Stylish but barely mediocre overall

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

This comedy is well paced and stars Lucille Ball two years before she started on her super-stardom career on TV; and William Holden shortly before making it big on the silver screen. Ellen Grant(Ball)is the absolute worst pupil at a school for secretarial skills. Her dim-witted actions makes her the perfect secretary for Dick Richmond(Holden), who is using a phony real estate business that merely fronts for a bookmaking operation. The ambitious new secretary puts a venture in motion to find cheap housing for local citizens. Richmond gets himself in a crunch and decides to use down payments on non-existent homes to pay off a large gambling debt. Incompetence can be very humorous. The supporting cast features: James Gleason, Frank McHugh, Janis Carter, George Cleveland and Gloria Henry.

Lucille Ball is a clumsy student who barely graduates from secretary school. William Holden and his two buddies, Gleason and McHugh, run a bookie joint and hire Ball as a front for the "Richmond Realty" office. Ball thinks it's a genuine realty firm and disarticulates Holden's arrangement by committing the office to a low-rent real estate project for returned veterans and their families.There are lots of opportunities for chuckles in this set up, involving conversational exchanges, situational absurdities, and slapstick. And if William Holden is no expert comedian, Lucille Ball ought to make up for it, and almost does. Gleason and McHugh, of course, are veterans of this sort of shtick.It doesn't work. The writers must have been in a melancholy mood. The funniest scene is at the beginning, when "I Love Lucy" is trying to take dictation and type a letter and the ribbon pops out and rolls across the floor and her fingers are all blotched with ink and smears appear on her face -- and when not looking horrified she's intermittently trying to smile reassuringly at the instructor who is goggling at her from his desk. It's downhill from there.I watched this years ago and didn't find it successful. So I watched it again tonight, wondering if the years had improved my ludic faculties. Nope.

This is a not so funny comedy that does at least provide a few laughs, mostly because it's a set-up for some shenanigans that are reminders of what would happen when LUCILLE BALL left films for television to become America's number one comedienne with I LOVE LUCY.There are more than a few hints of her deft handling of physical comedy and there's a nice chemistry between Lucy and her handsome boss, WILLIAM HOLDEN. Then too, there's the additional advantage of having JAMES GLEASON and FRANK McHUGH as supporting actors for a thin story about a daffy secretary who is slow in catching on to the fact that the real estate office she works for is really a front for bookies.MISS GRANT TAKES RICHMOND has all the appearance of a low-budget programmer and it's surprising to find WILLIAM HOLDEN still drifting around in this sort of weak material when he had so many golden opportunities just ahead of him. Still, he's not bad and shows a definite flair for handling light romantic comedy. But there's no doubt about it, this is a vehicle designed to promote the comic flair of his co-star, soon to become famous as a scatterbrained housewife.The thin script plays more like a half-hour TV comedy padded to the running time of a feature film. The funniest bits are the slapstick elements, particularly Lucy avoiding a building crane that seems intent on burying her in a pile of dirt and mud. But the stronger laughs are few and far between when the script is as painfully weak as this one.Strictly for Lucy's most ardent fans.

When Lucille Ball did I Love Lucy few at the time suspected she had the comic talents she possessed. Her history up to then in films was usually as a wisecracking second banana in major films and some leading roles in B films. And Miss Grant Takes Richmond is definitely a B film. Next year William Holden with Sunset Boulevard would step into the A list of players, but it wasn't his time yet. Holden proved to be a worthy foil for Lucy's comic antics.The film is definitely Lucy's however. CBS executives must have seen Miss Grant Takes Richmond and seen what Lucy could do before passing on I Love Lucy as a television series.There were some incidents that definitely could have come out of I Love Lucy. Her struggles with mastering the typewriter in secretarial school with Holden deftly catching a flying typewriter carriage, her dodging a steam shovel at a construction sight, her trying to use a jackhammer and the aftermath of that, all these could easily have been in any of her television series. Harbinger of things to come. Remember also that Bill Holden made a memorable appearance on I Love Lucy and got a pie in his face at the Brown Derby.Lucy is a klutzy scatterbrained student at a secretarial school run by Charles Lane and Holden comes in looking to hire. To everyone's amazement he hires Lucy. He runs a scam real estate operation that is a front for a bookie joint. Her job is to basically babysit and commiserate with those who actually come in and are looking to buy property and shine them on. She doesn't know she's working for bookies, Bill Holden, Frank McHugh, and James Gleason.Through her own wide-eyed Marie Wilson type view of the world before long she's got this trio actually building homes and trying to be bookies at the same time.To see the Lucy Ricardo of the future by all means catch Miss Grant Takes Richmond.If you don't, you'll have a lot of 'splaining to do.