Lucille Ball was ill-served by her studios — first RKO and then MGM –, by history, and probably by her own misplaced ambition to be a topline star. Apparently no one detected, or desired to detect, the slapstick dexterity and hysterical demeanor that would make her the greatest American television comedienne of the post-World War II period. Folks knew she looked beautiful, the camera liked her, and she could move fluidly from deer-in-the-headlights innocence to “hey-wait-a-minute!” sass. With the right script and appropriate guidance she had the potential to be a strong B-star. Give her a good script with the role of a gorgeous dish with down-home common sense, or a street-savvy moll with a heart of gold, or even a Lubitschean store clerk with big dreams, and she could have been gold, a redheaded Carole Landis. But that’s not what happened. At RKO she was given minor roles in big pictures or major roles in little ones. Throughout her many years at RKO, the possibilities were probably still open. But as soon as she moved on to MGM in the early 40s, her fate was sealed — not just, or even mainly, by monumentally stupid, uninspired scripts, but by the screen itself. MGM wanted her in Technicolor and transformed her from a natural beauty into a painted floozy.
It’s worth remembering how much the camera loved Ball in black and white.
And then came Technicolor.
I’m sure that many folks will disagree with my emphasizing color as a factor in Ball’s failure as a movie comedienne. My beef with 40s MGM Technicolor may strike many people as excessive. Its pivotal role in developing camp spectacles is well known. But it’s obvious that many of the things that made great films distinctive in the ’30s could not be simply transposed into the garish hues of Technicolor, from mise-en-scene to lighting to movement-in-space. For comedy in particular, the glaring visuals can easily — maybe inevitably — block the audience’s attention to words and gestures. MGM tried to get around this in Ball’s first comedy for the studio, Du Barry was a Lady, by placing some of the action in a dream-sequence set in Louis XV’s Versailles, complete with loony stage versions of 18th century court habille. With Ball’s next starring vehicle, Best Foot Forward, there was no excuse.
In the early 1940s, MGM was leading the way to transforming Hollywood film comedy from the edgy, urbane, modernist sensibility of the ’30s, rich in wit and design, toward conformist spectacles agreeable to Midwestern theater audiences. The vanilla language and small-town small-mindedness was covered by extravagant physical color. The War had a lot to do with it. Too much sophistication might suck some of the air out of the gassy patriotic Americana. Too much of anything associated with “continental” gaiety might fuzz the boundary between suspect Europeans and honest Americans. The Hays Code had finally triumphed by being fully internalized. (There were exceptions, of course, but they were rare.)
Best Foot Forward is a good example of this conformist discipline. Its opening premise actually has a witty idea, which is never exploited. Lucille Ball plays herself as a movie star whose contract has not been renewed. Her agent persuades her that she needs some good, wholesome publicity. When an adoring cadet at Winsocky Military Academy sends her a moony fan letter inviting her to the school’s prom, her agent (William Gaxton) decides she should accept. The publicity will be great — big-time movie star (now without a job) will hang out with a star-struck fan base of adolescent schoolboys and make their wet dreams come true. So far so good.
There aren’t very many comedies in which beautiful movie stars play themselves for mocking laughs. (Jean Harlow’s Bombshell is the great exception.) But in Ball’s case, it was an especially edgy idea, since it had some basis in her real career. Ball never could crack the list of top female movie stars; her name recognition was wanting. RKO really did drop her. But there was apparently one demographic in which she was a bankable star: adolescent males. For them, she had “it.”
Think of the possibilities. Then forget them. In Best Foot Forward, no lines are crossed, or even approached. The cadets are harmless teenagers, and that’s all you get. The central complication is that Bud (Tommy Dix), the shy cadet who invited Ball, never thought she would accept, and had already invited his real girlfriend, Helen (Virginia Weidler). Helen comes to the prom; Tommy tries to send her away; Ball has to pretend to be Helen, because Bud had registered Helen as his date and apparently there’s no changing such things at a military academy. All the action happens on the teens’ level; Ball is resentful, sardonic, and bitchy almost to the end. Even though she is clearly supposed to be a Hollywood sex goddess in this setting, she is given no romantic interest at all. She might as well be House Mother. The teens get things sorted out at their level and Lucille Ball escapes home. In the meantime there are several insipid songs and dances, and sincere patriotic bullshit signifying nothing. (Ball even sings a little song — except that she’s dubbed.)
Best Foot Forward is one of the whitest films you will ever see, and that seems to me to be part of its program. There are no Black characters even in servant roles. OK, that’s not untypical of the studio, the times, and the genre. But it’s not just all-white and whitebread, to the discerning eye it is ostentatiously whitewashed. It’s the kind of film that would fit easily into a scary parody by Jordan Peele. I feel it’s almost calling attention to its whiteness. The film features music by the great white jazz trumpeter, Harry James, and his 1943 band. James was a featured soloist with Benny Goodman but left to form his own a year before Goodman integrated his band. By 1943, James was an immensely popular recording artist and band leader. He had moved away from Black-inflected swing to “sweeter,” more insipid, conventional and “respectable” jazz-pop — in other words, more acceptable to white middle-American taste. As in many of the movie musicals that featured jazz artists, the band’s first tune reminds us that the form is a Black one. They play a solid, but excessively flashy version of Count Basie’s “Two O’Clock Jump.”
It’s not hard to notice that there are no Black musicians in the band that’s playing a composition by one of the most popular and well-known Black band leaders of the day. Again, that’s not unusual. Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, the Dorseys, Woody Herman and lots of other popular bands were featured in early ’40s films, and none of them included Black musicians. There is one big exception, though, which was made early enough to make one think it should have had some influence. Howard Hawks’s Ball of Fire shows Gene Krupa’s 1941 band, and includes a short solo by Roy Eldridge. A couple of Dick Powell’s RKO films of the ’30s — Twenty Million Sweethearts (1934) and Broadway Gondolier (1935) — featured Powell singing with the Mills Brothers. In other words, the segregation line had already been breached. Best Foot Forward shows it was repaired.
The piece de resistance of in-your-face whitewashing is the showstopping big collective dance sequence, the swingless joy that both Broadway and Hollywood decided were celebrations of American middle-of-the-road community togetherness. This thing definitely belongs in a sequel to Get Out. The song is “The Three B’s,” which stand for “the barrelhouse, the boogie woogie and the blues.” This tribute to what one would think are the pillars of jazz is then sung and danced to with great glee by a community of debutantes in their ersatz plantation ball gowns with their partners attired in their ersatz Confederate dress grays. Hard to watch. Someone call Jordan Peele.
As for Lucy, you’d think something like this would be hard to survive. Apparently, it was quite successful, made a lot of money, and nobody complained. About anything.