Lucky Lady (1975)

• Year: 1975
• Released: 25 Dec 1975
• Country: United States
• Adwords: 1 nomination
• IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073317/
• Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/lucky_lady
• Metacritics:
• Available in: 720p, 1080p,
• Language: English, Spanish, French
• MPA Rating: PG
• Genre: Comedy, Crime, Drama
• Runtime: 118 min
• Writer: Willard Huyck, Gloria Katz
• Director: Stanley Donen
• Cast: Gene Hackman, Liza Minnelli, Burt Reynolds
• Keywords: prohibition era, san diego, california, liquor, bootlegging, 1930s,

5.3/10

Lucky Lady Storyline

It’s 1930. Claire (Liza Minnelli), an American living in Tijuana, Mexico, has just buried her husband Harry, who owned a dive bar there. Walker Ellis (Burt Reynolds), a loser with whom she has long had a thing on the side, agrees to wrap up her affairs in Tijuana for her so that she can move stateside before they be together after an appropriate grieving period. Wrapping up those affairs includes smuggling one last truckload of illegal Mexican immigrants across the border. In that job not going quite according to plan, Walker is forced to go into business rum running across the border with Kibby Womack (Gene Hackman), one of those he was trying to smuggle across the border, Kibby an American in trouble with Uncle Sam. Instead of via overland, Walker has hired Billy Mason (Robby Benson) to Captain the sailboat to transport the goods via water, Billy a young, quiet man unwise to the ways of the world, but wise when it comes to the sea. As Walker, Claire, Kibby, and Billy navigate the waters on this venture, they will find two inherent risks. The first is the U.S. Coast Guard, officious Captain Moseley (Geoffrey Lewis), who patrols these waters. Moseley and the Coast Guard can do nothing if they’re in international waters unless there is a sign of illegal cargo or a sale of illegal merchandise. As such, Moseley can usually just “starve” rum runners who just sail up and down the coast unable to dock in a U.S. port. And second is other rum runners. While the small players generally leave each other alone, the east coast mob has sent Christie McTeague (John Hillerman) to place first a foothold then second a stranglehold on the entire west coast Mexico-U.S. trade. Through it all, Claire has convinced Kibby and an initially reluctant Walker that their three partner business should extend into the bedroom.—Huggo

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Lucky Lady Movie Reviews

Liza’s a “funny lady” but unfortunately the film wasn’t so “lucky”.

While this is considered one of Liza Minnelli’s film career flops, the evidence points out otherwise. It definitely was not the box office hit that 20th Century Fox anticipated it would be coming off as her first acting role since winning the Oscar for “Cabaret”. However, box office receipts show that it didn’t do as badly as rumor would have it. In fact, Liza received a Golden Globe nomination for the film, and was still one of the year’s top box office stars (among very few women listed) in spite of poor reviews that the film received. What really tanked that year for Fox was “At Long Last Love”, their big musical spoof which starred Liza’s co-star here, Burt Reynolds.

This is a prohibition era story of rum running, and Liza plays a Clara Bow lookalike who sings Kander and Ebb songs in a border-town saloon. She convinces sometimes lover Reynolds to run rum for her, and has both the border patrol and coast guard on their trail. On the way, they pick up grizzled Gene Hackman who was ripped off by Reynolds, and pretty soon, the three are engaged in a menage-a-tois, although it is clear that manly men Hackman and Reynolds only share Minnelli, not each other.

“Gangsters?” a San Francisco hotel clerk asks his manager. “No”, he responds. “Hollywood trash”. There’s tons of lines like this, but the all time classic is Minnelli’s “It’s so quiet here, you can hear a fish fart!” Network TV years ago cut out the line altogether while a cable channel simply silenced the offensive word, even though it was clear through Liza’s mouthing what she had said. Young Robby Benson plays Reynolds’ shy shipmate and quickly moved onto leads in such popular teen films as “Ode to Billy Joe”, “One on One”, and “Ice Castles”.

The film is no better or worse than many fluffy comedies of the 1970’s, probably a tad higher budgeted than most. Liza was the epitome of the wild ’70’s lifestyle of the rich and famous, and with the Studio 54 days just around the corner, some memorable Broadway appearances and much press, it isn’t hard to see why some critics would want to put her down a peg or two, justified or not. She’s actually the best thing about the movie, and if her Kander and Ebb songs aren’t up there among their best (which includes the same year’s Barbra Streisand hit “Funny Lady”), they do reflect the era. Standards of the late 20’s such as “All I Do is Dream of You” and “If I Had a Talking Picture of You” are heard in a nightclub sequence. The opening theme, “Too Much Mustard”, is best remembered as the Astaire/Rogers “Castle Walk” in “The Story of Vernon & Irene Castle” and snappily gets the film started with some nice artwork over the credits. The title song is one of the highlights of the film, a montage of various situations that is quite humorous. Overall, the humor of the film is very similar to the 1982 Blake Edwards/Julie Andrews classic “Victor/Victoria”, which didn’t suffer at all at the box office, and a show Liza later did on Broadway.

“Lucky Lady” was part of the ’70’s nostalgia craze and was obviously influenced by “The Sting” as were such others as “The Fortune” and “Harry and Walter Go to New York”. There is apparently an alternative ending that Liza liked better but was re-filmed to be more commercial. I felt satisfied with this conclusion, however (involving rival bootlegger John Hillerman), although the alternate ending sounds more touching. Geoffrey Lewis is amusing as a Coast Guard commander, and Hillerman is droll as always. I think in time that “Lucky Lady” will be like other disappointments of the era and be acknowledged as an entertaining film without pretension that suffered mainly because of the overabundance of attention the three stars were receiving.

Slapstick and violence making strange bedfellows…

Liza Minnelli plays such a selfish harpy in “Lucky Lady” that it’s easy to see why this film won her no new admirers. Fans of 1972’s “Cabaret” were already softened to love Minnelli no matter what, but here director Stanley Donen seems intent on making Liza’s character Claire as brittle and abrasive as possible. The lumbering plot, about a trio of rum-runners in the 1930s who outsmart the competition and fall into an oddly casual three-way love affair, isn’t worked out cohesively in terms of the narrative (and the overlapping scenes of raunch, comedy, and mobster melodrama eventually cause impatience and resentment). At first it’s a bit shocking to see Liza in bed between Gene Hackman and Burt Reynolds, however the movie isn’t all about after-hours fun under-the-sheets; Donen turns the third act into a violent extravaganza (with a slapstick bent), including boats blowing up, guns going off, and dead bodies everywhere. The picture walks a shaky line between nostalgia and bloodshed, with echoes of “Bonnie & Clyde”‘s jangly tone. Little of it jells, though the attempt is certainly a curious one. **1/2 from ****

What a shame

“Lucky Lady” is a pretty bad movie. It has three big stars and doesn’t do anything with them. At least not anything worth while. The movie seems confused about what it is. Is it a comedy? Is it a crime drama? It doesn’t work as both. The sets and costumes are okay, I guess. But none of that matters. “Lady Lady” is an uninteresting movie. It wears out its welcome after an hour or so.