Lucille Ball Film Collection (Dance Girl Dance, The Big Street, Du Barry Was a Lady, Critic's Choice, Mame)Show More + (1940)

"[Critic's] ...stars in some early roles...Soupy Sales plays a desk clerk...Rip Torn has a secondary role that is quite amusing.  A FileThirteen Review
"[Du Barry] ...Del Ruth's direction has a sloppy, burlesque vitality...good, garish fun.  Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
"[Big] ...a richly devised work...sympathetic when it counts--and the well-paced narrative make the film difficult to resist.  Doug Pratt, DVDLaser.com
"[Mame] ...the music's still great.  Nell Minow, Movie Mom
"[Dance] ...Ball steals the show with her outlandish personality and entertaining strip tease dances.  Reel Classics

Editor's Note Lucille Ball stars in the five films compiled for this collection. The titles included are: THE BIG STREET, CRITICS CHOICE, DANCE GIRL DANCE, DUBARRY WAS A LADY, and MAME.

	Agnes Moorehead
	Barton MacLane
	Beatrice Arthur
	Bob Hope
	Bruce Davison
	Gene Kelly
	Henry Fonda
	Louis Hayward
	Lucille Ball
	Marilyn Maxwell
	Maureen O'Hara
	Ralph Bellamy
	Red Skelton
	Rip Torn
	Robert Preston
	Virginia O'Brien
	Don Weis - [Critic's] Director
	Dorothy Arzner - [Dance] Director
	Gene Saks - [Mame] Director
	Irving Reis - [Big] Director
	Roy Del Ruth - [Du Barry] Director

Variety 8 of 10
[Big] Taken from a Collier mag story [Little Pinks] by Damon Runyon, this is a Cinderella-like fable of a Broadway cafe-singing golddigger who becomes more human long after a fall cripples her for life. Scripter Leonard Spigelgass makes the transition from the grasping, selfish little beauty to a bitter disillusioned girl entirely life-like albeit a prolonged affair. He's done a neat job of transferring the spirit of the piece to the screen, studding it with typical Runyon humor...Lucille Ball, cast at first in an unsympathetic role, comes through with high laurels. Henry Fonda, as the mooning but intensely loyal Little Pinks, is at his best. Eugene Pallette is well teamed with Agnes Moorehead, the food-loving but realistic Violette whom he weds.

CinePassion.org 9 of 10
[Dance] Dorothy Arzner's best-known work, re-released as an early feminist manifesto to the "right ons!" of '70s sisterhood, survives today as one of the more interesting explorations of the elusive "gaze" famously pinned down by Laura Mulvey...O'Hara's purity carries a hint of prissy intransigence just as Ball's brazen gold-digging is infused with offhand generosity, and both are reconciled under the expressive mantle of dancing (with artsy ballet and Gypsy Lee Rose vamping equally valid manifestations of femininity). Dance also serves as metaphor for codification of womanhood for male contemplation, as well as a substitute for cinema and its built-in voyeurism. Without rising out of the cinematically conventional, the movie's self-reflexivity continually questions the gaze of the camera...Of course, the concept of the "maleness" of the gaze is further complicated by Arzner's own queerness, so that the eroticization of bodies becomes less hardened, more richly ambiguous. - Fernando F. Croce