Too Many Girls

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."

This film was made in 1940. We were just about to go to War with Japan & people had just barely survived the Great Depression. Most people wanted fun escapist movies. The music is great! Of course it's full of fluff. The audience preferred it that way! Ask your grandparents, they'll tell you what life was like in 1940. My grandmother had a job seating people at the Admiral theater in Seattle, Wa. Actually West Seattle, which at the time was considered a separate area from Seattle. She told us that the customers loved Musicals and Westerns. The perfect escape for a Saturday afternoon. The theater's were full for every show and only cost a dime. I think if we were to quit picking apart these films and just enjoy them for the the times they were created, we could learn a lot about life in the 40's. Try to see what we have in common with that era instead of looking for the differences. We are much too cynical and if we can't enjoy a silly film like Too many Girls, we haven't come as far as we think we have. Submitted by Little Blue

Great dancing by Ann Miller and some fellow; Langford looked kind of puffy; Desi was cute and so was Bracken. All the cast seemed energetic and there was good ensemble choreography. Wish it was in color! The surprise was Richard Carlson who looked really hunky in those days...Lucille Ball was great from the beginning...really a beautiful woman with plenty of comic talent!

Some movies become important, not because of their subject or their cinematic relevance (or irrelevance in some cases), but because of other circumstances.

In this case, it's the film that brought together two of television's greatest personalities and business people: Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Both were struggling actors trying to make their images a commodity in the Hollywood of the late Thirties and early Forties. Arnaz, however, was less an actor than a musician so he had material on which to fall back on. Ball, on the other hand, was today's Parker Posey -- you always saw her star in B-movies and rarely, if ever, in "major productions". Back then, though, such a thing was looked down upon and Ball in this vehicle didn't fare better: she remained rooted in the B's.

So with Ball and Arnaz coming together in 1940, it is reported that the sparks were loud and clear and despite their personality and racial differences, they were to begin an alliance which would legally last 20 years, but emotionally, a lifetime. Neither of them share scenes together other than the ones in which their characters happen to appear on screen simultaneously, which would have been great in order to capture what they were about to experience (much in the style of Hepburn and Tracy, and Bogart and Bacall), but that's okay. We know the history of Lucy and Desi and if anything, this movie is the catalyst for their union.

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.