User reviews

This film was made in 1940. We were just about to go to War with Japan & people had just barely survived the Great Depression. Most people wanted fun escapist movies. The music is great! Of course it's full of fluff. The audience preferred it that way! Ask your grandparents, they'll tell you what life was like in 1940. My grandmother had a job seating people at the Admiral theater in Seattle, Wa. Actually West Seattle, which at the time was considered a separate area from Seattle. She told us that the customers loved Musicals and Westerns. The perfect escape for a Saturday afternoon. The theater's were full for every show and only cost a dime. I think if we were to quit picking apart these films and just enjoy them for the the times they were created, we could learn a lot about life in the 40's. Try to see what we have in common with that era instead of looking for the differences. We are much too cynical and if we can't enjoy a silly film like Too many Girls, we haven't come as far as we think we have. Submitted by Little Blue

Too Many Girls is a charming, light-weight and vapid college musical based on the Broadway show by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. What it has going for it is a fine Rodgers & Hart score, enthusiastic and talented actors (several of whom, such as Eddie Bracken, Desi Arnaz, Hal LeRoy and Van Johnson, were re-creating their Broadway roles), a couple of first-rate production numbers and a nostalgic look at a long-ago time when co-eds wore beanies and college football was played just for the fun of it.

Connie Casey (Lucille Ball), the head-strong daughter of a rich industrialist who has been trying to keep her out of trouble, decides she wants to go to Pottawatomie University, her father's alma mater, in Stop Gap, New Mexico. Dad agrees, but secretly hires four college football stars as bodyguards. "Kelly," he says to one of them, "would you like a job? Good pay, long hours, hard work. You're not afraid of that, I suppose?" "Oh, no, sir," Clint says. "Good pay never frightened me any."

Connie, unknown to her Dad, has fallen for a famous British author who has a ranch near Stop Gap. The four new bodyguards are Clint Kelly (Richard Carlson), Jojo Jordan (Eddie Bracken), Al Terwilliger (Hal LeRoy) and Manuelito Lynch (Desi Arnaz). Once everyone is enrolled, things do not go smoothly. There are lovely co-eds to distract our bodyguards (the ratio of male to female at Pottawatomie is 1 to 10). There is the football team that desperately needs help if it is ever to win a game. There are all those creaking jokes. When Jojo is surrounded by cute and adoring Pottawatomie co-eds one day, he's asked if he'd ever dated any of those eastern girls. "Oh, I went with a senior at Wellesley," Jojo tells them. "They're all air-conditioned." "What do you mean, air-conditioned?" "Forty degrees cooler in the house than on the street."

Mainly, there is Connie to be kept from her paramour, which is both made easier and more difficult when Clint falls for her, Connie reciprocates and then finds out he was sent to keep an eye on her. Well, Connie is hurt and angry. She decides to leave Pottawatomie on the night train going back east...and her football-playing bodyguards must go with her. But wait. There's a crucial game the next day. Without Clint, Jojo, Al and Manuelito there's no hope that Pottawatomie can win. Only if Connie realizes how much she loves Clint and relents can our boys play. I know you're in suspense over what Connie decides, but I don't believe in spoilers. You'll have to watch the movie.

The primary reason to see the movie is the Rodgers & Hart score. This was the only film version of a Thirties Rodgers & Hart production that even remotely resembled the Broadway original. The score has one classic, "I Didn't Know What Time It Was," and one near classic written specifically for the movie, "You're Nearer." Since this is a college movie, Rodgers & Hart came up with some real rousers; pep songs before a game and victory songs after: "'Cause We Got Cake," "Spic and Spanish" and "Look Out." The climax is a near hallucinogenic production number that features a bonfire, pulsing rhythm, flickering shadows and Desi Arnaz sweating and beating a bongo drum while he struts amidst the cheering throng. Rodgers & Hart also came up with a lovely, gentle gem of a song, "Love Never Went to College," that demonstrates why Hart was one of the best in the business.

