DVD Review: The Lucille Ball Film Collection

Includes five films, none of which are Ball’s best--missing is “Stage Door” and “Without Love,” and especially “Room Service” with the Marx brothers.

Still, we do get a mix of those movies that helped to make Ball a screen star--“Dance, Girl, Dance,” in which Ball leaves ballet for burlesque (and goes on to stardom as Bubbles), and “The Big Street,” which is about as far removed as one can get from the Lucy audiences know from “I Love Lucy.” Here, she’s a bitter ex-chanteuse in a wheelchair, with Henry Fonda starring opposite her.

The collection also includes the slight "Du Barry Was a Lady," with Red Skelton and Gene Kelly, and the 1963 comedy "Critic's Choice," with Bob Hope.

Perhaps (cough!) most interesting is Ball as Auntie Mame in "Mame,” in which she sings (sort of), dances (she tries), and goes for the jugular with cutting asides (she succeeds). Ball has nothing on Rosalind Russell’s Mame, but with a bulldozing Bea Arthur at her side, the proceedings are just atrocious enough to be nicely unhinged.

Grade: B-

Below is a clip of "Mame." Try to spot the tranny.