The question that gnawed at me as I watched this was a simple one. Just one word: why? I truly failed to see the point of this at all. Essentially, it's three episodes of the old TV series edited (very awkwardly) together, with a beginning and an ending tacked on. The beginning gives us a tiny bit of dialogue between, I assume, a husband and wife who are on their way in to watch a taping of "I Love Lucy." They take their seats, Desi Arnaz comes out and explains a wee bit about how the show is made, and how the cameras are used, and he introduces Vivian Vance, William Frawley and, of course, Lucille Ball. I thought that perhaps the point was going to be a sort of behind the scenes look at the taping of an episode, but it wasn't. It then just became this awkwardly stitched together "movie" that was really just three episodes of the series that didn't really have any other relationship to each other. So on either side you have what was a typical "I Love Lucy" storyline, where Lucy tries to weasel her way into one of Ricky's shows, and sandwiched in between was an episode featuring a fight between the Ricardo's and the Mertz's, which almost leads to Ricky and Lucy moving out. That middle episode was the most awkward. It came literally out of nowhere (in the context of the "plot" - loosely defined) and it served no real purpose. The "movie" then ends with the audience at the taping getting up and leaving after the cast take a few bows.
If you liked the TV series (and the series was good and creative and is widely acknowledged and accurately described as ground-breaking as far as television shows are concerned) then this has all the things you liked, including some good physical comedy from Lucille Ball, especially in the third segment. But why you wouldn't just watch the TV series, I don't know. Why Desi Arnaz thought about putting a movie together in this way is beyond me. The only thing I can think of is that in 1953 a lot of people didn't have TV sets and so had never seen "I Love Lucy" - but they had probably heard of it. So, here was a chance to make the show more widely accessible, I guess.
It's interesting, I suppose, as a sort of historical curiosity. "I Love Lucy" represented the very early days of television, so I suppose it's possible that this might have been the first time anybody thought of taking a weekly TV series and turning it into a feature movie. That's pretty common today. In fact, sometimes it seems that Hollywood has run out of creativity and has little else to do these days but make movies out of old TV series. But in 1953? Not so. So, in that sense, it's a creative idea. But as I understand it, this was never actually released. Somebody obviously came to the conclusion that it wasn't worth the effort. (4/10)
