The Long, Long Trailer (MGM, 1954)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, September 20) I watched a couple of films on Turner Classic Movies, including one quite famous one I’d never seen before. It was The Long, Long Trailer, made by director Vincente Minnelli (who turns in a quite respectable job even though his presence here virtually defines “overqualified”) at MGM from a script by husband-and-wife team Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich based on a novel by Clayton Twiss, a writer of whom I’ve otherwise never heard. This was a vehicle for Lucille Ball and her real-life husband, Desi Arnaz, at a time when they were the biggest stars on television through their pioneering sitcom I Love Lucy. Lucy and Desi shot it in 1954 during their summer hiatus from the second to the third season of I Love Lucy, and according to Todd S. Purdum, who just published a book called Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television (not literally true, of course, but Arnaz was the first producer who shot a scripted TV show in the three-camera format – Ralph Edwards had done it before with his game show Truth or Consequences – and the first to do a scripted show on film, so it could be re-run and I Love Lucy is still entertaining audience members who weren’t yet alive when Lucy and Desi died), there was some trepidation among MGM’s executives about green-lighting the film. The thinking was, “Why would audiences pay to see Lucy and Desi on screen when they can see them every week on TV for free?” Ironically, one Hollywood producer who knew better was David O. Selznick, who in the mid-1930’s as an MGM executive had been involved in films featuring major radio stars like Ed Wynn and Jack Pearl. In 1954 Selznick wrote one of his famous memos, saying that a feature-film version of I Love Lucy would be a potential hit as long as it had a different plot from the ones that had already been filmed for TV. But by then he had fallen from his former heights and no longer had the clout to set up a project.

MGM didn’t exactly cast Lucy and Desi in a feature-film version of I Love Lucy, but they came as close as they could. They’re called “Taci” and “Nicky” instead of “Lucy” and “Ricky,” and instead of a small-time bandleader in a seedy Florida nightclub “Nicky” (full name: “Nicholas Carlos Collini,” which suggests writers Hackett and Goodrich intended to explain Desi’s ineradicable Cuban accent by passing him off as Italian) is a globe-trotting engineer. Also Taci and Nicky are merely engaged to each other at the beginning of the film, though their wedding is an important plot point. The Long, Long Trailer actually begins in a torrential rainstorm as Desi – oops, I mean “Nicky” – returns to the relative safety and comfort of the office of a trailer park while the trailer he and Taci bought at the start of the film is parked outside with a “For Sale” sign. Nicky recounts the events that led them there and the film becomes an extended flashback starting two months earlier. Nicky and Taci were planning their wedding and debating where they were going to live as soon as they tied the knot. Taci has seen a brochure for a trailer company and hits on the idea that they should buy a trailer so they can move it wherever Nicky is working at the moment and still have a home they can call their own. They can also save the money they’d otherwise spend on rent, hotel rooms, and dinners “out.” (Given how astronomical housing prices have become since 1954, to the point where a lot of young couples today have resigned themselves to being lifelong renters, this part of The Long, Long Trailer rings surprisingly true today.) Nicky and Taci go to a trailer sales convention and see the model they originally saw in an advertising brochure, the “Bungalette,” but Nicky decides it’s way too “-ette” for their purposes. Then they spy a huge model across the hall made by a company called New Moon, and Taci instantly falls in love with it. (My husband Charles came home about two-thirds of the way through the movie and told me his mother used to work for that company. They were not only not paying for a product placement, they understandably disliked the way their trailer was portrayed in the movie.)

