I know it's not a majority viewpoint but I always thought the best thing on I Love Lucy was Desi Arnaz. I never loved Lucy as much as some people but Desi always seemed so interesting and funny to me. Go figure.
Our clip today should give you some idea of what he was doing for a living before that show. He had a band that performed an act very much like what's in this film, which was a short subject he made some time in the forties. (The copyright date on the end says 1949 but I think that's just when this print was made.) At one point, Desi got a number of prints of this short and when he was touring, he or his representatives would contact movie theaters in cities he was about to play and offer them a deal: They could run the short for nothing if they also showed a slide or posted a poster announcing where he'd be performing in their town the following week. A very clever Cuban.
This is a Castle Film, meaning (in this case) a copy made to be sold on 16mm film for home viewing. The opening title, which the Castle Films people obviously made, spells his name "Desi Arnez," which is a pretty common misspelling. One whole season of I Love Lucy had in its closing credits, a music credit for "Wilbur Hatch conducting the Desi Arnez Orchestra." Someone erred but Desi, as producer, decided not to pay the money to have it corrected. As far as I know, he never spelled it that way.
If you ever get a chance to read Desi's autobiography, give it a look. It was pretty good, though others who worked on I Love Lucy had some different recollections. The book was called A Book and in it, Desi made the point of insisting that he'd written it without a ghost writer. Shortly after it came out, I met a gentleman named Marvin Moss, who was Desi's agent. I told him I was impressed by how well-written the book was and that I found it hard to believe that Desi hadn't employed a ghost writer. Mr. Moss said, "I swear to you he didn't." When I registered surprise, he added, "It's true. Desi didn't know he had a ghost writer. He dictated it all into a book and when he got back the manuscript, he thought that's what he'd said."
This runs a little under sixteen minutes…
