Forever, Darling

Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz made three feature films together. I already did posts on Too Many Girls and The Long, Long Trailer ages ago, but never got around to the third film, Forever, Darling. TCM ran that movie back in August when Lucille Ball was honored in Summer Under the Stars. Not having seen it before, I decided to record it so that I could do a post on it the next time it aired. That airing comes up tomorrow (October 12) at 12:30 PM, so I made a point of watching it off of my DVR so that I could do the post.

As in The Long, Long Trailer and like their TV show I Love Lucy which was still running at the time Forever, Darling was released, Lucy and Desi play a married couple, with a brief establishing scene at the beginning showing them getting married. This time, however, the couple are named Susan and Lorenzo, and Lorenzo is not a musician (although he does get a few chances to play the concertina and sing the movie's theme song). Lorenzo, instead, is a research scientist working for a chemical company trying to produce a new miracle insecticide that will make agriculture easier and benefit public health since mosquito-born diseases are a pain in the ass.

Time passes, however, and in the second brief scene, we see that the couple are hitting the marital doldrums well before the seven year itch. Part of it is that Lorenzo is spending so much time working on that insecticide that he doesn't have time for Susan. It's a chicken and egg question, though, because Lorenzo would tell you that he's sick of having to deal all the time with Susan's cousin Millie (Natalie Schafer) and her even bigger drip of a husband Henry. This leads to a big argument that will make you wonder whether the marriage is on the rocks.

Except that Susan comes from a family in which one side has always had guardian angels, and the other side has always seen things that aren't really there. You just know that's going to come together, when a man comes from out of the blue, or really out of the glowing light. That man is Susan's guardian angel, who looks suspiciously like James Mason, partly because that's going to be a running joke, and partly because that's the sort of man Susan would like to have if she couldn't have Lorenzo. It's the guardian angel's job to get Susan to put things right between her and Lorenzo, although that's going to take some doing.

The first issue is that Susan has a hard time telling people what's going on, in no small part because nobody is really going to believe her and everybody is going to think she's going crazy. And she just knows that Lorenzo wouldn't understand. Never mind that the angel suggests to her that if Lorenzo had a similar guardian angel, that angel would look like Ava Gardner. And sure enough, Lorenzo tells Susan one morning that he's had a dream involving him and... Ava Gardner.

But the James Mason angel's suggestion to Susan is that the show some more interest in Lorenzo's life. He's trying to show that the insecticide really can work, and that will involve going out into the field for a real-life test of it, somewhere in the relative middle of nowhere (actually filmed in Yosemite National Park). Susan decides to follow along, and sure enough, like an episode of I Love Lucy, everything that can go wrong does.

Forever, Darling is, I'm sorry to say, the weakest of the three Lucy/Desi movies. I think that's partly because the script is wrong for them. After the success of The Long, Long Trailer, MGM wanted them to make more movies. But they didn't have a good script, and took something off the shelf that had been written several years earlier for some other screen team (I've seen references to William Powell and Myrna Loy as well as Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn). Desi is all wrong as a research scientist, and Lucy is getting more into the shrill phase of her career. James Mason isn't given much to do, although I get the impression he was having fun doing broad parody.

All three of the Luci/Desi movies were put out on a box set together, but I'd definitely recommend the other two (especially The Long, Long Trailer) before this one.