1950s – Reel Time With Richard Ades

A kinder, funnier look at TV’s first power couple

Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, stars of the hit TV sitcom *I Love Lucy*, in a photo taken around 1953

By Richard Ades

Last year, Aaron Sorkin dramatized the lives of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in Being the Ricardos. Now Amy Poehler is revisiting the television icons in the documentary Lucy and Desi.

The first thing you should know about the new flick is that it’s nothing like Being the Ricardos. While Sorkin’s tale is awash in interpersonal conflict, marital strife and political controversy, director Poehler takes a gentler approach that creates an affectionate yet clear-eyed portrait of the famous couple.

Being a comic herself, Poehler also recognizes something that apparently escaped Sorkin: If you’re doing a film about famously funny people, you really should include a few good laughs. In fact, Lucy and Desi has many laugh-out-loud moments, thanks largely to excerpts from Ball and Arnaz’s groundbreaking 1950s sitcom, I Love Lucy.

The doc begins by looking back on the pair’s early lives with the help of archival footage and interviews with people who knew them, including their daughter, Lucie Arnaz Luckinbill. We learn that both Ball and Arnaz faced financial struggles in their younger years.

Arnaz was born into wealth, but his Cuban family lost everything and was forced to flee following the island’s 1933 revolution. When he arrived in the U.S., the film points out, he was not an immigrant but a refugee.

Ball was raised by a loving grandfather who fell on hard times due to an unjust lawsuit. The family’s dire situation led her to leave home in her mid-teens and head for New York, where she struggled to break into show business until a lucky break sent her to Hollywood.

The doc covers some of the same territory as Sorkin’s drama, though it’s able to fill in more details because it doesn’t rely so much on breathless flashbacks.

This 1940 photo shows Desi Arnaz carrying his bride, Lucille Ball, over the threshold of his Roxy Theatre dressing room in New York. The couple had eloped and gotten married in Greenwich, Conn.

How did Ball and Arnaz meet? How did they become the first couple of television comedy? How did they branch out from TV stars into big-time producers? And, finally, what drove them apart at the height of their success? These questions and others are addressed, which should delight anyone who’s ever enjoyed I Love Lucy or any of the many other shows the pair helped to create.

In the process, the doc is decidedly more discreet and even-handed than Sorkin’s dramatized account, which spends much of its time trying to figure out whether Arnaz was faithful to his talented wife. Director Poehler, writer Mark Monroe and their interviewees are clearly less interested in casting blame than they are in understanding Ball and Arnaz and paying homage to the devotion they felt toward each other even after their divorce.

As Arnaz wrote in a tribute that was read when Ball was honored by the Kennedy Center only five days after his death, “I Love Lucy was never just the title.”

Rating: 4½ stars (out of 5)

Lucy and Desi (PG) is available beginning March 4 on Prime Video.

Saga of Lucy and Desi is a Baba-loser

Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball (Javier Bardem and Nicole Kidman) in a rare happy moment from *Being the Ricardos* (Amazon Studios photo)

By Richard Ades

Being the Ricardos, Aaron Sorkin’s behind-the-scenes look at the 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy, provides the answers to several burning questions.

Question No. 1: Can Aaron Sorkin do comedy? Answer: No. Sorkin has excelled at high-minded dramas such as 2020’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 and TV’s The West Wing. But as the writer and director of this film about a comedy classic, he takes a relentlessly dour approach that leaves room for only a handful of chuckles. Fans of I Love Lucy will be disappointed.

Question No. 2: Can Nicole Kidman do comedy? Answer: Yes—but she gets little opportunity here. As I Love Lucy star Lucille Ball, Kidman is both unconvincing and, worst of all, unfunny except during the brief moments when she’s allowed to act out iconic scenes from the sitcom.

Question No. 3: Did they have electric lighting in the 1950s? Answer: Yes, though you’d never know it from Being the Ricardos. Cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth lights nearly every scene so dimly that you’d think it was illuminated by oil lamps and took place during a total eclipse.

For the one or two people who aren’t familiar with the iconic sitcom, I Love Lucy was about a redheaded screwball named Lucy Ricardo and her bandleader husband, Ricky, who were played by Lucille Ball and her real-life husband, Desi Arnaz. The Ricardos lived in a New York apartment building run by their friends Fred and Ethel Mertz, played by William Frawley and Vivian Vance. Premiering in 1951, the comedy quickly became a smash hit and ran for six seasons.

Set during a single week of the show’s second season, Sorkin’s movie deals with the unexpected and potentially career-ending rumor that Ball once belonged to the Communist Party. Also during the week, Ball struggles with her suspicions that husband Arnaz (Javier Bardem) is being unfaithful. In addition, she and Arnaz must inform their sponsors that she’s pregnant, after which they hope to convince them to allow her TV character to also be pregnant despite fears that viewers will be shocked and repulsed.

