a failed
paradise
by Douglas MesserliThe Long, Long Trailer / 1954
For several weeks now I have been trying
to get a moment to review a film from my childhood, beloved by my family (one
of the very few we attended as a family) at the time. My mother, in particular,
was a big fan of Lucille Ball, and The
Long, Long Trailer was ostensibly another occasion to see the couple
together in the comedic high-jinks style of the television favorite. Playing
Tacy Bolton, Ball is about to marry Nicky Collini (Desi Arnez), a relationship
that will surely be fraught with all the zaniness that the TV’s Lucy imposes
every week upon her husband, Ricky. Everyone in the audience of the day knew
the formula: Tacy would involve Nicky in an adventure that would cost money
they could ill afford, leading to a series of comically terrifying events in
which Tacy could play out her manic physically comedic shticks.
In this version of their “on the road” adventures (which they performed
in their various trips throughout Europe in their television show), Lucy
convinces a very dubious Nicky that they should buy a trailer—not a little
“junior” trailer which she first proposes, but a long, long trailer, the New
Moon, representative of both the sleek modernity of the period but also of the
early 1950s increasing mobility. Since Nicky works as a civil engineer in this
go-round, wouldn’t it be perfect if she could follow him, from job to job,
serving him up great meals in their own moving palace, a place he might return
to each night wherever his itinerant life might lead them?
Since most of the Post-World-War II culture was on the move, I am sure
to the writers Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich (basing their script on a
novel by Clinton Twiss), thought it was the perfect metaphor for the era in which
American families were stretching their legs in what suddenly seemed like a
large country. During the same period my own family traveled on summer
vacations to St. Louis, South Dakota’s Black Hills, and eventually all the way
to California. Each year I would joyfully send away to nearly every state’s
tourism board for informational pamphlets, and would help plan for our trips.
But someone forgot to tell the writers, director Vincente Minnelli, and
his cast that this was meant to be a comedy. Although from time-to-time Lucille
Ball tries to steer it back into range of her forte, she does it with such pouting grimaces that we hardly
recognize the zany friend of Fred and Ethel.
The film begins in a kind of panic wherein Nicky is seen rushing through
the mountains through a downpour of rain in search of his missing “house.” When
he finally discovers it in a small trailer park, he pours out his heart to a
potential buyer (the man is intending to buy Tacy’s trailer), deploring a world
where “when you come home to your home and your house is gone,” and damning a
world in which, like a turtle, you carry your house upon your back. The couple
whose life the story is about to recount has clearly broken up, and the rest
of the movie suffers for our knowledge of the seemingly unfortunate results.
While the TV Lucy is presented as a kind of innocent maniac, Tacy is
represented as the ultimate consumer, a woman determined not only to purchase
the largest of all trailers, but a new car which can pull it along with hooks,
buckles, pulleys, ropes, and everything else needed to carry the beast with her
and her husband. She fills it up, moreover, with every pot, pan, dish blanket,
towel, and article of clothing that she can get her hands on; poor Nicky cannot
even find room for a few articles of clothing and his golf bags. But the
consumerism is not just about commercialism but includes nature itself, as she
grabs up large rocks throughout their voyage, representing the places they have
been, as if her own mind cannot retain them. Preserves, piccalillis, and other
potted foods join in her already overflowing larder—this despite the fact that
she hardly ever has the opportunity to cook a full meal during their disastrous
voyage.
All of this is made even worse by the fact that this film represents
this couple’s world in the most claustrophobic of spaces. Even upon their first
visit to the trailer show, both are impossibly surrounded by others in the
small spaces in which they are expected to live. Soon after, at the wedding,
Nicky cannot even find a way to reach his new wife through the masses of
celebrants. I have already mentioned the scene where Tacy imports into the
trailer nearly every object she has received as wedding presents, along with a
whole retinue of giggling women friends. Upon their wedding night they are
overtaken by an army of trailerites, led by the well-meaning but over-bearing
Marjorie Main, who, convinced that Tacy has passed out (as she observes Nicky
trying to simply carry his new bride over the doorway), spikes her drinks with
a sleeping pill.
Indeed, it appears throughout the film that this newly-married couple
hardly ever has a moment to sexually consummate their union. The second night
the exhausted Nicky falls to sleep, while Tacy cannot even lay down in her
slanted (the trailer is trapped in mud) separate bed. Surely they cannot have
slept comfortably in Tacy’s angry aunt’s home, particularly after they and the
trailer has destroyed most of the woman’s gardens and sawed off a whole
driveway wing of the beautiful house. As they plan the drive up to 8,000 feet,
Nicky announces he will be away all night at the local garage as they work on
the auto in preparation for the trek.
Finally, the very stereotypes of American sensibilities make this film
unpalatable. One might almost have thought that the usually suave Minnelli, who
so lovingly created the American family of Meet
Me In St. Louis, had transmogrified into Frank Capra in his presentation of
the Americans Tacy and Nicky encounter during their trip. Does each car
following the long trailer in an early scene have to be filled with hooting and
shouting hillbillies? Do all the wedding guests have to be ridiculously insensitive
dunces? Do the “trailerites” have to remind us more of a league of corny
sloganeers than legitimate travelers? Is it truly necessary to have Tacy’s
family represented as a grotesque mixture of Gothic types (posing almost as if
Grant Wood were painting the Addams family), including a truly batty sister?
This is an ugly America which, even if Tacy is loud and silly and Nicky
insensitive and selfish, seem somehow completely unrelated to their attempts to
achieve a normal relationship
As she does over and over in the TV series, Tacy/Lucy lies, seriously
endangering her and her husband’ lives; she has simply been unable to abandon her
consumerist sensibilities enough to get
rid of the numerous rocks she has hoarded. And, so it seems, as we have already
glimpsed in the first scene of this now fairly bleak presentation of the
American 1950s, their relationship is, quite literally, on the rocks. Is it any
wonder, given the consumerist, claustrophobic, unconsummated, and caricatured
world of this movie? In the end, the characters can only bleat out what should
have been expressed by the writers and directors: “I’m sorry,” as the put-upon
couple reenter their failed paradise, the door, caught in the wind of the
storm, seemingly the only celebrant of what might finally happen within.
Los
Angeles, June 9, 2013
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