Own the rights?
Maybe it was because I was expecting the cowardly Bob Hope and the scatterbrained Lucy Ricardo, but somehow I couldn't get into The Facts of Life. It had nowhere near the quality comedy that characterized Fancy Pants and Sorrowful Jones.Bob and Lucille play a couple of 40 something marrieds, a bit of a stretch for Bob to be sure, but nothing that other Hollywood leading men weren't also doing. Problem is they're not married to each other. Their respective mates are Ruth Hussey and Don DeFore. Both couples are part of a set of California neighbors who apparently do everything together, not unlike the gangster couples in Goodfellas. Not that the men are involved in anything that illegal and risky.Anyway DeFore due to business reasons is delayed on their planned trip to Acapulco and Hussey gets sick while down there. Bob and Lucille get thrown together and one thing leads to another.But the fates do conspire against them, they just can't seem to close the deal on the affair. I think you got the rest of the story.There were a whole lot of opportunities for the type of comedy both Bob and Lucille do that creators Melvin Frank and Norman Panama just passed by. Yet both of them got good reviews generally and to be sure their performances were restrained. Maybe too restrained.As the title song of that other Facts of Life creation says, it takes a lot to get them right, and this film didn't.
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