Lucy and Desi
Amazon Studios’ documentary on the making of I Love Lucy is a winning combination of entertainment and real truth.
The recent Amazon biopic on Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Being the Ricardos, only slightly grazed the surface of the lives of these two extraordinary entertainers, she a brilliant comedian who rewrote the history of television comedy, and he a talented bandleader who brought the conga line from Cuba to New York and became a producer. Ball and Arnaz met in 1940 on the set of the film version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Broadway show Too Many Girls. They fell in love immediately and eloped to get married at the end of that year. Thus began a partnership that was to last for twenty years until they divorced in 1960, although the effects of their careers were to resound down the subsequent decades.
In the meantime, they produced I Love Lucy, the most successful comedy show on television ever, in which they played Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, characters that were loosely based on their real-life marital relationship but exaggerated to more than a certain degree. In her documentary, the actress Amy Poehler, herself a stand-up comedian, covers their time together and after they split, shedding light on both personae who were in a way quite opposite to each other. The lives depicted here are seen through archive material, recordings and photographs supplied by the Arnaz children Lucie and Desi Jr, along with contributions from such comedy stars as Carol Burnett and Bette Midler, plus Gregg Oppenheimer, son of the TV show's writer and producer Jess Oppenheimer.
With these personnel on board, the film does have the ring of truth about it and there are so many clips of Ball and Arnaz at work, that it is easy to see how good they were. Ball, with her rubber-faced comic contortions, didn't care how awful and un-feminine or pregnant she looked, so long as the performance was funny. Indeed, the material is still hilarious because Ball demanded good comedy scripts and knew instinctively how to make them funny. Also Arnaz didn't seem to care that he was often made to appear foolish on account of his thick Cuban accent. And through it all, and not to get too sentimental about it, you sense that, despite their personal troubles and the eventual divorce, they loved each other right to the end.
Of course they were not only TV comic performers, but shrewd business people as well. Apart from I Love Lucy, their company, Desilu Productions, formed in 1950, was also behind the success of The Untouchables, Mission: Impossible, Mannix and Star Trek, among many others. Theirs is a unique life story telling how a relatively minor Hollywood movie star and a Cuban musician influenced the nature of American television for good. It makes Being the Ricardos, the other recent Oscar-nominated account of their lives, fairly redundant.
MICHAEL DARVELL
Featuring Lucie Arnaz Luckinbill, Desi Arnaz Jr, Carol Burnett, Bette Midler, Laura Laplaca, Norman Lear, Gregg Oppenheimer, Michael Stern and Michele Spitz (narrator), plus archive footage of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.
Dir Amy Poehler, Pro Jeanne Elfant Festa, Mark Monroe, Michael Rosenberg, Nigel Sinclair, Michele Spitz and Justin Wilkes, Screenplay Mark Monroe, Ph Axel Baumann and Ernesto Lomeli, Ed Robert A. Martinez, Music David Schwartz.
Imagine Documentaries/White Horse Pictures-Amazon Studios.
103 mins. USA. 2021. UK and US Rel: 4 March 2022. Available on Amazon Prime. Cert. PG.