Lucille Ball is a knock-out. Richard Carlson is stalwart and a bit wooden. This was Eddie Bracken's first movie and he's great...especially when he sings his version of "I Didn't Know What Time It Was." Hal LeRoy, like Bracken, is around to provide comic relief. He was a gifted and distinctive dancer. He has one tap segment in the Spic and Spanish number which is extraordinary. He's not only fast, but his knees seem to be double-jointed. Desi Arnaz makes a funny and endearing impression as the guy who is always ready for a game or a dame. Frances Langford, long forgotten by most nowadays, was a pop singer of style and great popularity during the Forties. She does a fine job as the student body president. She does an even finer job singing some of the songs. Ann Miller is there to do her machine-gun taps and precision twirls. And although Van Johnson is unbilled (he's listed on IMDb as Chorus Boy Nr. 41), his one line is vital to Pottawatomie and to the movie. "We won the game, so help me!"

Too Many Girls offers the viewer and opportunity to see George Abbott direct one of his own hits from Broadway for the big screen. If the film does have a problem is that Abbott did it too much like a photographed stage play. When Abbott got to recreate Damn Yankees and The Pajama Game for the screen he didn't make that mistake with them. This film plays a whole lot like early musicals such as Rio Rita, The Desert Song, Animal Crackers, and Cocoanuts.

On Broadway Too Many Girls ran for 249 performances and coming over from the Broadway production were Eddie Bracken and Desi Arnaz. Playing the leads here are Richard Carlson and Lucille Ball and yes, Lucy and Desi did meet on the set of this film.

It's a college musical and in plot and location Too Many Girls plays a lot like the Gershwin Brothers, Girl Crazy. This time it's the woman who is the wild child who goes to the rustic university, in this case it's Pottawatomie College in Stopgap, New Mexico. Lucille Ball plays the Paris Hilton type and she kind of surprises her father Harry Shannon when she says she wants to attend his alma mater. Of course it's a ruse so she can be near her latest flame, Broadway playwright Douglas Walton who has a ranch there.

But Shannon is up to her tricks and hires four All-American football players to transfer there and act as bodyguards, the four being Carlson, Arnaz, Bracken, and Hal LeRoy. It takes a great deal of suspension of disbelief to see Bracken and LeRoy as football players.

Also on hand are Frances Langford and Ann Miller who contribute their talents to the film. I also don't understand why with a singer like Langford around she wasn't given the lead. Lucy's voice is dubbed by Forties radio singer Trudy Erwin who was a vocalist for a spell on Bing Crosby's radio show.

And Ball/Erwin get to do the two main numbers in the film. Most of the score from Too Many Girls came over from Broadway and Rodgers&Hart wrote You're Nearer in addition for this film. You're Nearer and the show's big hit from Broadway I Didn't Know What Time It Was which is a favorite song from Rodgers&Hart for me. Patti Page did a great record of it.

Too Many Girls could have had a better screen adaption, but it still remains a gem from what was the height of the collaboration of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart.

My mother and father were often on the set of Too Many Girls before they got married. My father was a dancer/extra on the film, as was Van Johnson, who he was buddies with at the time. My mother, who was working in Los Angeles at the time, would go to the set just to watch.

My parents often told the story of how my mother would come visit the set and would sit with Lucille Ball and chat with her on the sidelines when she was not being filmed.

Once, it came time for a new scene and George Abbott yelled for everyone to get on the set. When my mother remained seated at a table he turned around and yelled at her when he said everybody, he meant everybody! My father had to step out of the chorus line and explain she was his girlfriend and just there to watch. I've not yet gotten the DVD but hope to soon.

Others have explained why the movie is disappointing, and I won't repeat their reasons, which I agree with, but I want to.give a shoutout to one of Lorenz Hart's lyrics which was almost the only thing I remembered years after I first saw the movie, apart from the beautiful "I Didn't Know What Time It Was". The lyric is from a minor song called "Pottawatomie", which was supposed to be the school song of the fictitious Pottawatomie College where the story takes place (there is in fact a native American Potawatomi nation). The lyric that stayed in my memory was trivial but I found its goofiness memorable:

And every tot to me That is begot to me Will go to pot Will go to pot To Pottawatomie.

"Too Many Girls" is fluffy little musical that most likely would be getting no attention today...if it wasn't for the chance pairing of Lucille Ball with her future husband, Desi Arnaz. Apart from this, there's not much to recommend it...not the story nor the songs.

When the film begins, four college football players decide to forego returning to their old schools but instead enroll in tiny Potowomanie College in New Mexico! Why? Because a pretty but spoiled young lady (Ball) is going there and her father hires them all to keep an eye on her from a distance. Why they would leave the top football schools in the country seems a bit dubious and it's all an excuse for a lot of singing and dancing and nonsense.

