THE LONG, LONG TRAILER: Blu-ray (MGM, 1954) Warner Archive
It may seem sacrilegious now to
refer to Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz as ‘has-beens’. But in 1954, this is
precisely how the couple were viewed by the film industry at large. Ball, a
spry and still sexy 43 at the time, had been an RKO and MGM glamor gal
throughout the previous decades, appearing in such high-profile and uber-glossy
hits as Stage Door (1937), Best Foot Forward, Thousands Cheer
(both in 1943) and Ziegfeld Follies (1945). She also had shown a real flair for drama in
dark noir thrillers like The Big Street (1942) and, The Dark Corner
(1946). But by 1950, studio interest in Ball’s career decidedly cooled. The
henna-haired honey, however, was not ready to fade into obscurity. And thus,
taking the proverbial bull by its horns, Ball embarked upon an even more iconic
reign as everyone’s beloved madcap/housewife, in I Love Lucy
(1951-57), one of the irrefutable ‘high water’ marks in early television
programming in which Ball not only starred, but co-produced alongside her
husband, Desi Arnaz for their company – Desilu. If, in retrospect, Lucy’s
aspirations for longevity in the movies seems anemic, they absolutely bested Arnaz’s
by a mile. Apart from his popular nightclub act, Arnaz’s boast in the movies
was merely to be ‘fitted in’ as a sort of Xavier Cugat knock-off specialty in
B-grade musical fluff throughout the 1940’s. Desi could boast a modest 26
movies to Ball’s 121 – virtually, all of
them - forgettable.
So, it must have chagrined Hollywood
naysayers when Ball and Arnaz instantly knocked one out of the park with I
Love Lucy. So, when film producer, Pandro S. Berman came to Dore Schary with
the suggestion MGM capitalize on the couple’s charm and appeal by casting them
in The Long, Long Trailer (1954), the reply from on high was hardly encouraging.
Schary could not see why anyone would pay for the privilege of seeing Lucy and
Desi together as they were already available for free on television. And lest
we remember, the 1950’s were a time of financial entrenchment for all the major
studios, particularly at MGM, where profits had incrementally dipped annually since
the end of the WWII and where a recent management shake-up had since deposed its
Teflon-coated raja, L.B. Mayer in favor of Schary to oversee this vast, but
already crumbling empire. MGM in the fifties was hardly a ‘forward’ thinking
studio. It resisted the urge to partake in TV’s launch and absolutely
prohibited any of its stars to appear, even as guests on its popularized talk
shows to promote their most recent movies. While 2oth Century-Fox, Warner Bros.
and Paramount were swift to develop new technologies like Cinemascope,
VistaVision and stereoscopic 3D, to combat the runaway appeal of that little
black box popping up in everyone’s living rooms, MGM retreated into a sort of
artistic cocoon from whence it only deigned occasionally to license the new
widescreen technologies from the others.
To hedge their bets on The Long,
Long Trailer, Schary turned to one of its most dependable directors at MGM,
Vincente Minnelli whose most recently scored megahits included 2 in the comedy
genre to fatten Metro’s depleted coffers: Father of the Bride (1950) and
Father’s Little Dividend (1951). The Long, Long Trailer held
little appeal for Minnelli at first. But then, he reconsidered. Unlike the
endless spate of rom/coms slavishly devoted to the big build-up ending in the
merriment of marriage, The Long, Long Trailer’s focus would be on an
established couple, looking to reinvent and revitalize their romantic vigor
with a life-altering change of scenery. Even so, Minnelli considered the
picture featherweight, if a nice change of pace after his meticulous and
precise craftsmanship exerted on the marvelously sophisticated musical, The
Band Wagon (1953). One aspect bothered Minnelli: MGM’s decision to shoot The
Long, Long Trailer in Ansco Color, an infinitely less expensive process
than Technicolor, alas, also to yield a far less impressive spectrum of colors.
