidman a second Oscar), and because it was Ball's favorite film performance, we're going to continue our look at Ball with The Big Street today, a movie that could've taken an entirely different direction for Lucy if it had been a hit, but instead was one of the final movies she made for RKO.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Big Street is the story of Pinks (Fonda), a waiter who is madly in love with a spoiled singer named Gloria (Ball).  Gloria is a beautiful crime boss's girlfriend, and treats everyone (especially Pinks) like garbage.  When Gloria is pushed down the stairs by her mob boss boyfriend, she become paralyzed, and needs constant help (and money), which Pinks provides even though she still continues to treat him poorly.  After she eventually is scorned by a former lover of hers, she & Pinks stop speaking until it turns out she's clearly dying.  Gloria confesses to Pinks that she wants to just be her old self again, if only for a night, and through a series of blackmail, theft, & pulling every string he can, Pinks does just that, getting her a night of dancing & singing & fawning in a club before she dies in his arms.

I enjoyed this movie, though your mileage may vary as it's less a good movie and more a great melodrama...but I'm a sucker for a four-hankie, "doomed romance" style melodrama, and so I was onboard.  It helps that Lucille Ball is at the top of her game, totally owning every angle in the complicated role of "your highness," playing Gloria as totally unlikable, but charismatic to a degree that you get why people want to be on her good side.  I was less enthralled with Henry Fonda, who is playing Pinks as a mousy cartoon character, but Ball...there's a reason she thought this would open up new doors for her at the time.

But it didn't.  The Big Street was a big opportunity for Ball, and she only got the role because Carole Lombard wasn't available (and because write Damon Runyon overrode RKO's wishes to put Barbara Stanwyck or Jean Arthur into the part).  Ball got rave reviews for the film, but it wasn't a hit, and RKO, after having spent years trying to find the right formula that would work for Ball on the big-screen, let her contract go after which she signed with MGM.  We're going to, as a result of spending time with The Big Street largely gloss over the MGM portion of Ball's career, but it's probably okay as she made very few films for the studio worth mentioning, and indeed, it looked like Ball's career as a film headliner was almost over before a radio show called My Favorite Husband would change Ball's life (and the medium of television) forever.  We'll talk about that, and one of the films that resulted from it, next week.

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.

Dance, Girl, Dance (1940)

Film: Dance, Girl, Dance (1940)

Stars: Maureen O'Hara, Louis Hayward, Lucille Ball, Ralph Bellamy

Director: Dorothy Arzner

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 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're going to start our look at Lucille Ball's career a bit later in her career than she started making movies.  Ball moved from New York to Hollywood in the early 1930's as a Goldwyn Girl, and started getting bit parts in a number of movies including a lot of films with Ginger Rogers, one of which, Stage Door, gave her a larger part & put her in the company of people like Katharine Hepburn & Eve Arden.  After Stage Door Ball would start to get leading roles, albeit in properties that weren't particularly important to the studio's bottom line.  RKO at this time frame would've cared primarily about Ginger Rogers and Maureen O'Hara, the latter of whom teamed up with Ball in what would become one of the more important films in Ball's career at the studio, 1940's Dance, Girl, Dance.

(Spoilers Ahead) Dance, Girl, Dance is a dramedy focused primarily on two women: Judy (O'Hara), an aspiring ballerina who can't find success in that world, and Bubbles (Ball), a beautiful blonde chorus girl who only dreams of making money & finding stardom.  When Bubbles is discovered by a night club owner for a burlesque show, she jumps at the opportunity (even though Judy finds the prospect to be demeaning), and Bubbles turns out to be correct-she is rebranded as "Tiger Lily White," and suddenly finds herself the toast of New York City.  Bubbles incorporates Judy into her act to dance & essentially "act the stooge" to get the audience excited for Bubbles to return to the stage.  Judy resents Bubbles doing this to her, but she needs the money, and she goes along with it.  While this is happening, Judy is chased by an eccentric, emotionally-damaged (but very rich) man named Jimmy Harris (Hayward), fresh out of a relationship & looking for a rebound.  He initially sets his sites on Judy, but after Bubbles realizes he's loaded, she tricks him into marrying her, and gets a fortune in order to grant him a divorce. The film ends with Bubbles getting her act booed after Judy chastises the audience for reveling in her humiliation and the fleshy exposure of the dancers, but still getting her payday, and Judy finally becoming a proper star, one that will be famous for ballet & not for burlesque.

Dance, Girl, Dance was not a hit at the time, either critically or commercially, but it's grown in stature since it was first released, thanks in large part to the reputation of its director, Dorothy Arzner.  For those unfamiliar, that's not a typo-a woman was directing a major studio's films in 1940, and indeed Arzner regularly worked with key stars of that era (until the 1970's, she was one of only two women, the other being Ida Lupino, who had been an active member of the DGA).