My recommendation? If you must see it, well, it's harmless. Just don't THINK very much, as the story seldom makes any sense and overthinking this one will ruin it. Otherwise, if you skip it and watch something else, the chances are what you chose instead is better!

'Too Many Girls' is froth, but it's well-made froth: a fun movie musical that's just slightly below top-notch, based on a 1939 Broadway musical comedy of the same name, starring Eddie Bracken and Desi Arnaz (who repeat their stage roles here). The songs are by Rodgers and Hart, but only one song here has become a standard: 'I Didn't Know What Time It Was'. One song from the Broadway version that doesn't show up here is 'I Like to Recognise the Tune', a snappy quartet. When I interviewed Eddie Bracken in 1993, he told me that this had been his favourite song in the original Broadway production, and he was disappointed that he didn't get a chance to perform it in the film version.

One problem with 'Too Many Girls' is that it's got almost exactly the same plot as the Gershwins' musical 'Girl Crazy', but with the sexes reversed. In 'Girl Crazy', a wealthy young playboy from New York is sent by his father to a tiny ranch in the Southwest to keep him away from his multiple girlfriends. In 'Too Many Girls', a wealthy young playgirl from New York (Lucille Ball) is sent by her father to a tiny college in the Southwest to keep her away from her boyfriend ... a guy with the improbable name Beverly Waverly. 'Too Many Girls' doesn't stand up to comparison with the other show: 'Girl Crazy' came first, and it features George and Ira Gershwin's best score ever ... whereas Rodgers and Hart were not up to their usual standard when they wrote the songs for 'Too Many Girls'.

I was never a fan of Lucille Ball, because I dislike the ridiculous character she played in all her tv series and most of her movies. In 'Too Many Girls', amazingly, she gives one of her very few realistic performances as a plausible human being, and she's actually quite good here. I wish she'd played roles like this more often. It was during production of 'Too Many Girls' that Lucille Ball met Desi Arnaz, leading to their marriage and a tv series that I always considered vastly overrated. But Arnaz is quite good in 'Too Many Girls', playing a Cuban conga player (what a stretch!) who isn't at all like Ricky Ricardo. Desi and Lucy are not teamed in this movie: each of their screen characters is attracted to somebody else.

Arnaz, Bracken, Richard Carlson and Hal LeRoy play four football heroes. Arnaz and Carlson are believable as gridiron stars, and Bracken might just possibly be a place kicker ... but the slender and limp-wristed Hal LeRoy is just not plausible as a football player. LeRoy does absolutely nothing to justify his presence in this movie except for a big production number halfway through the film, in which he does a spirited tap dance on top of a tom-tom. For some reason, this dance is cut out of most television prints of this movie.

There's an amusing running gag concerning college girls who wear beanies to let the male students know whether or not the girls are sexually available. You might spot Van Johnson very briefly in two of the dance numbers. At the end of the show, Desi Arnaz whips out his conga drum, and does a very energetic rendition of 'Babalu' while all the college students form a conga line across the campus. This leads to a bizarre joke which physically disgusted me, when a biology professor peers down a microscope and he sees a bunch of microbes forming a conga line. The crude animation for this brief gag makes the microbes look nauseating: also, this joke is a rip-off of an animation gag in the 1930 movie 'Good News', in which some chalk drawings suddenly start dancing during the 'Pass that Peace Pipe' number.

'Too Many Girls' is a lot of fun. I don't like Lucille Ball's tv shows, but she gives a fine performance here, and I'll rate this movie 7 out of 10.

RKO filed for bankruptcy in the mid-1930's and was on the verge of finally getting back on their feet financially by 1940. I suspect that someone from their cost accounting group wandered into the studio commissary in 1939 and found it full of under-contract actors and production staff goofing off and eating studio food. They rounded up this group, stuffed the whole bunch onto an unused sound stage (with a leftover southwestern set) and got them singing and dancing to songs from a Rogers and Hart Broadway show (which they had an option on but had deemed unworthy of feature film treatment).

The result was released as "Too Many Girls" (1940), financially practical because with almost everything already paid for (insert fixed cost here), the additional expense of actually producing something boiled down to a little electricity and some black and white film stock.