While Minnelli encouraged Berman to go to bat for him over these concerns, MGM remained
unrelenting in their decision here, and Ansco stayed in the picture.
Scripted by Albert Hackett and
Francis Goodrich, The Long, Long Trailer emerges as a rather episodic
slideshow of oddities culled from a middle-aged couple’s year-long, cross-country
travelogue of misshapen adventures. Applying the old adage of ‘if it ain’t
broke, why fix it?’, this Hackett/Goodrich effort leans heavily on I
Love Lucy’s iconography in which Ricky (thinly reborn in The Long, Long
Trailer as Nicky Collini) and his wife, Tacy (Ball) evolve as mere
clones of their television selves; he, inevitably, to detonate into a brawny,
if thoroughly frustrated Spanish diatribe, while she cringes in faux feminine piety,
only after performing a series of pratfalls. Because the screenplay never attempts anything
better than a string-along of misfires, the resultant story becomes a lengthy,
and oft tedious ‘one off’ sight gag - the trailer, at every lurch and turn, the
impetus for blind havoc to thwart this couple’s starry-eyed plans for a happy
honeymoon. To this nomadic concoction, Minnelli inserts a biting social
commentary about the disturbing rootlessness creeping into mid-fifties middle
class America, basking in the afterglow of its own post-war mechanized
modernity, while blindly being absorbed into its crass commercialism. The quest
for comfort here gets dashed as Minnelli views the trailer as a sort of
hermetically sealed and very claustrophobic, failed utopia devoted to super-kitsch.
If anything, Minnelli implies the automotive age, far from improving upon the
enjoyment of life’s journey, has merely embellished it as a grueling ordeal,
teeming in potential for disaster.
Author Clinton Twiss’, who died a
scant 15 months before the film went into production, and on whose 1951 novel The
Long, Long Trailer is based, would likely not have approved of the finished
film – arguably, Minnelli’s most frivolous and gauche romantic comedy. We meet
the Collinis, Nicholas – who, having taken a new job as a civil engineer, must
now placate his wife, Tacy’s desire to accompany him on his cross-country road
trip, docking in Colorado, as part of their honeymoon vacation plans in the
Sierra Nevada mountains. It’s love at first sight for Tacy and Nicky after they
spy a yellow and chrome motor home at a local trailer show. Buying a new car
with a hitch, the Collinis embark on what will eventually prove to be their fateful
odyssey. Overwhelmed by friendly – but otherwise, annoying – trailer park brethren
on their first night out, Tacy elects to camp in the woods the next night to
ensure a bit of privacy. Alas, the trailer tips on its side while attempting to
climb up a muddy logging road. A brief visit to Tacy’s relatives (Marjorie
Maine) is likewise a disaster when Nicky, unable to navigate the trailer while
backing up, takes out his host’s carport and landscaping.
From these inauspicious vignettes,
Minnelli and the Goodrich/Hackett screenplay turn the disputes inwards. Nicky
criticizes Tacy’s desire to drive the car. She retreats to the trailer, only to
endure a rough and tumble ride that decimates her plans to make dinner. The
couple quarrel over one another’s respective ineptitude, but eventually
reconcile. Nicky contemplates selling the trailer, using the money to put a
down payment on a real house. It doesn’t happen, as Tacy still believes they
can be happy in their nomadic existence. As Nicky is preparing a perilous
ascendance up another mountain road, he demands Tacy get rid of the rocks and
canned food she earlier collected. But Tacy, believing she is shedding ‘memories’,
elects instead to hide them from her husband. Inevitably, these secretive goods
break loose from their hiding places and make a royal mess of things. The
trailer tips over yet again. Infuriated, Nicky tosses everything Tacy has
collected over the side of the mountain. Again at loggerheads, Nicky and Tacy
quarrel. She predictably storms off in a huff while he prepares to return home.
Fate – and presumably love – intervene. The couple reconcile yet again and
drive off together towards an uncertain future.
