Critic's Choice

For me, watching this movie was a lot like walking in on my parents.

But let me backtrack first. The reason why I watch Bob Hope and Lucille Ball movies are for cute, nonmovies to fall asleep to. I don't want to have to think too hard about what's going on, just look at the screen and be fall asleep under the watch of two familiar faces dressed up in top 50's hokum.

Critic's Choice started off this way.Cute 50's kids with cute, slick backed hair. Guys in suits and dolls in dresses. There was nothing to alert me to the dangers ahead other than that it was shot in brilliant color and edited in stubbornly modern cuts, pans, and dissolves. Nothing so extreme as to prepare me to hear about Bob's inability to knock Lucille up. Hmm...I wasn't sleeping so much after that.

There were more...instances, like their casual kissing and talk of pregnancy. I've become so used to shows tiptoeing around censorable subjects that to have two icons from that era talk openly about it is surreal. Before they were two prepubescents in adult bodies, but in this movie they are adults dealing with adult subjects. Not so good for fluff.

I've heard that this movie is based off of a Broadway play by the same name, and that this is the weaker of the two. While there were some major flaws with some extended slapstick scenes (Bob Hope's drunken romp) and cliches (the unfortunate characterization of Lucille's boyfriend), there was a lot to love, and I'm not so sure it was because of what the movie was.

This was the early 60's. We're used to defining decades by certain events and clothes as if all of everything and all of everyone could be described so simply. It's easy to forget that time isn't rigid but that the years flow into one another. There has never been a new year where upon striking 12, the population's clothes have changed to the newest fad, hair grows out or cuts short, and Paris Hilton comes out with the latest way to describe attraction. Time is fluid. In this movie, I saw the last of the 50's as seen by the 60's.

And all of what had come before from Ball and Hope became clear to me how little it revealed about them as people. I had never been able to see them as adults, but this movie allowed me to. That small realization brought me that much closer into understanding them as people. I realized how little I would truly know. How little we know so much of our beloved stars. We like to think of them as their persona, representing a need we lack in our own lives, and with these older movies, so free of sex, drugs, curses our stars become free of them. They're not human like the rest of us. The days they lived in become mystical and we only have our stars to show us how it truly was. But they can't, so they don't, and those times become very representations. "It was innocent back then" because it's not now.

I wonder if anything has really changed.