by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film we watched last night, Senior Prom, was quite different. It was produced, not by Katzman, but by Harry A. Romm and Moe Howard — that’s right, the Moe Howard of the Three Stooges — and directed by David Lowell Rich, who eight years after this movie was made (1958) would direct Lana Turner in the most recent (and, hopefully, last ever) remake of Madame X.
It’s a peculiar movie because, while the intent seems to have been to do a movie aimed at the youth audience, all the guest musical performers were older people whose natural audience was adults: Louis Prima and Keely Smith, billed as making their first movie, appear to do the big number at the end, “That Old Black Magic” (later they’d do a film together as leads, Hey Boy! Hey Girl!; and still later they would break up in 1962 and the following year she’d do an album of South Pacific with Frank Sinatra that showed what a fine singer she’d always been when she didn’t have to cope with his yelling, screaming and horribly hammy mugging opposite her — if you get the impression I don’t particularly like Louis Prima, you’re right; before he hooked up with Keely for what appears to have been the beta version of Sonny and Cher, he was just another white singer/trumpet player trying to be Louis Armstrong and failing miserably); Mitch Miller (doing a quite odd instrumental that featured himself on oboe, double-tracked through part of it); Connee Boswell (doing a version of “When the Saints Go Marching In” that just revealed how muscle-bound her voice, a beautiful and flexible instrument in the 1930’s and early 1940’s, had become by 1958); José Melis (a Latin cocktail pianist whose selection, “El Cumbachero,” was recorded far better by Desi Arnaz and his band in the late 1940’s); and Toni Arden, a foghorn-like contralto who did “Come Back to Sorrento” in both English and Italian.
The writer, the incredibly appropriately named Hugh Hackady, deserves credit for one thing: he really tried to make this a musical, a film with a real plot and numbers performed by the central characters to advance the plot instead of just trotting in guest stars to lip-synch to their hit records. Unfortunately, the romantic intrigues are singularly uninteresting and so are the stars engaged to perform them: the leads are Jill Corey as rich girl Gaye Sherridan (the spelling with two “r”’s is from imdb.com) and Paul Hampton as Tom Harper, the senior agronomy student and aspiring rock ’n’ roller who’s courting her and trying to win her away from the man her parents think she should marry, rich creep Carter Breed III (played by, of all people, Billy Jack star Tom Laughlin!). When Tom is introduced to Carter Breed III he says, in by far the best line in the film, “You mean there are a couple of others like him walking around?” There’s also a comic-relief couple, “Dog” (played by comedian Jimmie Komack — who looked so much like a certain Left-wing Ohio Congressmember I couldn’t help but joke, “Separated at birth: Jimmie Komack and Dennis Kucinich!”), who plays bass in Harper’s band and seems to have got his own nickname from the “doghouse fiddle” term frequently used in the swing era (another example of how retrograde this movie is) to denote his instrument; and his girlfriend Flip (Barbara Bostock), who in an example of the annoying sexism of 1950’s movies considers it a high honor to be allowed to carry around Dog’s bass, which of course dwarfs her.
The four lovers (at least the ones we’re supposed to like) sing songs to each other in voices of varying degrees of nerdiness, with Harper’s the most tolerable (remember he’s the one who’s supposed to be heading for a great career as a singer) and Dog’s the least (later Komack left the on-screen side of the business and became a TV producer, doing such hit shows as Chico and the Man), and we’re supposed to regard Harper’s as a great ensemble but we really wonder which are more irritating, their bland, insipid, boring attempts at rock or their bland, insipid, boring attempts at jazz. The plot, such as it is, consists of Carter Breed III’s attempts to use his (or, more accurately, his dad’s) connections and money to break up Harper and Gaye — which he does by getting other people to deny Harper’s band chances to play in public (in one scene he does Harper out of a gig playing intermission for Les Elgart’s band — another surprisingly “square” bit of talent for something that’s supposed to be a teenage movie! — only Harper upstages him when Elgart invites him to sing a song with the band, which he does: a terrible rock version of Harold Arlen’s great ballad “Let’s Fall in Love”) and promising he can get Louis Prima and Keely Smith to play for the senior prom (this is a college, not a high-school, senior prom, by the way) — only just then Dad pulls the financial plug on him and the best he can get is Ellington. Not Duke Ellington, mind you (and the biggest surprise in a movie that has many of them is that 1958 college students actually know who Duke Ellington is!), but someone named Spike Ellington.
