by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I had asked Charles if he
wanted to go to the Vintage Sci-Fi screening in Golden Hill rather than do any
of the Pride evening events (most of which involve partying, drinking and/or
tricking), and we went even though the two movies being shown were uninspiring
choices. One was a truly preposterous movie from 1965 called Sergeant Dead
Head, made by the “beach party”
unit at American International — and yes, the term “dead head” is spelled as
two words, and since the Grateful Dead didn’t exist as a band yet it couldn’t have meant a member of that bizarre assemblage of
camp followers they built up over the years who criss-crossed the country to
see as many of the shows on each tour as possible. Instead it casts Frankie
Avalon in a dual role: as the titular Sergeant Dead Head (that’s actually the
character’s name!) and as Sergeant Donovan. Donovan is a straight-ahead officer
but Dead Head is a classic screw-up in the manner of Private Snafu and the Sad
Sack, doing slapsticky things like sitting on the “Panic Button” his commanding
officer, General Fogg (Fred Clark), has installed on top of his desk and
thereby calling out the entire base for evacuation. It’s unclear just what branch of the service the characters are in, since
the females on the base are referred to as WAC’s (which stands for Women Army
Corps) but the enlisted personnel are called “airmen” (both men and women are
so called, which really dates
this movie) and their job seems to be to fly things.
There are quite a few
people in this movie who had illustrious careers outside of it, including
several supporting players who had got to make films with “A”-listers of
previous eras and one who’d been on the “A”-list in a previous era: Buster Keaton. He plays a sort of
civilian handyman around the base, who installs Fred Clark’s panic button and
successively gives himself, General Fogg and his adjutant, Lt. Charlotte Kinsey
(Eve Arden — between them Keaton and Arden make this movie and give it what meager entertainment
value it has), electric shocks in the process; later he turns up as the
groundskeeper, assigned to water the lawn of the training field, and of course
he screws up the process and gets a huge splash of water in his face. He was
nearing 70 and would die the following year, but Keaton still knew how to get
laughs — and some of the slapstick scenes involving other actors in the movie
suggest that in addition to appearing in the film, Keaton was also serving as a
gag man. The main intrigue is that the base is working on a super-secret
project called “Monkey Shines” in which a chimpanzee is going to be launched
into space orbit — previously they’ve done this with lower animals and the
creatures have returned with no ill effects except they got hornier. (Made
during the last dregs of the Production Code era, this movie has a lot of teasing about sex, some of it genuinely funny —
the intense sexual attraction between the Fred Clark and Eve Arden characters,
who have to maintain the appearance of professional decorum whenever anyone
else is around but who are literally all over each other when they’re alone,
seems to have been the model for the Frank Burns/“Hot Lips” Houlihan
relationship in M*A*S*H — and
some just annoying: when the panic button goes off, the women in the showers on
the base have to leave, and in order to stand at attention they have to drop
the towels they’ve wrapped around themselves: this movie has a lot of prick-teasing that probably infuriated the
teenage straight boys who were part of the target audience, though maybe they
were too busy making out with the teenage straight girls in their cars at the drive-in to notice or care!)
Of course, Sergeant Dead Head gets trapped in the capsule with the chimp, and
the result is when he gets back he’s a lot more aggressive towards his fiancée, Airman Lucy Turner (Deborah
Walley, the in-house replacement American International groomed for Annette
Funicello when Walt Disney stopped loaning l’Annette to them), who as in a lot of her movies seems like a genuinely intelligent,
“together” character whose attraction to terminally dull, klutzy Sgt. Dead Head
remains totally inexplicable. (Blame Louis M. Heyward, who “wrote” this movie —
or at least assembled it from clichés probably as old as Aristophanes.) The
imdb.com synopsis claims, “When they return to Earth after their orbit, it is
discovered that the chimp has the brains of the astronaut, and the astronaut
has the brains of the chimp” — which isn’t what happens, though this film would have been considerably funnier if
it had been! Instead, like the previous animals shot into space, all that
happens to Frankie Avalon is he gets hornier and more sexually aggressive with
Deborah Walley (whose real-life husband at the time, John Ashley, is in the
movie as one of Avalon’s fellow guardhouse inmates in the pre-spaceflight
scenes), and writer Heyward decides to go for the Nutty Professor out of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde tropes as Frankie Avalon turns out to have a more
responsible double, Sgt. Donovan.
