Aaron Sorkin’s new film, available on Amazon Prime Video, tells of the first sitcom and a particular moment in US history
Few know today what it was for American TV and not just «Lucy and I», in the original “I love Lucy,” the first sit com, and what kind of family-size diva was Lucille Ball (1911-1989), the protagonist of this marital bickering that lasted 7 years serializing domestic life, from ’52 to ’57, gluing tens of millions of viewers, even 60 in the evening, so much so that on Friday, the day of the broadcast, the use of water and electricity decreased significantly. The show had no luck with us, also because it distorted the original, and the National Program broadcast only 13 episodes from February 6, 1960.
All this to recommend you ora su Amazon Prime Video «Being the Ricardos», “About the Ricardos” (the surname of the protagonist couple), a beautiful movies on Aaron Sorkin that collects a particular moment of this sitcom, the first to be filmed with three live cameras with 200 spectators, like in a theater. Sorkin, is one of those director-screenwriters who do not discount America, as viewers know who applauded “The social network” (Oscar for the screenplay), the political series “West wing” and “The trial of Chicago 7 “,” The President “and” The War of Charlie Wilson “, in short, clearly a filmmaker who looks the stars and stripes in the face, not always simple, as shown by this story in the form of a comedy but which also examines the social and ethical conditions in which TV was made in the era of McCarthyism, when it was not possible to show double beds and only the fact of being able to present Lucy in pregnancy was an unparalleled scandal that only the highly regarded opinion of the sponsors was able to pass to the fearful TV magnates of the Hays code which forbade any real reference to love life.
The film, which was originally meant to be performed by Cate Blanchett and found one instead Nicole Kidman as good as ever in a role in character and physically opposite to her, she is a TV history manual and a perfect fit between TV and cinema and between fictional characters and real actors, on and off the set: the typical redhead American matron Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, her musician and narcissist husband who came in exile from Cuba were really married since 1940 and divorced in the 1960s at the end of the series which could be compared for us to the stories of Sandra and Raimondo. Ball and Arnaz also made a film by Minnelli, “12 meters of love” (a middle-class couple struggling with life in a caravan) together, in the wake of TV success, and each has had a personal career, especially she who he had some chances but he had to fight against high-ranking colleagues like Rita Hayworth, Joan Crawford and Judy Holliday against whom he often and willingly lashes out.
If Kidman, even physically, she is just the opposite of the “pretty” Ball, an icon of the average viewer on the model of Doris Day, but she is so good that she manages to resemble her, for her paranormal faculties as an actress, Javier Bardem, as a good Spaniard, he is quite close to Arnàz’s original model and therefore this couple also works but the Latin seducer, very macho, will not be able to get away with his extra-marital adventures: art, it is known, imitates the life and vice versa. The tangle of the film, which goes continuously in and out of fiction a bit like the Mankiewicz, is that in ’52 there was a week of fire, the most burdensome in the history of TV, because Miss Ball was accused by the American tabloid newspapers. to be a communist, all because of a grandfather of socialist ideas. We will see how she will defeat the media ready to lynch, even making Hoover the head of the CIA intervene, while the scenes are discussed, arguing as in any self-respecting set, especially for that fake but true pregnancy that in the end gave birth to a really nice child who is now one of the producers of the film.
Going back and forth in time a little, with the digital tricks that Scorsese used in «The Irishman», the film touches different keys and always with the necessary malice to put us in doubt, on TV and media communication in a critical Chinese box game on the system. And we talk about the power of CBS to dictate the law on a family comedy that then gave way to dozens and dozens of imitations, also influencing the film production of the small bourgeois environment. Alongside the department store-format divine diva, there are many character actors, including Oscar-winning OK Simmons.
January 26, 2022 (change January 26, 2022 | 11:44)
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