Too Many Girls (RKO, `1940)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

As Annie Live! lumbered to its closing tableau I switched channels and watched another adaptation of a hit stage musical, RKO’s 1940 film Too Many Girls. It’s a rather silly piece about a super-rich tycoon, Harvey Casey (Harry “Dr, Zarkov” Shannon), whose scapegrace daughter Consuelo, nicknamed “Connie” (Lucille Ball) ,is on her way back to the U.S. after having been deported from Switzerland for crashing her speedboat into a pontoon right when the Swiss president was standing on the pontoon delivering a lecture on water safety. To see that she doesn’t get into any more trouble, Casey orders his daughter to attend college, offering her the pick of any of the all-women schools on the East Coast. Instead she insists on going to Pottawatomie College, a co-ed institution in New Mexico (so this is essentially Girl Crazy with a scapegrace daughter instead of a scapegrace son) whose football team hasn’t scored a touchdown since 1918. Had writers George Marion, Jr. and John Twist, or director George Abbott (who had also helmed Too Many Girls on stage and was notorious for insisting that the screen actors use the same blocking and “business” as their stage counterparts), seen the Marx Brothers’ Horse Feathers, also about a no-account college in disgrace because of its no-account football team? Casey hires the three greatest college football players in the country – Clint Kelly (Richard Carlson), Jojo Jordan (Eddie Bracken), and Al Terwilliger (Hal LeRoy, a spectacular song-and-dance man who was for some reason moistly relegated to shorts to attend Pottawatomie and serve as Co nnie’s bodyguards – along with a fourth man, a Spanish bodyguard named Manuelito (Desi Arnaz).

From that description you can pretty well guess it yourself: the three bodyguards join Pottawatomie’s football team and build the school into a national football powerhouse, only despite the no-romance clause in their contracts and the sorority beanies most of the Pottawatomie girls wear that are supposed to signal their unavailability for any sort of physical affection towards the opposite sex (George Orwell’s Junior Anti-Sex League over four decades early!), Connie and Clint fall in love with each other. At least this pulls her away from her muych older boyfriend, British playwright Beverly Waverly (Douglas Walton, prissy as usual), but it also leaves the student athletes concerned that Clint will be so besotted by love he’ll blow Pottawatomie’s chances in the Big Game against Tennessee. In the end, of course, Clint pulls it together, Pottawatomie wins the big game, Clint and Connie pair off and Manuelito sends us off with a spectacular cohga number that was the highlight of the stage version as well and actually started a fad for conga dancing. The songs are by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, and include one timeless ballad,”I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” (far better performed by Helen Forrest with Artie Shaw’s band in 1939 – and done even better by Carmen McRae on her 1962 live album from the Sugar Hill club in San Francisco – than the perfunctory treatment it gets here); another good love song, “You’re Nearer” (nicely sung by Trudy Erwin, Lucille Ball’s voice double – Lucy never did her own singing in a musical film until her ill-advised decision to do Mame in 1974) and some typically rah-rah college anthems. Whatever reputation Too Many Girls has today stems almost exclusively from it being the project that brought Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz together – he’d been in the stage version while she was an RKO contract player assigned to the film – and though the script pairs her with the dull Richard Carlson it’s no surprise that the electrifying Desi Arnaz was the cast member she fell for in real life – especially since the moment Lucy makes her entrance here, getting out of the car driving her on the last stage of her journey home, Desi sees her and faints at the sheer sight of her superlative beauty ...