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Absolutely Fantastic

Absolutely brilliant

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Released in 1954, The Long, Long Trailer was made during the I Love Lucy era, and in it Lucy and Desi play slightly domesticated versions of their characters in I Love Lucy. Instead of a bandleader, Desi is apparently some kind of civil engineer. To cope with his being away on projects, Lucy comes up with the romantic idea of buying a trailer to live in so they can travel together without living in rented rooms or hotels. The difficulty of towing the big trailer behind their Mercury Monterey convertible is the plot of the movie. Such a concept is achieved mostly through set pieces, some of which go on painfully long. Some also seem taken from the much better Mickey Mouse short, "Mickey's Trailer." One of the set pieces near the end, a trip up a narrow mountain road with the overweight trailer, was actually filled with tension for me, and might be the best part of the movie.I watched this movie on TCM and the Ansco color was terrible. I don't know if this is because Ansco was a poor process or just because this was a bad print. It's unfortunate, because there was some otherwise spectacular scenery. Another visual defect for me was that scenes in a trailer park, and some other outdoor scenes too, were obviously shot on an indoor sound stage. You can tell even by the kind of dead sound. Since I mention the trailer parks, one oddity was that the society within, while folksy, bears no resemblance to the social dystopia we'd expect in a contemporary trailer park. There are really no invidious class hints.With Lucy's being a superstar, one would think that she should in some way be the hero of the movie. However, she's deeply annoying with her insistence on doing things her way with the trailer. There's one scene where she wants to drive and does so recklessly. It was also her fault that the trailer was too heavy for the mountain road. I was a fan of I Love Lucy, and I realize that the crucial part of making the madcap Lucy tolerable in the show was the resistance that Ricky, Fred, and Ethel exerted against her. Also, I don't know whether it's because I encountered her at a very young age, but Lucy has always seemed utterly sexless to me, very "aunt-like." Unlike some actors, who can plausibly play younger than their real age, Lucy, for me, is unable to do so. Therefore, it's disturbing to see her in romantic scenes, even if they're quite chaste. This movie is only mildly entertaining.

Released in 1954 - The Long, Long Trailer (TLLT, for short) was very much like watching a very, very long, long episode (90 minutes) of the highly-popular "I Love Lucy" TV Show of the early 1950's.Now, don't get me wrong here - I can certainly enjoy watching an extended episode of "I Love Lucy"', now, and again. But I found that with TLLT there seemed to be something slightly out of kilter with its story - Something oddly unbalanced.It seemed to me that TLLT was missing a vitally important element in its "comedy relief" department.What I'm talking about here is, of course, the much needed input of actors William Frawley and Vivian Vance, as Fred and Ethel Mertz, into TLLT's comic story. Believe me, these 2 characters were most desperately needed several times throughout the course of TLLT as a buffer to counter the often amusing, but sometimes annoying, domestic squabbles of Nicky and Tracy (aka Ricky and Lucy Ricardo).But, with that all said - TLLT was still fairly entertaining as far as comedies go. But it certainly wasn't great.

My 4 kids grew up knowing I was a huge I Love Lucy fan, watching it whenever it was on. So when I found a copy of this movie in a video store about 20 years ago, my youngest remarked, "What are Lucy & Ricky doing in color?" Well, that's the reason they agreed to do this movie, because it would be filmed in color. Lucy & Desi are just as good in this hilarious comedy as they were on TV. They play a pair of newlyweds, Stacy & Nicky, who buy a long, long trailer. Nicky is hesitant, but Stacy talks him into it. Once they purchase the trailer, it becomes "one long nightmare," almost breaking up their marriage (while on their honeymoon). I don't know why this movie was hardly ever shown on TV because is's very entertaining. I had to order it on Netflix & will probably end up buying the DVD on Amazon.com. Plus it's nice to see Lucy & Desi in color!

Lucy and Ricky are on the road. Oh, yes they're on the lam, fugitives from Manhattan and hiding out from Fred and Ethel, taking on the new identities of "Nicky" and Tacy." But they can't fool us. It's the Ricardos up to their old tricks, furious and fast. They're newlyweds and Tacy subjects them both to a honeymoon of horrors as they start on the road of life. Tacy empties "the rocks in her head" and keeps them as mementos of their trip, stashing them in the trailer, weighing it down, courting the disaster of an over-weighted trailer collapsing on the road and tilting over a cliff and into a ravine. Tacy loves Nicky's "elegant " nose and cooks him, or tries to cook him, elegant dinners within the minuscule trailer kitchen. Of course this provides a comic set-up, literally, at full tilt, as food, utensils, and everything not nailed down swoops down all over the place. No matter, nothing, but nothing will dampen Tacy's enthusiasm for trailer life. Her wifely responsibility is to take care of her new husband. She tells him that when she first met him, she almost teared up, she felt so sorry for him because he was out in public with a button missing from his shirt. He needed a woman's care. More specifically, the tender care of a madcap like her. This is pretty much the duo you see on the classic "I Love Lucy" TV shows. If you love them there, you'll love them everywhere. Even in this movie.