Too Many Girls

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!

Too Many Girls offers the viewer and opportunity to see George Abbott direct one of his own hits from Broadway for the big screen. If the film does have a problem is that Abbott did it too much like a photographed stage play. When Abbott got to recreate Damn Yankees and The Pajama Game for the screen he didn't make that mistake with them. This film plays a whole lot like early musicals such as Rio Rita, The Desert Song, Animal Crackers, and Cocoanuts.

On Broadway Too Many Girls ran for 249 performances and coming over from the Broadway production were Eddie Bracken and Desi Arnaz. Playing the leads here are Richard Carlson and Lucille Ball and yes, Lucy and Desi did meet on the set of this film.

It's a college musical and in plot and location Too Many Girls plays a lot like the Gershwin Brothers, Girl Crazy. This time it's the woman who is the wild child who goes to the rustic university, in this case it's Pottawatomie College in Stopgap, New Mexico. Lucille Ball plays the Paris Hilton type and she kind of surprises her father Harry Shannon when she says she wants to attend his alma mater. Of course it's a ruse so she can be near her latest flame, Broadway playwright Douglas Walton who has a ranch there.

But Shannon is up to her tricks and hires four All-American football players to transfer there and act as bodyguards, the four being Carlson, Arnaz, Bracken, and Hal LeRoy. It takes a great deal of suspension of disbelief to see Bracken and LeRoy as football players.

Also on hand are Frances Langford and Ann Miller who contribute their talents to the film. I also don't understand why with a singer like Langford around she wasn't given the lead. Lucy's voice is dubbed by Forties radio singer Trudy Erwin who was a vocalist for a spell on Bing Crosby's radio show.

And Ball/Erwin get to do the two main numbers in the film. Most of the score from Too Many Girls came over from Broadway and Rodgers&Hart wrote You're Nearer in addition for this film. You're Nearer and the show's big hit from Broadway I Didn't Know What Time It Was which is a favorite song from Rodgers&Hart for me. Patti Page did a great record of it.

Too Many Girls could have had a better screen adaption, but it still remains a gem from what was the height of the collaboration of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart.

My mother and father were often on the set of Too Many Girls before they got married. My father was a dancer/extra on the film, as was Van Johnson, who he was buddies with at the time. My mother, who was working in Los Angeles at the time, would go to the set just to watch.

My parents often told the story of how my mother would come visit the set and would sit with Lucille Ball and chat with her on the sidelines when she was not being filmed.

Once, it came time for a new scene and George Abbott yelled for everyone to get on the set. When my mother remained seated at a table he turned around and yelled at her when he said everybody, he meant everybody! My father had to step out of the chorus line and explain she was his girlfriend and just there to watch. I've not yet gotten the DVD but hope to soon.

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

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.