Michael O'Keefe 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.

MartinHafer Lucille Ball made this film couple years before starring in "I Love Lucy" and in many ways she plays a character with a lot in common with her Lucy Ricardo--clumsy, ditsy and yet quite eager."Miss Grant Takes Richmond" begins with Lucy in a secretarial school. She is utterly hopeless and stands almost no chance of graduating. However, oddly, a guy (William Holden) comes to the school looking for a secretary and picks, of all people, Lucy. You find out later that he's actually running a bookmaking business and wants a really stupid person to pose as a secretary--and just sit there and ask no questions. However, he doesn't anticipate that while Lucy's character isn't very bright, she is full of enthusiasm and drive. So, instead of just sitting around doing nothing, she decides to 'help' Holden with his business (he's posing as a real estate broker). Without his knowledge, she begins making business deals and suddenly Holden and his friends find out they actually have an honest to goodness land development--and new owners! What are they to do? They can't just fire her and abandon the deal, as she has a very well-connected family--including a local judge! What are they to do? Aside from one rather bad slapstick scene where Holden things Lucy was buried alive, the film actually is pretty clever and fun. While the film isn't all that deep, it is enjoyable and a nice vehicle for Lcuy.

jotix100 Who in his right mind would give a secretarial job to Ellen Grant, a woman who doesn't seem to have mastered either typing or shorthand? Leave it to Dick Richmond, a man that wants to use Ellen as a distraction to be his receptionist at his real estate agency that serves as a front for his illegal betting activities that is his real business. Poor Mr. Richmond, he gets more than what he bargained for.Ellen, who starts as an eager secretary, suddenly decides to help the firm in sponsoring the construction of badly needed housing in the area. This is happening at the 'baby boom' era in America, where the returning sailors and their families couldn't find affordable housing. Ellen, who has a heart of gold, wants to involve Richmond into being the builder. Little does she know she is getting in his way.Lloyd Bacon directed this mildly funny comedy that showed Lucille Ball's talent as a comedienne, something she would exploit in later years as one of America's best loved funny woman in that new medium of television. William Holden shows he was an excellent comedy actor with the way he portrayed the con man Richmond. Two of the best character actors of the thirties and forties, James Gleason and Frank McHugh are seen as the men working the racket in the Richmond's real estate firm.Although Lucille Ball was nearing forty at the time she appeared in this film, one tends to forget her contribution to the movies that came before this comedy and before finding fame in that new technology, television.

Red-125 Miss Grant Takes Richmond (1949) directed by Lloyd Bacon, stars Lucille Ball as Ellen Grant, probably the worst student the Woodruff Secretarial School has ever graduated. William Holden plays Dick Richmond, a bookie who needs a naive person to lend respectability to his illegal gambling operation. Naturally, he chooses Ellen Grant.The movie is totally predictable, and very much a product of the 1940's. To my knowledge, not a single person of color appears in the film. Bookmakers have a code of professional ethics, to which they scrupulously adhere. When a boss kisses a secretary, she's flattered, not offended, and so on. (Some things in our society have really changed for the better in 56 years!)By 1949, it was obvious that Lucille Ball was no longer starlet material, and the director was intelligent enough to recognize her abilities as a comic actor. Many of the scenes in the movie could have come right out of the "I Love Lucy" show, which began two years later. (Incidentally, co-star William Holden appeared in a memorable episode of "I Love Lucy.")As one reviewer has already noted, this film is for Lucy fans only. However, if you *are* a Lucy fan, the video is worth finding and seeing.