Lucille Ball

Unlike the typical Bob Hope and Lucille Ball vehicles, The Facts of Life is essentially a domestic drama with comic undertones. Hope is married to Ruth Hussey, while Ball is the wife of Don DeFore. All four are old friends, who for many years have taken each other for granted. A series of unforeseen circumstances requires Hope and Ball to spend a great deal of time together without their spouses, and as a result they fall in love. Though the affair is never consummated, Hope and Ball are prepared to run off together, but in the end they decide that adultery at their age just isn’t worth the trouble. Long unavailable for viewing due to legal tangles, The Facts of Life has gained legendary status as one of the few Bob Hope films of the 1960s to concentrate on character development rather than silly one-liners.Read More »

Quote:
A fairly neglected exercise in film noir, The Dark Corner is a more than adequate if less than topflight example of the genre. Director Henry Hathaway was already familiar with crime thrillers, having helmed such previous efforts as Johnny Apollo and The House on 92nd Street, and he competently makes the shift to the edgier, more fatalist film noir game with ease and assurance, if little in the way of virtuosity. The screenplay is solid, hitting all the right plot points and keeping its cards appropriately close to the vest until it’s time to spring a few surprises on the audience, and there’s a good swift line of hardboiled dialogue hiding behind every corner. If Mark Stevens is not an immortal in the pantheon of screen tough guys — his Galt is a little wan, a trifle lightweight — he’s more than credible and makes the character’s tightlipped stoicism appealing. Lucille Ball assays one of her rare non-comedic roles and comes off very well; there’s a welcome mixture of innocence and worldliness to her character that she manages to get across without getting mired down in either extreme. Clifton Webb is deliciously smarmy, a nasty piece of work that’s a joy to watch. Corner misses out on being one of the majors, but as minor leaguers go, it’s one of the best.Read More »

Plot:
THE LUCILLE BALL RKO COMEDY COLLECTION VOL. 1
Long before she was crowned the queen of TV, Lucille Ball reigned as the “Queen of the Bs” for RKO Pictures, appearing in over 43 films in under a decade. Although she had yet to find her niche, Lucy’s prodigious talents, grace and charm as a performer found her much in demand across a wide variety of movies. This collection brings together three rarely seen cinematic treasures from Lucy’s RKO days, giving modern audiences a chance to witness a star on the rise. 3 Films on 2 DVDs.Read More »

Synopsis:
Denny drops fiancée Jean and marries Flora who is worth ten million dollars. When Jean is fired from her job she decides to market the face cream she invented. She goes to Jeffrey and he sends a sample of the product to 12 selected rich women. Only one woman invests in the business and Jean is happy until she learns that it is Flora – but she takes the money. As Denny has no job, the girls give him an office at the factory. The business takes off, but Jean finds that she is still in love with Denny and Denny seems to forget he is married to Flora. So Jean and Flora send him to California for six weeks to open the West Coast branch of Jeanne Varelle. Written by Tony FontanaRead More »

from Film Society of Lincoln Center:
Money, sex, and football: the three cornerstones of American life spell doom in Tourneur’s tough, subversive anti-marriage melodrama. Victor Mature is a star quarterback with a fatal heart condition who’s willing to risk death on the field to give his power-hungry wife (Lizabeth Scott) the life she wants, even as she pursues a sordid affair with a Wall Street sugar daddy. Co-starring Lucille Ball—who delivers some of the film’s most memorable moments as a hard-nosed working girl spouting world-weary cynicisms—Easy Living is a Sirkian sports movie with a dark noir undercurrent.Read More »

Reviewers on IMDB wrote:
Okay, this movie is a cheap Saturday matinée type film from the 1950’s, but heck, that is all it is meant to be. It is one of those silly Arabian nights movies that is fun to watch. I wish it were released on DVD, as I would gladly buy it. As a child, I liked this movie when I saw in on television, and just recently saw it again and still like it. Runs in the family as those 1950 Universal Studio Tony Curtis “Son Of Ali Baba” type films and “Son Of Sinbad” with Vincent Price. These movies may not be great in any sense of the word, but they sure are fun to watch one right after the other when there is nothing else to do!! And besides, like my summary said, where else can you find a film that has Lucy Ricardo, Perry Mason and Abner Kravitz in it??Read More »

A serial killer in London is murdering young women whom he meets through the personal columns of newspapers; he announces each of his murders to the police by sending them a cryptic poem. After a dancer disappears, the police enlist an American friend of hers, Sandra Carpenter, to answer advertisements in the personal columns and so lure the killer.Read More »

Quote:
This is one of the few times at MGM Lucy was given a chance to exploit her full comedic range, and she goes at it with gusto. From the moment she makes her whirlwind entrance looking absolutely gorgeous in a white wedding gown, she commands the screen whenever the camera is on her. In fact, though the movie ostensibly “stars” Van Johnson and Esther Williams, the bland leads take a back seat to the lively pairing of Lucy and Keenan Wynn, as her somewhat morally corrupt boyfriend. Forget comparisons to “Libeled Lady”; “Easy to Wed” is of a different era, and much more slapsticky, and, as noted, Lucy is a gem whether getting drunk and playing the piano or evincing true pathos as a wronged woman. She has rarely been photographed more appealingly, either.Read More »

Three For Two finds Lucille Ball and Jackie Gleason in short vignettes about couples. In “Herb & Sally,” they’re on vacation in Rome, where Sally wants romance and Herb feels like she’s always angry at him, perhaps with good reason. “Fred & Rita” finds two adulterers meeting in secret. In “Mike & Pauline,” a couple is angry because their kids want to go out on New Year’s Eve.Read More »