The bills mount up as Nicky and Taci find they also have to buy a new car because their current one isn’t powerful enough to pull the trailer, and they have to spend even more money on having a trailer hitch welded to the new car. Nicky also needs a crash course in how to drive a car with a trailer attached, and the person teaching him warns him to think of it as a 50-foot train bearing down on him at all times. He also says that to pull a trailer you have to remember to use the trailer’s separate brakes before the car’s brakes in case you have to slow down or stop. Having to so radically re-educate himself on something he’s been doing – driving without the encumbrance of a trailer – naturally drives him nuts. Once they pull out onto the open road from California to Nicky’s next job site in Colorado, they cause a traffic jam as tens of cars get stuck behind them because they have to slow down to handle the weight of the trailer. On their first night in a trailer park, where at least they can connect to electricity and running water, they also get intimidated by the Big Brother-ish announcements that constantly crackle through the park’s P. A. system. (Marjorie Main, as a woman who welcomes Nicky and Taci to the great community of trailer dwellers, has a great role in this scene; a pity Hackett and Goodrich couldn’t have figured out a way to make her role run through the entire movie!) Taci gets so pissed off at the incessant announcements that she has the idea that they spend the next night literally on the open road, and there’s a great sequence in which Nicky tries to maneuver the car-and-trailer over a rather bumpy country road in, you guessed it, a torrential rainstorm. Eventually car and trailer stall out with the trailer listing to one side, and Taci tries to cook a meal (they have a gas stove and propane tanks to fuel it) but the eggs she tries to fry literally slide off the pan and end up in her lap or on the floor.

Their next stop is at the ancestral home of Taci’s family, where her Aunt Anastacia (Madge Blake) and Taci’s homely niece “Poor Grace” (Connie Van) end up in arms against Nicky and Taci because Nicki, trying to park the trailer at the entrance to the family’s garage, has wiped out Anastacia’s precious prize-winning rose bush and much of the rest of her garden as well. Nicky has even taken the back end of the trailer and smashed it into her gazebo, turning it into kindling. Taci makes another attempt to cook inside the trailer while it’s actually moving – and another predictable fiasco that leaves most of the food Taci was trying to prepare on the floor (she even smashes Nicky in the face with some sort of bread dough as he comes in to check out what’s going on). The climax occurs on an ultra-narrow highway leading to their final redoubt in Colorado. Nicky demands that in order to make it up the 8,000-foot elevation, the collection of boulders Taci has picked up along the way – all carefully labeled with tags on where she got them – and also the cases of home-canned raspberry preserves Taci bought along the way must be thrown away before he’ll attempt the trip. Taci ostensibly goes along with her husband’s common-sense edict but secretly hides both the rocks and the preserves. They face the predictable hazards going up the narrow mountain road, including a car coming in the other direction. When they’re at the summit Nicky pulls rank on Taci and they throw out all the boulders and preserve jars that were weighing them down on the way up. Then the film cuts to the opening framing scene, in which Nicky says he doesn’t know how they got back down off the mountain (no doubt Vincente Minnelli, Albert Hackett, and Frances Goodrich didn’t want to figure that one out either!) and Taci, who’s the legal owner of the trailer since Nicki deeded it to her earlier as an act of love, is finally willing to sell it. Only the sympathetic trailer-park manager, who along with his wife is interested in buying the trailer himself, tells Nicky that he can patch things up with his wife with just two magic words – “I’m sorry.” The film ends with Nicky and Taci apologizing to each other and repairing to the trailer, with the philosophical manager lamenting the fact that by giving Nicky that good advice he’s done himself out of the trailer he wanted.

The Long, Long Trailer was shot in the Anscocolor process, and there are scenes in the movie in which we miss the vibrancy of Technicolor (notably in the outdoor scenes shot at Yosemite; the National Park Service gets an acknowledgement in the closing credits), but on the whole it’s a charming and entertaining movie even though it does seem surprising that Desi gets more and funnier slapstick gags than Lucy does. It’s a testament to how well they worked together as a comedy team even though it does at times seem like a batch of I Love Lucy episodes spliced together to the length of a feature film. “The simple truth is that neither Lucy nor Desi ever achieved anything alone that approached the artistic achievement they enjoyed together,” Purdum wrote in his book. “Their collaboration was lightning in a bottle, a once-in-a-lifetime combination that could never be recaptured but has been preserved forever, thanks to Desi’s insistence on putting I Love Lucy on high-quality film.”