Miss Grant Takes Richmond (1949)

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

This comedy is well paced and stars Lucille Ball two years before she started on her super-stardom career on TV; and William Holden shortly before making it big on the silver screen. Ellen Grant(Ball)is the absolute worst pupil at a school for secretarial skills. Her dim-witted actions makes her the perfect secretary for Dick Richmond(Holden), who is using a phony real estate business that merely fronts for a bookmaking operation. The ambitious new secretary puts a venture in motion to find cheap housing for local citizens. Richmond gets himself in a crunch and decides to use down payments on non-existent homes to pay off a large gambling debt. Incompetence can be very humorous. The supporting cast features: James Gleason, Frank McHugh, Janis Carter, George Cleveland and Gloria Henry.

This is the only big-screen movie I have seen in which the Lucille Ball of "I Love Lucy" was clearly apparent. The movie was released only a few years before the TV series started. The TV series: Of course I love it. The movie: It's nicely done but warmed-over from numerous earlier films.Ball is hired by bookie William Holden from a secretarial school. What's odd about that? Only this: She is far and away, and very obviously, the worst student there. She makes a mess of typing, gets tangled in the typewriter ribbon, etc., Just like Lucy. A little like Charlie Chaplin.And she uses that high, bleating voice we came to know and love in her television show. She'd made comedies before this but she was always kind of tough, the way she came across in most of her more serious outings too.This has a fine supporting cast. Seeing James Gleason is always a pleasure. Ditto Frank McHugh, looking a little prosperous here but playing his usual sort of role. And Janis Carter is hilariously mean as Holden's onetime romantic interest.Holden holds up his part of the movie but seems distracted. He was fine in "Golden Boy" but didn't come into his own until "Sunset Boulevard," also a few years later.There's absolutely nothing wrong with "Miss Grant Takes Richmond." Maybe it's good, too, that if one dozes off for a bit, one will be right there and know exactly what's going on. It's familiar stuff, nicely handled.

A small comedy with a nicely paced story about a bookie played by William Holden who tries to hide his operation behind the front of a real estate office that he opens in a medium sized town. He hires a secretary played by Lucille Ball who can't even type. To his consternation, she attracts interested first-time home buyers, WW2 vets and their wives and children. It almost has, at times, the feeling of George Bailey in Capra's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, building homes for the emerging middle class. Taking us out to the construction site, Lucy is nearly crushed under tons of earth in a rather incredible scene, while Holden and his associates (who are given many funny lines) are reluctantly led by the positive goodness of the buyers into being pioneers in real estate development and early suburban sprawl.

When Lucille Ball did I Love Lucy few at the time suspected she had the comic talents she possessed. Her history up to then in films was usually as a wisecracking second banana in major films and some leading roles in B films. And Miss Grant Takes Richmond is definitely a B film. Next year William Holden with Sunset Boulevard would step into the A list of players, but it wasn't his time yet. Holden proved to be a worthy foil for Lucy's comic antics.The film is definitely Lucy's however. CBS executives must have seen Miss Grant Takes Richmond and seen what Lucy could do before passing on I Love Lucy as a television series.There were some incidents that definitely could have come out of I Love Lucy. Her struggles with mastering the typewriter in secretarial school with Holden deftly catching a flying typewriter carriage, her dodging a steam shovel at a construction sight, her trying to use a jackhammer and the aftermath of that, all these could easily have been in any of her television series. Harbinger of things to come. Remember also that Bill Holden made a memorable appearance on I Love Lucy and got a pie in his face at the Brown Derby.Lucy is a klutzy scatterbrained student at a secretarial school run by Charles Lane and Holden comes in looking to hire. To everyone's amazement he hires Lucy. He runs a scam real estate operation that is a front for a bookie joint. Her job is to basically babysit and commiserate with those who actually come in and are looking to buy property and shine them on. She doesn't know she's working for bookies, Bill Holden, Frank McHugh, and James Gleason.Through her own wide-eyed Marie Wilson type view of the world before long she's got this trio actually building homes and trying to be bookies at the same time.To see the Lucy Ricardo of the future by all means catch Miss Grant Takes Richmond.If you don't, you'll have a lot of 'splaining to do.