No good reason to track this one down, it's pretty witless as a comedy-with the miscasting making for funnier moments than anything else in the film. Everyone except Ann Miller is too old to be playing college students and they try to pass Hal Le Roy (one of Hollywood's most effeminate actors) off as a college football All-American. I generally like this kind of stuff and will sit through anything to watch Ann Miller; so if it totally turned me off it is unlikely to appeal to most viewers.

Mostly it is notable for what happened off camera as Lucy and Desi made their first connection.

Some of the musical numbers by Rodgers and Hart were bearable; "Heroes in the Fall" and "Pottawatomie". Trudy Erwin dubs Lucy's only song. Francis Langford does most of the other numbers.

Mildly wild heiress Connie Casey (Lucille Ball) returns from finishing school in Europe with an unusual request to attend her father's alma mater in New Mexico-Pottawatomie College. "You mean a lot to me, Pottawatomie. You hit the spot of me, Pottawatomie. I love Pottawatomie with all my anatomy. So every tot of me, that is begot of me, will go to Pot, Pot, Pottawatomie".

Lucy was almost 30 at the time and even with "extreme" soft focus and minimal close-ups can't remotely pass for 18.

Her father suspects that she has a boyfriend at the school and hires four Ivy League football stars to monitor the behavior of the new freshman. The four eventually end up playing for the school's hapless football team, which in a matter of a few days has changed its schedule to include games with big time programs like Nebraska, Columbia and Tennessee. There is a grand celebration at which the student body sings the following less-than-immortal lyrics: "You're a ham-better scram-Notre Dame, We'll make Williams wail, Army-you too Navy, Boo Hoo to Purdue, Georgia Tech day you'll dread-you're a wreck, Look at Brown turn blue, We'll make a bumpia out of Columbia, In a quota Minnesota's got to go, You'll see U of D, We'll have all the alphabet to shout out." (reviewers note: the U of D is the University of Detroit which was once a football power).

The scale of this thing is ultimately its undoing as Broadway ensembles of 15 are replaced with a cast of hundreds (remember all those people sitting in the RKO commissary drawing paychecks for doing nothing). On risqué Broadway the girls who are still virgins wear beanies; in the film they wear them to signify that they have never been kissed (it is amusing to watch these aging and jaded RKO starlets trying to pass for ultra-chaste teens).

There is a corny and unconvincing romance between Lucy and Richard Carlson; whose brand of wooden acting would eventually work to his advantage in 1950's science fiction films like "It Came From Outer Space".

Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.

With Lucy off to college, her dad hires four college football players as bodyguards, but the four young men are confronted with the temptations of the film title. Fluffy entertainment is most notable for being the set on which Ball and Arnaz met. If it had not been for this film, perhaps we would never have had "I Love Lucy." Interestingly though, Ball's romantically paired with Carlson, not Arnaz, in this film. This marked the film debuts of Arnaz and Bracken (both playing football players!), as well as Van Johnson in an uncredited bit role (Chorus Boy #41!). In a preview of Ricky Ricardo, Arnaz plays some musical instruments.

This film is significant for one reason only: Lucille Ball met Desi Arnaz,they married,they created the most influential sitcom in TV history. They created the most influential television production company of the 20th century.

The film? Awful. Ann Miller? Awful.Lucy is pretty good in a trite role,Desi is the only one really worth watching. The plot? Oh,there was one?

Okay,seriously, I didn't find anything about this enjoyable, and I usually like big splashy 40s musicals,but this was frantic and pretty convoluted to say the least. Not my cup of tea.

A cast of thousands--extra dancers and singers. George Abbott probably had 18 dancers in the Broadway version, so here he got about 180. Some of these numbers are well worth the watch. Don't miss the surreal finale with Desi Arnaz on conga (and he's supposed to be a rich Argentinean). Lucille Ball is shot through gauze even though she's quite young, but who cares, she's luminescent in this silly plot. This is the rare Hollywood film taking place on a college campus where not a single professor is evident, save a quick visual joke.

The hard-to-watch scenes involved handsome Richard Carlson who acts like a sap in a painfully sappy way. No wonder he was unable to continue his career after WWII. But oh, that Eddie Bracken, Hal Le Roy, and the always magnificent Anne Miller. Frances Langford shows how that band experience produced fabulous singers.

