Easy to Wed

I recorded a surprising number of Lucille Ball movies that I hadn't seen back when she was honored in Summer Under the Stars, and have been watching them on an irregular basis. The most recent one that I watched is Easy to Wed, and now I'm getting around to doing the post on it.

The movie starts of with a scene of newspapermen trying to collect a bunch of copies of a newspaper out of circulation, and getting all of the early edition except for 40. The problem is that the newspaper published a story about a socialite that's not true, and the paper's publisher is worried that J.B. Allenbury (Cecil Kellaway), father of the socialite, is going to sue for libel. Sure enough Allenbury does sue.

With that in mind, the publisher calls his managing editor, Haggerty (Keenan Wynn) in. Haggerty isn't exactly happy, because he's about to get married to chorus girl Gladys (Lucille Ball). And if Haggerty isn't happy, Gladys is even more pissed, because this is just one more time that Haggerty has put the newspaper ahead of her. But Haggerty's job is going to be on the line, and he needs to come up with an idea to save the newspaper and his job quickly.

His idea is that, since the article that engendered the lawsuit claimed that Allenbury's daughter, Connie (Esther Williams), broke up a marriage, Haggerty will engineer a case where the paper can catch her actually doing so, and then sue her for alienation of affection. The big problem is that Haggerty doesn't have a reporter good enough to get the story, and one who's married. The best reporter would be a former reporter for the paper, Bill Chandler (Van Johnson).

Haggerty does eventually find Chandler, and somehow does convince Chandler to work for the paper again, although a large payday has something to do with that. The bigger problme is that Chandler is not actually married. Haggerty has just the woman for him however: Gladys. Not that Gladys really wants to go along with it.

Chandler gets in with the elder Allenbury, but as things go on you get the sneaking suspicion that Chandler is falling in love with Connie and doesn't want to hurt her to win the lawsuit. Meanwhile, Gladys and Haggerty are getting more and more displeased with Chandler. How is the script going to resolve all this in a way that makes the Production Code office happy?

If the plot sounds familiar, that's because Easy to Wed is a remake of MGM's earlier movie Libeled Lady. Needless to say, Libeled Lady, with its glittering cast, is rather the better movie. It also doesn't help that Easy to Wed is bogged down by a bunch of musical numbers. Still, Easy to Wed is not without its appeal, especially those who like the MGM gloss. Lucille Ball in particular is well cast as the brassy chorus girl and long-suffering girlfriend of Haggery. Keenan Wynn, it should be pointed out, is also a natural as the oily operator who came up with the nutty scheme at the heart of the movie. Easy to Wed was also filmed in lovely Technicolor.

So while Easy to Wed isn't as good as Libeled Lady, it's still definitely worth watching.