By Kathryn Ware
Lucille Ball’s hair was made for Technicolor. It’s an amazing red color not found in nature and in Best Foot Forward, which I saw recently and was shown again last night on Turner Classic Movies, she wears it in a huge fortress style favored in the ’40s that easily adds another ten inches to her already impressive height. With her pale skin and bright red lipstick, she’s stunning. There’s a scene with Lucy wearing a vibrant ensemble, complete with a hat that looks like layers of bright blue-green phyllo dough balanced atop her rock solid flaming hairdo. It’s almost painful to look at.
The movie itself is a silly song-and-dance piece of wartime escapism. Ball portrays herself, a Hollywood bathing beauty looking for some much needed publicity to boost her stalled movie career. In this simpler time, accompanying an underage military school cadet to his prom seems like a brilliant PR move.
The cadet chosen to be Lucy’s date has a jealous girlfriend (Virginia Weidler) of course, Harry James and his orchestra belt out the dance tunes (including an odd prom-stopping rendition of “The Flight of the Bumblebee”) and the dance ends with a mob of girls so angry with their dates for ditching them in favor of the middle-aged movie star that they attack Lucy and rip her dress off! Yeah, it was a simpler time.
June Allyson makes her first film appearance and she’s cute as a bug in a rug. Also featured are Gloria De Haven and a wise-cracking Nancy Walker (Rhoda’s mom was young once too!) who practically steals the movie. They all sing and dance their little hearts out while Lucy does a beautiful job lip-syncing a ballad in all her Technicolor splendor.
Catch up on what we’ve been watching, in the What I Watched Last Night archive.
Posted on December 7, 2006