Really, you'll be screaming in pain, choking your popcorn out in laughter, and popping your eyes over the over-the-top Busby-you-can-be-outdone dance numbers. And it has one of the best Rodgers and Hart songs ever, "I Never Knew What Time it Was," sung man to woman, and then, yes, man to man. Postmodern viewers will find some unintended gay laughs.

So show it to your best friends, the only ones who'll understand and not throw a pillow at you.

Four college football players are hired to be bodyguards to a madcap heiress.

Based on a Broadway musical, with songs by Rodgers and Hart and a cast that includes Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, Eddie Bracken and Ann Miller, what could go wrong? Quite a lot, apparently.

For one thing, it's only 85 minutes long but feels interminable. The dance numbers are badly staged, with some trying for some Busby Berkeley-ish effect. The songs are disappointing as well. The cast try their best, but none of them are known for starring in musicals, with the exception of Ann Miller, who is wasted in a pitifully small role as "Pepe".

Lucy does her best as Conseulo(!), while Richard Carlson is a bit bland as the leading man. I spent the whole film wondering what I'd seen Carlson in, before realizing he was the star of Creature from the Black Lagoon. Of all the actors, Eddie Bracken and Desi Arnaz come off the best. There is a humorous bit where Bracken sings "I Never Knew What Time It Was" to Desi.

Famously, this was where Desi first met Lucy in real life, while Van Johnson (in his film debut) can be spotted in several of the dance scenes. And one more thing: who though Desi and Eddie Bracken looked like football players?

Some movies become important, not because of their subject or their cinematic relevance (or irrelevance in some cases), but because of other circumstances.

In this case, it's the film that brought together two of television's greatest personalities and business people: Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Both were struggling actors trying to make their images a commodity in the Hollywood of the late Thirties and early Forties. Arnaz, however, was less an actor than a musician so he had material on which to fall back on. Ball, on the other hand, was today's Parker Posey -- you always saw her star in B-movies and rarely, if ever, in "major productions". Back then, though, such a thing was looked down upon and Ball in this vehicle didn't fare better: she remained rooted in the B's.

So with Ball and Arnaz coming together in 1940, it is reported that the sparks were loud and clear and despite their personality and racial differences, they were to begin an alliance which would legally last 20 years, but emotionally, a lifetime. Neither of them share scenes together other than the ones in which their characters happen to appear on screen simultaneously, which would have been great in order to capture what they were about to experience (much in the style of Hepburn and Tracy, and Bogart and Bacall), but that's okay. We know the history of Lucy and Desi and if anything, this movie is the catalyst for their union.

You can't really appreciate the pace and style of the great movie musicals until you've seen some lousy ones like this. A really awful 1930s or 1940s musical movie can induce a sort of restful trance, and take you into another world of stunned tedium. If you know only Rodgers and Hart's great songs which survived shows and became standards, you'll be astounded by how many strained and stupid ones come in between them in the course of a plotted show. The story-scenes are acted in a stiff and disinterested style. Actors seem just to be waiting for others to stop speaking so they can say their lines, rather than actually listening to each other. And why should they listen? What they say is overwritten, repetitious, and yet often indirect and incomplete as far as telling the story is concerned. The plot manages to be both contrived and clumsy, unlikely to the point of being fantastic--yet who would fantasize such dreariness? This effect is probably partly the result of prudish Hollywood trying to adapt a supposedly "spicy" script direct from supposedly "wicked" and "sophisticated" Broadway, and therefore inserting or deleting lines to keep the script "clean" but still leave the impression that it's "daring." But the prudishness seems hypocritical, and the sophistication way, way overestimated. Trying to convey both attitudes, yet neither, the actors become robotic and stressed. And the sets are so stagy that it's a shock when suddenly one scene is played on a real ball-field. Perhaps the most characteristic moment comes when Lucille Ball makes a remark about a boyfriend which is clearly the lead-in for a song, and then, as mechanically as a wind-up toy, while the other actors in the room watch helplessly, with nothing to do, crosses a whole room, goes out onto a porch, hits a position, stares into a light, and lip-syncs woodenly to a voice obviously not hers. Another: after what seems an endless discussion of the troubled finances of a college (which turn out to have nothing to do with the story at all), one boy donates the three hundred dollars (?) that's needed, and the college is opened, at which point for some reason everyone participates in a production number called, "Cakewalk, 'Cause We Got Cake," possibly left over from some other situation in the Broadway original (some of its lyrics seem to relate to Depression optimism), and performed not as a cakewalk, but a swing number. Also, as is to be expected in a "college musical" of the time, the main characters are far past college age, so their sexual coyness seems retarded. The ultimate effect is one of dreamlike slowness and isolation and illogic, making this trivial nonsense seem related to the existential sadness of De Chirico's paintings or Kafka's novels. The movie may be even more bewildering to younger viewers today because of changed social attitudes. A long scene among four boys is oblique to the point of mystery because in 1940 none of them could actually say that certain girls wearing certain "beanie" caps are virgins (there are a couple of incredibly labored attempts later at jokes about these caps). Lucille Ball, giving an old Native American man a letter to carry for her to a lover, calls the messenger, "Boy," and Latino Desi Arnaz not only has an awkward gay joke early in the film, but later performs a song called "I'm Spic and Spanish."