This critical rescue is justified because Dance, Girl, Dance is pretty darn great.  The movie never talks down to its two leads.  While there is some sexually conservative messages toward the end of the film (it's always clear that the audience is supposed to be cheering for Judy), it never really shames Bubbles, and in fact in the end of the movie Bubbles gets everything she wanted-headlines & cash, even if she doesn't get her man.  The film also has some really fascinating sexual politics, not just in the way that Bubbles doesn't feel ashamed of cashing in, or the way that it calls out the audience (both onscreen & off) for celebrating these women who don't really have another option given to them to make this kind of money, but also in the bizarre way it makes Louis Hayward's Jimmy into a bizarre, sexually-obsessed loose cannon.  He screams in an early scene at Maureen O'Hara because he doesn't like her eye color, and it's clear throughout the film that he's basically just trying to find a replacement for his emotionally-manipulative wife.  The film is from 1940, but it's easy to see what Arzner is doing here, trying to show that a rich man can get away with such oddities because he's rich...but that doesn't mean he's not bizarre & potentially dangerous.

It's also worth noting that Lucille Ball is incredible in this movie.  O'Hara is badly miscast, not able to make Judy seem like anything other than a doormat, but Ball steals every scene she's in wholesale.  Bubbles in her hands is someone who knows when an opportunity shows up, milks it for all it's worth, and doesn't apologize.  Yes, she's a bit of a backstabber (basically tricking Judy into doing her show), but she also is a backstabber who isn't afraid to take the low road if it means she reaches her destination.  All of the trademark physical comedy skills Ball would later use in television are employed here, but so are some fine acting chops.  Lucille Ball, who would spend the next ten years as the "Queen of the B's" definitely deserved better.

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.

OVP: Stage Door (1937)

Film: Stage Door (1937)

Stars: Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Adolphe Menjou, Gail Patrick, Constance Collier, Andrea Leeds, Lucille Ball, Eve Arden, Ann Miller

Director: Gregory La Cava

Oscar History: 4 nominations (Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actress-Andrea Leeds, Adapted Screenplay)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

The "more than five" window of the Best Picture race for the modern Oscars started in 2009, but it wasn't always like that.  Prior to 1944, the Best Picture race was a rotating number, peaking at one point with as many as 12 nominations for the category.  As a result, like today, you get some films that you wonder if they would've been nominated in a five-wide field or not.  That was one of the thoughts I had while watching Stage Door recently, a movie that features a cavalcade of major actresses, not just of that era but more so of the upcoming era; women like Lucille Ball, Eve Arden, & Ann Miller were all breaking out in a big way with this movie.  I was surprised after watching that the film had also been nominated for Best Director, not because it's not well-directed (it is) but because our modern preconceptions of films starring women (and the male-friendly AMPAS) is to assume such a picture can't score both, and thus be one of the "would've made it to five" films (which it appears Stage Door was).

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about a group of women who live in a boardinghouse, many of them aspiring actresses who are trying to land their lucky break.  A new girl, Terry (Hepburn) moves into the house, and her worldly attitude & love of Shakespeare make her an object of ridicule, particularly for Jean (Rogers), a wisecracking dancer who is forced to be her roommate.  It turns out that Terry doesn't need to be there-her father is very wealthy, and she's trying to strike out on her own against his wishes.  The two start to patch things up, and Terry befriends the rest of the girls including unlucky-in-love Judy (Ball), sarcastic Eve (Arden), and especially Kay (Leeds), who is desperate for a part in Anthony Powell's (Menjou) new play.  When Terry gets the part instead (initially on the wishes of her father, who is secretly backing the play in hopes of getting his daughter back after it fails), Kay, frustrated from unemployment & starving for her art, kills herself on opening night.  Terry, bereft from the grief, gives a good performance in the play, and becomes a star.  Despite this, she stays on at the boardinghouse, where her new family resides.

The film is unusual, in that it's clearly meant to be a fluffy, light comedy for the first hour, and then it takes a dark detour in its last few minutes.  The death of Kay is a left field twist, something I didn't really expect (I assumed she'd be rushed to a hospital & get the part that she was meant for that instead went to Hepburn's Terry).  It feels like a cheat to me, and one that kind of leaves a bitter taste in the movie, as it totally upends all of the fast-talking girls, and it feels like it's trying to teach the actresses a lesson that they didn't really deserve-they're just young women trying their best (and Terry's greatest sin was *GASP* being ambitious).  The death of Kay makes the film too off, and while it's still a good movie, it disappears some of the best attributes that made you fall in love with it in the first hour.

The film won four nominations, and three of them I don't have a problem with.  Like I said, this is a good movie, a great one in parts, but it's too sporadic & spastic in the way it handles the genre shift, and so it's simply a good movie.  The direction & writing is in a similar situation-good in both its comedic & dramatic shifts, but it can't combine the two.  Leeds, though, isn't the right fit.  Yes, her character is tragic, but that's all she is-there's no depth here.  It's hard to imagine someone looking at this performance and thinking "best in cast."  Obviously Ginger Rogers & Kate Hepburn aren't supporting parts, but they're both terrific.  Rogers is delicious, some of the best I've seen from her (Rogers was always better in comedy than in drama), and Hepburn is glorious, especially when she has to perform right after Kay's suicide.  If I had to pick a supporting player to honor from the movie, I might go with Eve Arden (though Lucille Ball is good in the role that put her on the map as a character player)-she's quintessential Arden (there's nothing to her Eve), but she (and her cat) steal every scene they do together.