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Sometimes marriage is bliss, and sometimes it's like pulling "forty feet of train." Nomadic suburbia has its covered wagons, the metallic behemoth of the title makes or breaks you, the newlyweds (Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz) find out. The test is a haul to Colorado, "that's gonna be half the fun!" Head-smacking door, sunken living room, snaky shower head, a yellow and chrome monstrosity bearing down on the poor dope sweating at the wheel. It clogs up the highway, crushes the bourgeois rose garden, hurls the missus into a pool of mud. "We're gonna need a trailer for the trailer." Buster Keaton via Vincente Minnelli, more of a companion piece to Father of the Bride than Father's Little Dividend. The trip is blessed by the ostentatious mock-accommodation of Keenan Wynn's passive-aggressive traffic cop, the honeymoon is interrupted by a tribal invasion led by Marjorie Main's pushy "trailerite" matriarch. "How do you do, Mrs. Vagabond?" Parking the trailer at an angle provides a diagonal screen surely admired by Tati, the heroine attempts to whip up a salad in the moving vehicle and gets bounced from side to side like a rag doll covered in flour. All build-up for the remarkable spectacle of the destruction of the driveway of the class the wife ardently wants to belong to, a great sadistic comedy for the Eisenhower era's rampant materialistic accumulation. Minnelli cannily absorbs his sitcom stars into a pure mise en scène of domestic panic, the placid travelogue leads to a harrowing parody of The Wages of Fear on the edge of the precipice. "I'm telling you, it's a fine thing when you come home to your home, and your home is gone." Brooks in Lost in America receives it gratefully. With Gladys Hurlbut, Moroni Olsen, Bert Freed, Madge Blake, and Walter Baldwin.
--- Fernando F. Croce |