Lucy looks beautiful, Desi looks beautiful, this movie had me pretty much rolling on the floor 30 minutes into it and the laughs just keep on coming if you have a slight sense of humor and just enjoy the show that they put together. Don't try to analyze it, don't try to justify it, don't put it in the pantheon of films, just enjoy it for what it is and you'll probably be laughing pretty much throughout the whole movie. Four college football jocks getting enlisted ed to be a secret bodyguard group for Lucille Ball's character. At Potawatomi University. The whole thing is hilarious, it looks great the print is really good, the sound was excellent, a black-and-white film in 1940 this is one of the best I've seen lately. So I say watch it, enjoy it, and you'll probably tell friends about this movie that made you laugh last night. That's my review and I'm sticking with it.

Lucille Ball (as Connie) is going to college. Her wealthy father is afraid she'll get into trouble, so he hires four football players to be her bodyguards. Not a very bright man, obviously! The bodyguards are: Desi Arnaz (as Manuelito), Eddie Bracken (as Jojo), Richard Carlson (as Clint), and Hal LeRoy (as Al). Ann Miller and Frances Langford are around to dance and sing.

It's a fair musical, with an "Indian" subplot (Huh?), and budget problems. You should know that Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz are not paired up in (on-screen, anyway) this film (Ms. Ball is partnered with Mr. Carlson). This is a routinely presented film, with a few highlights. Unfortunately Mr. Le Roy and Ms. Miller do not have a real dance off/team-up together. Mr. Arnaz steals the show from his future wife with a charming performance - look for the scene where he plays "guess the lipstick"!

***** Too Many Girls (10/8/40) George Abbott ~ Lucille Ball, Richard Carlson, Desi Arnaz, Ann Miller

Too Many Girls is an interesting film for the above reason and is worth the look also. But while a long way from the worst film musicals, it is not a particularly great film either. There are definitely things that do salvage it. Desi Arnaz is very charming in his role and gives it his all, though his singing can sound strained because of the register. The songs make for very pleasant listening, I Didn't Know What Time It Was is the best number and is a classic, though other than that none really are among Rodgers and Hart's best. Hal LeRoy beguiles with his dancing and toe-work, and you have to love the comedy comebacks of Eddie Bracken as well as the vocal talents of Frances Langford and the dancing of Ann Miller. The football footage is interesting too, the film does look nice if not quite audacious and look out for Van Johnson. Too Many Girls has all those good things but is for me a very flawed film. When there aren't any songs, much of the film is weak with draggy pacing, a pretty dispensable story and stilted dialogue. The direction and choreography are definitely competent- the Conga at the end is an absolute riot and anything danced by Ann Miller is fun enough- but are not particularly memorable and could have had more passion. Lucille Ball's Connie is too exaggerated, and while the singer providing her singing voice has a beautiful silky voice- much better than Ball's, whose I can't stand, especially in the dire Mame- it is one of those instances where you can actually tell it's not the actor/actress singing. And Richard Carlson is unbearably wooden here too. Overall, not a bad film, not a good one either, kind of a difficult one to judge actually because there is some entertainment value there are a lot of noticeable bad things too. 5/10 Bethany Cox

George Abbott was a brilliant Broadway play writer/director/producer. He won five Tony awards and a Pulitzer Prize. His Hollywood career was interesting, although a bit less successful. "Too Many Girls" is one of only three of his Broadway musicals that he brought to film. "Pajama Game" and "Damn Yankees" are the other two. While not quite as good as those two, this one is a lot of fun and does have a lot of energy. Abbott also directed nine early sound films from 1929-1931. It is unfortunate that none of these are out on DVD, as far as I know.