The base command arranges a marriage ceremony
between Airman Turner and … which one? The intent seems to be to marry her off
to Donovan but she actually goes through the ceremony with Dead Head, who shows
up at the honeymoon suite in the hotel where the climax (in more than one
sense) occurs and Heyward turns it into a French farce with Turner alternately
being romanced by Dead Head and Donovan, who gets locked in a convenient closet
while Dead Head and Turner finally consummate their marriage, despite ceaseless interruptions by Fogg,
Kinsey (it’s obvious Heyward deliberately picked her name after the celebrated
sex researcher!) and a trio of obnoxious officers: Navy Admiral Stoneham (Cesar
Romero), psychiatrist Captain Weiskopf (Gale Gordon, Lucille Ball’s sidekick on
two of her post-I Love Lucy series), and Lt. Commander Talbott (Reginald Gardiner), a British
officer sent to the U.S. military, presumably as part of the same exchange that
sent Peter Sellers as Captain Mandrake to Burpleson Air Force Base in Dr.
Strangelove. Sergeant Dead Head has some genuinely entertaining moments, notably
the slapstick scenes Buster Keaton designed for the other actors as well as the
ones he performed himself, and two good songs, one for Eve Arden (“You
Should’ve Seen the One That Got Away”) and one for Donna Loren (“Two-Timin’ Angel”),
who doesn’t appear elsewhere in the movie but turns up in a rock ’n’ roll
nightclub and belts out this song with what I believe is the fabled “Wrecking
Crew” studio band behind her. (I particularly noticed the unique solo style of
their main guitarist, Tommy Tedesco, whose son Danny directed the documentary The
Wrecking Crew.) The rest of the songs are
as embarrassingly bad as the rest of the movie — they were all written by the
deathless songwriting team of Guy Hemric and Jerry Styner — and the lowest
point is a duet (or should I call it a trio?) between Deborah Walley and both Frankie Avalons on a lousy song called “Let’s Play
Love.”
When you look at the illustrious level of talent involved in this movie
— the director was Norman Taurog, who’d made his bones back in 1931 directing
Jackie Cooper in Skippy, had
helmed many of the Martin and Lewis movies (and said that working with Martin
and Lewis was like working with kids!) and had somehow hung on to a
feature-film career while a lot of second- and third-tier directors with his
sort of résumé were being relegated to retirement or TV series work; the actors
included Keaton, Fred Clark (who had been in Sunset Boulevard and The Solid Gold Cadillac as well as one of the last Abbott and Costello
Universals, A&C Meet the Keystone Kops), Eve Arden (who’d worked with the Marx Brothers on At the Circus, for which one of the gag men was Buster Keaton,
and later turned up as Deborah Walley’s mother on the short-lived TV sitcom The
Mothers-in-Law, Desi Arnaz’s only post-Lucy
production), Cesar Romero
and Reginald Gardiner (who worked with both Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers,
though only severally, not jointly: with Astaire in A Damsel in Distress and Rogers in the 1954 Black Widow) — and compare it to the meager level of what was
achieved, the first conclusion you reach was, “Why did they bother?” Obviously because they were making a lot of
money with this crap, though by this time the whole concept was losing steam
and the combination of superficial cock-teasing and underlying unshakable
wholesomeness that had made the original Beach Party and its immediate sequelae, Muscle Beach Party and Beach Blanket Bingo, successes was wearing thin with audiences and
American International decided to salvage the formula by combining it with the other sort of movie that was making them money at the
time, horror films. The end credits for Sergeant Dead Head promised the next film in the sequence, Dr.
Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, which had many of the same cast members as this one but added Vincent
Price. Though it’s not entirely without entertaining moments (emphasis on
“moments”), for most of its running time Sergeant Dead Head is the sort of annoying bad movie you sit through
just asking yourself, “When the hell is this going to end, already?”