There also are a few side issues that come up: Co-star Vance (Nina Arianda) chafes over the unglamorous image she’s forced to maintain as frumpy neighbor Ethel Mertz; fellow co-star Frawley (J.K. Simmons) tells Ball she’s not giving Arnaz enough on-set respect; comedy writer Madelyn Pugh (Alia Shawkat) complains about jokes that “infantilize” Lucy rather than treating her as a mature woman; and Ball engages in seemingly endless skirmishes with her director and writers over what’s funny and what’s not.

Also, in a flashback to the series’ creation, Ball fights with network bigwigs over her determination to cast her Cuban-born husband as her TV spouse despite their fears that viewers aren’t ready to accept an ethnically mixed marriage.

Whew! That’s a lot of issues. But the real problem is that Sorkin treats them all so seriously, emphasizing each melodramatic moment with overwrought music supplied by composer Daniel Pemberton. A lighter touch would have helped, as well as an occasional chance to remember what made I Love Lucy such a comedic treat. The players aren’t bad—Bardem and Simmons being especially on-target as Arnaz and Frawley, respectively—but their efforts are doomed by Sorkin’s somber approach.

If you think back, we actually had fair warning that Being the Ricardos would be a bad idea. In 2006, NBC coincidentally premiered two series that were set behind the scenes of a sketch-comedy show much like Saturday Night Live: Tina Fey’s 30 Rock and Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Fey’s show, a comedy, ended up running for seven seasons, while Sorkin’s show, an ambitious and serious-minded drama, quickly lost viewers and was canceled after one.

The moral: If you set out to write about comedy, if helps if you do it with a sense of humor.

Rating: 2 stars (out of 5)

Being the Ricardos (rated R) opens Dec. 10 in select theaters and Dec. 21 on Amazon Prime Video.

Beatty’s return to the silver screen is as eccentric as his subject

By Richard Ades

Rules Don’t Apply is Warren Beatty’s first appearance in front of a camera since 2001’s Town & Country—and his first appearance behind a camera since 1998’s Bulworth. That probably explains why the flick is filled with so many familiar faces.

Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich, left) listens as Howard Hughes (Warren Beatty) testifies before Congress in Rules Don’t Apply. — Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich, left) listens as Howard Hughes (Warren Beatty) testifies before Congress in *Rules Don’t Apply*.

Paul Sorvino, Matthew Broderick, Candice Bergen, Martin Sheen, Oliver Platt, Ed Harris, Dabney Coleman and Annette Bening (aka Mrs. Beatty) are among the veteran A-listers who apparently were eager to take part in the actor/director’s return to the silver screen. That makes it ironic that two of the younger cast members emerge as the best reasons to see a tale based on a late chapter in the life of eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes.

Lily Collins and Alden Ehrenreich have appealing chemistry as two people in Hughes’s employ: Marla Mabrey, a would-be starlet, and Frank Forbes, a driver who’s assigned to chauffer her around. Because both Marla and Frank are devout Christians—and more particularly because Hughes forbids them to have anything but a professional relationship—that chemistry has plenty of time to percolate as the two are forced to sublimate their growing attraction for each other.

Beyond this budding romance, the film offers Beatty fans the pleasure of seeing the ex-matinee idol’s take on the secretive and exceedingly bizarre Hughes. But beyond that, it offers very little.

Set primarily in Hollywood in 1959, Rules Don’t Apply reveals Hughes’s odd penchant for signing contracts with young actresses who are given sumptuous housing but little opportunity to launch a film career. When Marla arrives along with her equally Christian mom (Bening), she’s said to be one of perhaps 26 such women who wait around for an opportunity that almost never comes.

It’s a fascinating situation, whether or not it’s entirely accurate. (The movie begins with a Hughes quotation advising us to “Never check an interesting fact.”) But the film built around that situation is frankly a mess. Early scenes end so abruptly and pointlessly that you have to wonder what the editors were thinking. Later, after Hughes emerges from the shadows, the film takes a long detour into his chaotic life that is as frustrating for us as it seems to be for the underlings who are forced to share it.

Lily Collins as aspiring movie star Marla Mabrey

Throughout, consistent tone is conspicuously absent. Early developments and sumptuous visuals, including fleets of shiny vintage cars, help to establish a mood of affectionate nostalgia. But the script (co-written by Beatty) has no qualms about switching to broad comedy when chauffer Frank finally lets Marla take the wheel, only to watch her morph from a cautious and conservative young woman to a highway terror.

Collins’s character undergoes another transformation for the sake of a later plot point. Though a demure teetotaler, Marla turns into a booze-guzzling vamp the first time alcohol passes her lips. Despite being every parent’s worst nightmare, the scene just doesn’t ring true.

Like his many co-stars, Beatty’s fans will no doubt be glad to see him back after so many years of absence. But they might wish he’d taken a refresher course in filmmaking before attempting his return.

Rating: 2½ stars (out of 5)

Rules Don’t Apply (PG-13) opens Wednesday (Nov. 23) at theaters nationwide.