Forever, Darling ** (1956, Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, James Mason, Natalie Schafer, Louis Calhern) – Classic Movie Review 11,402

‘Lucy has a crush on James Mason – and WOW!’ in the 1956 comedy Forever, Darling. ‘MGM Presents Their Riotous New Comedy In Color’.

Director Alexander Hall’s 1956 fantasy romantic comedy film Forever, Darling is a screwy farce with an iffy script rescued by the talented comedy playing, especially from the irrepressible Lucille Ball and the carefully underplaying James Mason.

Helen Deutsch’s feeble screenplay for Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz finds Fifties classic TV show I Love Lucy’s favourite wedded couple struggling on the big screen, and with an unexpected co-star in James Mason as a Guardian Angel bringing Susan Vega (Lucy) guidance from above when her marriage to chemical engineer Lorenzo Xavier Vega (Arnaz) is in trouble. He is neglecting her in favour of his work after five years of marriage. The Guardian Angel is the mirror image of Lucy’s favourite movie star (James Mason).

Also in the cast Natalie Schafer, Louis Calhern, John Hoyt, John Emery, Mabel Albertson, Nancy Kulp, Ralph Dumke, Willis Bouchey, and Leon Alton.

Marilyn Maxwell appears uncredited as herself in a fictional film with Mason.

Helen Deutsch wrote the unfilmed script as Guardian Angel in the 1940s for William Powell and Myrna Loy, and later Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn didn’t end up doing it either. MGM that suggested Ball and Arnaz do it in a deal with their Desilu Productions, after the success of their 1954 The Long, Long Trailer.

The title song, with lyrics by Sammy Cahn and music by Bronislau Kaper, was recorded by both Arnaz and the Ames Brothers.

It was shot between mid-June and 12 July 1955, while Ball and Arnaz were on a break from making I Love Lucy. It is mostly filmed at Desilu Studios in Culver City, California, with some location work in Yosemite National Park. Arnaz found the script weak and got I Love Lucy writers Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll Jr to make uncredited changes, adding the slapstick camping sequence in the last third of the film.

Perhaps wisely, Cary Grant priced himself out of the market as the guardian angel when his demanded salary was too high.

Ball and Arnaz promoted it with a cross-country train tour aboard a car provided by the Santa Fe Railroad.

It flopped resulting in a loss of $188,000, and Desilu did not produce another film until Yours, Mine, and Ours 11 years later.

Sweetly, the film opened at the Loew’s State Theatre, where back in 1941 the newlywed couple Ball and Arnaz had performed their first vaudeville act. Less sweetly, Radio City Music Hall, where The Long, Long Trailer had premiered, refused to have the film open there, judging it ‘sub-standard’.

Even less sweetly, it wasn’t Forever, Darling for Ball and Arnaz. The couple divorced in 1960.

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 11,402

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