Absolutely Fantastic

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Who in his right mind would give a secretarial job to Ellen Grant, a woman who doesn't seem to have mastered either typing or shorthand? Leave it to Dick Richmond, a man that wants to use Ellen as a distraction to be his receptionist at his real estate agency that serves as a front for his illegal betting activities that is his real business. Poor Mr. Richmond, he gets more than what he bargained for.Ellen, who starts as an eager secretary, suddenly decides to help the firm in sponsoring the construction of badly needed housing in the area. This is happening at the 'baby boom' era in America, where the returning sailors and their families couldn't find affordable housing. Ellen, who has a heart of gold, wants to involve Richmond into being the builder. Little does she know she is getting in his way.Lloyd Bacon directed this mildly funny comedy that showed Lucille Ball's talent as a comedienne, something she would exploit in later years as one of America's best loved funny woman in that new medium of television. William Holden shows he was an excellent comedy actor with the way he portrayed the con man Richmond. Two of the best character actors of the thirties and forties, James Gleason and Frank McHugh are seen as the men working the racket in the Richmond's real estate firm.Although Lucille Ball was nearing forty at the time she appeared in this film, one tends to forget her contribution to the movies that came before this comedy and before finding fame in that new technology, television.

When Lucille Ball did I Love Lucy few at the time suspected she had the comic talents she possessed. Her history up to then in films was usually as a wisecracking second banana in major films and some leading roles in B films. And Miss Grant Takes Richmond is definitely a B film. Next year William Holden with Sunset Boulevard would step into the A list of players, but it wasn't his time yet. Holden proved to be a worthy foil for Lucy's comic antics.The film is definitely Lucy's however. CBS executives must have seen Miss Grant Takes Richmond and seen what Lucy could do before passing on I Love Lucy as a television series.There were some incidents that definitely could have come out of I Love Lucy. Her struggles with mastering the typewriter in secretarial school with Holden deftly catching a flying typewriter carriage, her dodging a steam shovel at a construction sight, her trying to use a jackhammer and the aftermath of that, all these could easily have been in any of her television series. Harbinger of things to come. Remember also that Bill Holden made a memorable appearance on I Love Lucy and got a pie in his face at the Brown Derby.Lucy is a klutzy scatterbrained student at a secretarial school run by Charles Lane and Holden comes in looking to hire. To everyone's amazement he hires Lucy. He runs a scam real estate operation that is a front for a bookie joint. Her job is to basically babysit and commiserate with those who actually come in and are looking to buy property and shine them on. She doesn't know she's working for bookies, Bill Holden, Frank McHugh, and James Gleason.Through her own wide-eyed Marie Wilson type view of the world before long she's got this trio actually building homes and trying to be bookies at the same time.To see the Lucy Ricardo of the future by all means catch Miss Grant Takes Richmond.If you don't, you'll have a lot of 'splaining to do.

I've always thought William Holden was an underrated comic actor and at his most charming in some of his comedies (Sabrina, Born Yesterday, Moon is Blue). Since he didn't make a lot of comedies, I was looking forward to this one with Lucille Ball. But it's not Holden's film. It's Lucy's film, with Holden playing the straight man. I'm not a big Lucy fan, but she's quite funny in this. Holden, on the other hand, seems a little stiff or disinterested. To be honest, there's not much to work with. Lucy probably succeeds because she's very good at physical comedy and can make us laugh without saying anything, which helps when the script is so weak. Holden's humor tends to come from his intelligence and his timing, which is harder to make work when the screenplay is mediocre or you don't want to be in the film to begin with. Miss Grant Takes Richmond came out the year before Sunset Blvd., so I imagine that Holden's frustration with his roles during much of the 1940s was reaching its peak around this time. But James Gleason and Frank McHugh, two wonderful actors, also seem to struggle a bit in this film, so I pin much of the blame on the writing. There are some funny bits here and there, but it's all a little sugary for me. Lucy fans will probably enjoy it, though - she does the best.

Miss Grant Takes Richmond (1949) directed by Lloyd Bacon, stars Lucille Ball as Ellen Grant, probably the worst student the Woodruff Secretarial School has ever graduated. William Holden plays Dick Richmond, a bookie who needs a naive person to lend respectability to his illegal gambling operation. Naturally, he chooses Ellen Grant.The movie is totally predictable, and very much a product of the 1940's. To my knowledge, not a single person of color appears in the film. Bookmakers have a code of professional ethics, to which they scrupulously adhere. When a boss kisses a secretary, she's flattered, not offended, and so on. (Some things in our society have really changed for the better in 56 years!)By 1949, it was obvious that Lucille Ball was no longer starlet material, and the director was intelligent enough to recognize her abilities as a comic actor. Many of the scenes in the movie could have come right out of the "I Love Lucy" show, which began two years later. (Incidentally, co-star William Holden appeared in a memorable episode of "I Love Lucy.")As one reviewer has already noted, this film is for Lucy fans only. However, if you *are* a Lucy fan, the video is worth finding and seeing.