Ever since its six original seasons on CBS (1951-57), “I Love Lucy” could be seen on TV in continuous syndication (it’s now most readily available on the Paramount+ streaming service). So it’s easy to forget or overlook just how innovative Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were and how much they influenced subsequent sitcom production. You can see some of those innovations, however, when The News-Gazette Film Series presents “I Love Lucy: The Movie” at 1 and 7 p.m. Saturday at the Virginia Theatre in downtown Champaign.
The film itself is actually one of those innovations in that it was constructed from three of the first season’s episodes — the first such production. But it was shown theatrically only once in 1953 and then shelved when MGM insisted that their projected 1954 release “The Long, Long Trailer” (seen in The News-Gazette Film Series in 2018) should mark the official return of Ball and Arnaz to the big screen. “I Love Lucy: The Movie” was then lost in the Paramount film vaults in mislabeled cans until the show’s original editor, Dann Cahn, discovered it in 2001.
Throughout the series, Lucy was continually trying to get into bandleader husband Ricky’s shows or just show business in general, and Ricky (Arnaz) always tried to stymie her efforts. Here, Lucy talks Ricky into performing for a local women’s club and then wangles her way into the performance even though Ricky tries to keep her role to a minimum. Then Lucy and Ricky have a falling out with best friends and landlords Fred and Ethel Mertz (William Frawley and Vivian Vance) and try to break their lease.
Finally, in another attempt to insert herself into one of Ricky’s shows, Ball goes full slapstick as Lucy tries her hand (or foot) at ballet and then burlesque comedy, culminating in a hilarious collision of the two in Ricky’s nightclub. Some of the most memorable “I Love Lucy” episodes were those in which Ball recreated classic film or vaudeville comedy routines, and here she does the “slowly I turned” bit, a vaudeville skit in which a trigger word repeatedly sends one character into a pummeling assault on another. “Slowly I turned” first appeared on the big screen in two 1944 films, one from Abbott and Costello (“Lost in a Harem”) and the other a short from the Three Stooges.
(Note: if you’ve seen “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice” (2016), you should find the “slowly I turned” bit even funnier than originally intended because the trigger word here is “Martha” — the name that brings the fight between the two superheroes to an end.)
The TV show was shot in Hollywood (to make it easier for Ball and Arnaz to appear in films) — a rarity when most television series were shot in New York. At that time and with the available video technology, that meant most of the country would see a visually inferior image if video tape were used. So Desilu (Lucy and Desi’s production company) shot “I Love Lucy” on 35mm film to provide a better image on multiple copies for the different time zones. Arnaz insisted on using three cameras, and that in turn meant they could shoot the show in sequence like a play and consequently with a live audience reacting to the comedy rather than using a laugh track.
When assembling the movie from three episodes, however, the laugh track presented a problem (since movies don’t have them), but they solved that by making the movie partly a documentary about the making of an episode. At the beginning, we see the audience coming into the studio and the cameras and crew getting into position (including editor Dann Cahn in the control booth). Then Arnaz comes out, explains what the audience (and we) will be seeing, and introduces the rest of the stars. They actually filmed this introduction before a live audience as well, though it comes from a fourth episode that does not appear in the movie.
What you see here became standard practice for TV sitcoms, and if you were in an audience for one today, you would see pretty much exactly the same sort of things — except the cameras would be smaller and there would be editors and showrunners looking at a bank of video screens to monitor the process.
Marc Daniels, who worked extensively in television (including “Star Trek,” another Desilu production), directed the original episodes for the entire first season. Edward Sedgwick (who directed the early sound films of one of Ball’s mentors, Buster Keaton) did the new material connecting the episodes and turning them into a single story.
Even more impressive, Desilu talked legendary cinematographer Karl Freund into overseeing the camerawork on the show. Freund was largely responsible for the look of German Expressionist films in the 1920s (through his inventiveness on classics such as “The Last Laugh” and “Metropolis”) and had won an Oscar for “The Good Earth” (1937).
Ordinarily, close-ups would have needed different lighting from a shot that took in the whole set, but Freund came up with a flat lighting system that made the three-camera, shooting-in-sequence system possible. That means that here and in all subsequent TV sitcoms, you will not see any shadows — an ironic development from a cinematographer central to a movement where shadows defined the look and meaning of so many films.
All this comes together to present you with Lucy, Ricky, Fred and Ethel in character-defining stories, hilarious classic gags, and even at least one song in each episode. Hollywood has renewed its interest in Ball and Arnaz, their marriage and the challenges of their industry-shaping show recently with “Being the Ricardos” (2021) and “Lucy and Desi” (2022), but “I Love Lucy: The Movie” gives you a literal behind-the-scenes glimpse of the show as well as the real comic icons themselves.