People have already noted the excellent cast: Eddie Bracken, Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, Francis Langford, Richard Carlson, Hal Leroy and Ann Miller. They all sparkle here. They hold a silly and absurd plot together by not taking any of it seriously for a moment. This is a good thing because the plot is unrealistic in wink, wink, nudge, nudge fashion. The absurdity of having Desi Arnaz who looks like he weighs 150 lbs. as a superstar football player is only topped by the absurdity of having Eddie Bracken, who looks 140 lbs., as a star quarterback.

Culturally, it is fascinating to see the way colleges were portrayed in 1940. Apparently, the only reason a woman went to college was, as Lucille Ball bluntly puts it, was to get a man. I also wondered about the women wearing beanies. The movie is unclear, but apparently all the girls who wear beanies, nearly all the women students, are virgins. I assume this was made clear in the play, although in the movie it is not so clear. After Ball and Carlson spend a night together, the movie pointedly shows Ball still wearing her beanie. One is supposed to believe this in the same way that one is supposed to believe Desi and Eddie are football players.

The flimsy book doesn't help a bit, and Mr. Abbott's inability to translate the stylizations of Broadway to the more naturalistic world of the film pretty much doom this one to pure anthropological significance. Yes, it's the first Lucy-Desi project, even if they have no scenes together and were reportedly unimpressed with each other during the making. So do not look for that Desilu magic, as it was still 10 years in the future. The movie crams together too many genre conventions for its own good: college football pic, zany mix-up, stiff leading man (Richard Carlson!), lost gal drama, fish outta water, south of zee border and worse, it features the dull Francis Langford as chief songbird of lyrics at the edges of the putrid. The dance numbers look like rehearsals for the invasion of Normandy--masses if unskilled, badly co-ordinated extras in clumsy formation-- and for some reason unbilled chorus boy Van Johnson, who can't dance a lick, is in the front row of every single crowd shot. But there are two saving graces. The first is the very young Ann Miller, also 10 years before her glory days at MGM, as Pepe, a racist caricature to be sure but one that can dance. In dark make-up as per cliché, Miller fricassees up a storm, giving a preview of the gifts she was to bring to the Freed unit.. And she's only the second best dancer in the picture! The best is Hal La Roy, and this is his only starring role in a major picture (he is featured in some Vitaphone WB musical shorts, such as "Jitterbut No. 1" but no other movies.) Lord what a talent, and what a crime he never got to do more. Like Gene Nelson of a subsequent generation, he just never got the break his talent warranted. So watch, enjoy and conjure what might have been when he does his loose-legged, spurred solo atop someone's idea of Mexican fountain which is the central architectural feature of Pottowattamie College" in Last Stand, N.M.: What a number, and how did he get those legs not only to bend like that but to bend like that at warp speed? You'll think Industrial Light and Magic computer-generated the number, that's how fast and astonishing it is. Boy, would I have liked to see him in a major film with someone like Hermes Pan or Stanley Donen calling the shots. Too bad and so sad it never happened.

Great dancing by Ann Miller and some fellow; Langford looked kind of puffy; Desi was cute and so was Bracken. All the cast seemed energetic and there was good ensemble choreography. Wish it was in color! The surprise was Richard Carlson who looked really hunky in those days...Lucille Ball was great from the beginning...really a beautiful woman with plenty of comic talent!

A dull musical with poor and laughable lyrics. But, most fascinating because this is where Desi met Lucy, and because at the end we see Desi playing a conga drum (as we will numerous times in 11-17 years later in I Love Lucy).

This film could not decide what it wanted to be. A comedy? A dance? A musical? A romance? A sport (football) genre film? By the end of the film you may figure out just like I did that the film is very choppy, out of synch, and thus I classified it as a "mystery", because you won't figure out what the film genre actually was.

Even with a very young Dezi Arnaz, and Lucille Ball who both fail in their singing roles the film fell flat like their singing. I scored the film a higher than deserving 4 out of 10 rating as the film was partially saved by the sweet and true songbird vocals of singer and actress Frances Langford.