Posted on 10/11/2010 7:54:08 PM PDT by FromLori
Hollywood, CA—I just finished watching another great Henry Hathaway, film noir classic, The Dark Corner (1946) starring Lucille Ball, Mark Stevens and Clifton Webb. Mark Steven’s plays a recently paroled private eye trying to rebuild his life and business. Ball plays the private dick’s new secretary. After the PI is targeted and endangered in a somewhat convoluted scheme, Ball’s clever character comes to his rescue at every opportunity. This film is available for instant play if you’ve got a Netflix account.
As a long time real life PI, I can’t imagine the luck of having a secretary like that in a million years. Together they overcome amazing odds and in case you’ve never seen the film I won’t spoil it be revealing the ending.
In The Dark Corner, Ball was a stunning 35 year-old looker that appeared much younger. Her grace, charm and acting were terrific. This is amazing in spite of the fact that Ball left, The John Murray Anderson School for the Dramatic Arts in New York City after only a few weeks. He acting coaches told Ball she had no talent!
As a child I grew up with a family TV show, I Love Lucy. It had its comic moments but it was more a comic soap opera of sorts in the lives of two couples, the Ricardo’s and the Mertz’s. Lucy was always up to mischief that usually backfired to the chagrin of her real life husband Desi.
Ball died in 1989 at age 77, when a recently repaired aorta ruptured. Aging and death is most unfair but the truth is we’re all in this together and none of us will get out alive.
What I really did not know was Ball’s age. She was already in her 40’s when she began her, I Love Lucy series. Her first husband Desi Arnez was seven years her junior.
This famous TV pioneer couple made entertainment history beginning with the three camera shoot of their series. With three cameras, scenes could be shot and edited together saving countless hours of setups and retakes.
Together they formed Desilou Productions and that led to many thousands of hours of programming that still seen and enjoyed today all over the world. Their 20 year marriage was volatile and finally ended after their second divorce filing in 1960. It’s always been said by their biographers that their love for each other never really waned, they just had difficulties mostly attributed to Desi that could not be overcome.
Not that long ago I had to do some business with Kelsey Grammar’s production company, Gramnet which was at the time located in the Lucille Ball Bungalow at Paramount Studios in Hollywood. I suspect the name Lucille Ball will be repeated hundreds of years after her death. She was indeed an artist.
When doing a little research for this story I learned that Ball actually joined the Communist Party and registered to vote that way in her earlier days. Ball’s politics were as red as her hair. The Communists always recruited members heavily in Hollywood because they knew that movie stars influence the masses. That still is the case today for sure.
The funny thing about Hollywood’s Communists, they all made huge fortunes through Capitalism. I will never be able to figure out that paradox.
He was a socialist.
Gene Roddenberry was a decorated bomber pilot during WW2 and wanted Star Trek to be ‘Wagon Train’ to the stars.
Well, if she was a commie, she was a funny commie.
Sure she could have just been distancing herself when her involvement came out. But then again, we all did stupid things when we were young without thinking. I think I would give her the benefit of the doubt as she never seemed particularly political to me.
It wasn’t just Hollywood it was most of the Arts back then.
was not jimmy stewart one too?
He sure looked like one.
Wrong too.
I saw twelve angry men in high school. How is was it anti American citizen? I forget.
Yes he was a cell leader.
then why the excuse to join the communists..lol
From what I have heard, she was registered as a communist by her father or grandfather but was never active in the party.
It wasn’t at all.
Are you insane? Jimmy Stewart was known as a diehard supporter of the Republican Part, and actively campaigned for Nixon and Reagan. He was was friends with Henry Fonda and Jack Lemmon, who were to the left of him politically, but they weren’t communists.
If I’m not mistaken, Stewart, a midwestern boy, was an outspoken Republican and a conservative.
Stewart was a Republican and a close friend of Sir Ronald..
“Oh like Star Trek does not spew leftist UN like sh*t including the prime directive and how no one in Star Trek ever seems to have money. They all work for the state.”
Not in the original series, which Desilu did. The folks on the Enterprise were military, but there were lots of traders and others trying to make a buck (”credits”).
Yeah, he sure looked like one.
I guess that's why he was such a great actor. :)
Imagine if there was a “viable” Nazi party in Hollywood. How long do you think that would last, yet we go all soft on real communists like Sean Penn, Danny Glover, Harry Belafonte, ad nauseum. Why did we not LEARN from history that these ideologies KILL people and leave them poor, starving, and without any artistic “freedom”?
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