Sat 22 Nov 2025
Archived Movie Review: TOO MANY GIRLS (1940).
Posted by Steve under Films: Comedy/Musicals , Reviews[5] Comments
TOO MANY GIRLS. RKO Pictures, 1940. Lucille Ball, Richard Carlson, Ann Miller, Eddie Bracken, Frances Langford, Desi Arnaz. Director: George Abbott.
When four football players are hired as bodyguards for a wealthy man’s strong-willed daughter,they all go off to Pottawatomie College, where she meets a secret lover. As the semester goes on, however, she finds herself falling for someone else.
One of the bodyguards, that is, and it isn’t Desi. Lucille Ball was a delectable long-legged damsel in her early days, and even if she doesn’t do her own singing here. she is still quite an eyeful. She is also the only reason anyone should watch this sappy movie.
— Reprinted from Movie.File.2, April 1988.
November 23rd, 2025 at 1:35 am
Why did I go to a boring college? I should have gone to Pottawatomie. (But if I had, I probably would have flunked out because I can neither sing nor dance.)
November 23rd, 2025 at 1:48 pm
The movie’s pure fantasy,Jerry, an onscreen facsimile of what screenwriters thought college was like in 1940, a place where rich kids went to play and have fun for four years. I don’t know exactly when that image ended, but when I went to the University of Michigan in 1963, the guys were still doing panty raids on the girls’ dorms, acting out their own delusions for what may have been the very last time.
November 25th, 2025 at 10:39 pm
Van Johnson appears in this one in a bit part, Lucy helped him launch his career.
November 26th, 2025 at 1:03 am
And so he did! Very neat, indeed.
November 26th, 2025 at 3:17 am
To go along with David’s comment about Van, Desilu also offered him The Untouchables, but Van, or his wife, turned it down, and so Robert Stack became Eliot Ness.