One of the most disheartening
aspects of The Long, Long Trailer is how it manages to squander such competent
studio-contract character actors as Marjorie Main, Keenan Wynn, Bert Freed,
Moroni Olsen, Gladys Hurlbut, Madge Blake, Howard McNear, and Walter Baldwin –
each, practically reduced to monosyllabic stick figures with no soul. Even the
principles in this movie would be nothing at all without their already built-in
‘Lucy’ derivations to fall back on as representations. The
Hackett/Goodrich screenplay is an oversimplification of situations and scenarios
that might have endured in skit form on a Vaudeville stage, or been loosely
strung together for a half-hour B&W I Love Lucy episode. Tricked out
in MGM’s 1.75:1 widescreen aspect ratio, and afforded color to boot, The
Long, Long Trailer instead outstays its welcome almost from the moment the
main titles have faded into the body of the piece. It is a meandering mess of
snippets and sound bites, made palpable only by the presence of Lucy and Ricky performing
dumb show as their thinly veiled big-screen alter egos. The other queasy
disconnect in the picture is owed its thoroughly awkward amalgam of MGM
free-standing sets, artificially recreated exteriors on a soundstage, and the
occasional inserts of actual location work.
Nothing here matches up to create a
comprehensive escapist world we can take on its own merits. There is also one
distinct and glaring continuity flub to consider. For the scenes depicting the
ascension of the trailer through the Sierra Mountains, the couple’s 1953
Mercury Monterey convertible has been switched out for a Lincoln Capri of capable
vintage and color, as the Lincoln possessed a stronger engine to successfully
tow the trailer up the mountainside. Unfortunately, keen eyes will recognize
the Lincoln’s grill over the Mercury. The trailer park set, basically a haphazard
assortment of colorful trailers wedged between vintage MGM plastic foliage and
artificial turf, is as woefully fake, though not nearly as fanciful, as the cramped
interiors of the trailer. Where B&W might have concealed this artifice
enough to get by, Ansco Color reveals the plywood and spackle, meant to evoke
the ultimate in 50’s chic mid-century luxury, remade here as plain-Jane fakery –
all fizz without the cola. Evidently, none of this seemed to matter to audiences,
who flocked to see Lucy and Desi do their schtick in widescreen and color,
proving Pandro Berman’s point and ringing registers to the tune of $3,978,000
in the U.S. and Canada and $1,007,000 elsewhere, resulting in a badly needed
profit of $3,550,000. For the briefest wrinkle in time, it appeared as though
the studio’s blind faith in the Arnazes, having signed a multi-picture deal, would
continue to churn out as a profit center – a promise unfulfilled when their
second big-screen pairing, Forever Darling (1956) proved a colossal misfire.
Future plans to costar the couple were immediately put on hold, then canceled.
There is better news for The
Long, Long Trailer on Blu-ray – yet another recipient of the Warner Archive’s
(WAC) pluperfect restoration efforts. Ansco Color was never a favorite of mine,
but WAC’s remastering effort has bled every last drop of vibrancy from the
original camera negative. The results are, frankly, astounding. Flesh tones,
once anemic, have been brought back into their natural register. Reds lean a
tad toward orange, which is a shortcoming of the Ansco process, not this
restoration. So, accurate, if regrettably NOT red. Lucy’s henna locks sparkle.
The crisp yellow of the trailer looks wonderful too. Contrast is ‘bang on’
perfect and film grain looks indigenous to its source. Age-related artifacts have
been eradicated. Virtually, NOTHING to complain about here. The 2.0 DTS mono
sounds solid. Extras are limited to a few short subjects and badly worn
theatrical trailer. Bottom line: for fans of Lucy and Desi, The Long, Long
Trailer on Blu-ray could not be a more satisfying experience. Alas, and in
spite of this, and some top tier talent at the helm, it’s still not a very good
movie. Just saying. Judge and buy accordingly.
FILM RATING (out
of 5 – 5 being the best)
2
VIDEO/AUDIO
5+
EXTRAS
1
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