DVD of the Week: The Long, Long Trailer

For the DVD of the Week for the issue of September 12th, commemorating the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I chose (in conjunction with the magazine’s Web editor, Blake Eskin, and this feature’s producer, Monica Racic) Vincente Minnelli’s 1953 comedy, “The Long, Long Trailer,” starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, which I discuss in the clip above. America’s beloved TV couple was also a multicultural couple, an apt pair to reflect the city’s diversity to the world. The comic adventure that Minnelli puts them through poses some questions that, perhaps now even more than at the time of the film’s production, are crucial to American life—the conflicts of personal freedom with the desire for community, the simultaneously liberating and constraining power of technology—as well, of course, as the redemptive values of comedy, beauty, and love. Minnelli, as I mentioned here before, is a paradoxical filmmaker: by means of his splashy and sumptuous images, he delivers a surprisingly probing fascination with institutions and processes. Here he turns his attention to a primordial version of the institution: the implantation of new social order in the untamed frontier. Putting his intrepid middle-class adventurers on the road, Minnelli makes a modern-day Western that, anticipating John Ford’s 1962 masterwork, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” suggests the wildness-at-heart of the young men and women who took Horace Greeley’s advice and, turning their backs on genteel society, went West. It’s a wildness that anyone who ever saw an episode of “I Love Lucy” would have recognized at once.