Harper and Carter Breed III have a fistfight that ends up in the campus swimming pool, and a disgusted Gaye breaks up with both of them, but meanwhile a disc jockey desperate for something to play when a Dodgers-Giants baseball game was rained out dredged up a record Harper made a year earlier, and it suddenly becomes a major hit, he’s signed to a major-label contract with Colpix (the in-house label of Columbia Pictures and one that actually didn’t break any major artists, though they did have Nina Simone between her breakthrough album I Loves You Porgy on Bethlehem and her seven albums for Philips that are considered the defining work of her career) and he gets on the Ed Sullivan Show — with Sullivan playing himself five years before he did so on the far better Bye, Bye Birdie. Tom’s new-found music success convinces Gaye’s parents that he’s right for her after all, and it ends happily (sappily). Senior Prom is more pleasant in the actual watching than I’ve made it sound above — it’s harmlessly diverting and not actively terrible; it’s just the sort of movie we seem to have seen thousands of times before, usually done better than it was here!
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
It’s Trad, Dad! a.k.a. Ring-a-Ding Rhythm (Amicus/Columbia, 1962)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
When Charles came home I ran him the DVD I’d just recorded of It’s Trad, Dad!, a film that because of its formula (a thin plotlet on which to hang a lot of performances by famous music stars, aiming at the teenage audience that was buying the stars’ records) and releasing studio (it was an Amicus production from Britain but Columbia was the U.S. distributor, and they changed the title to Ring-a-Ding Rhythm because the British term “trad” — short for “traditional,” and meaning Dixieland jazz — meant nothing to U.S. audiences) tends to get lumped in with all the cheap movies Columbia had been making stateside for almost a decade with the same formula: Rock Around the Clock and its remake, Twist Around the Clock; Don’t Knock the Rock and its “twisted” remake, Don’t Knock the Twist; Juke Box Rhythm; Cha-Cha-Cha-Boom! and the like — when in fact it’s a lot better than that and manages to turn into a minor comedy classic that at once exploits the clichés of the formula and twits them.
The kudos belong mainly to the director, Richard Lester (billed as “Dick Lester”), whose first feature film this was: before this all he’d done were TV commercials and a short with Peter Sellers called The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film whose title, not surprisingly, accurately and succinctly describes its contents. Lester would go on to make The Mouse on the Moon (an adaptation of writer Leonard Wibberley’s sequel to his own The Mouse That Roared, though without Peter Sellers, whose multiple roles in The Mouse That Roared were that film’s highlight) and then, for the producer of both Mouse movies, he would film the first two (and two best-known) films with the Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night and Help!
Indeed, much of It’s Trad, Dad! comes off as a sort of beta version of A Hard Day’s Night as well as — ironically enough — a snapshot of British popular music tastes just before the Beatles broke as first national, then international, stars. During the early 1950’s “trad” had briefly become the most popular form of music in Britain, and Brits who led Dixieland bands — notably trombonist Chris Barber, trumpeter Kenny Ball and clarinetist Acker Bilk — became major stars. The “trad” fad also led directly to the acceptance of rock ’n’ roll in Britain, thanks largely to Lonnie Donegan, who played guitar and banjo in the Barber band and would occasionally perform a number with just the rhythm section, augmented by washboards and jugs, to give the horn players a chance to rest. One of those numbers, a cover of Leadbelly’s “Rock Island Line,” became a major hit in the U.K. (and enough of one in the U.S. for Stan Freberg to parody it) and started a fad for so-called “skiffle,” basically jug-band music, which since it was simple to learn inspired hundreds of British kids to form bands. (Among them were three lads from Liverpool named John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison.) Since the guitar was the basic skiffle instrument — and the only one that required much in the way of musical skill — it was easy for people (including the three mentioned above) who’d already learned enough guitar chords to play skiffle to adapt to rock ’n’ roll when the British first heard it from Bill Haley (on records and then on tour) and then Elvis (on records and in films since, aside from three concerts in Canada in 1957, Elvis never performed outside the United States).
So the musical menu in It’s Trad, Dad! is an odd mixture of Dixieland (from the Dukes of Dixieland — a band of young white Americans from the wellspring, New Orleans — to Chris Barber, Kenny Ball, Acker Bilk, the Temperance Seven— who did their vocals through megaphones so they could really capture the 1920’s sound — as well as lesser names like Bob Wallis and Terry Lightfoot), American rock (Chubby Checker, Del Shannon, Gene Vincent, Gary “U.S.” Bonds — his real name was Gary Anderson and he hated that stupid stage name his record company stuck him with — and the fascinating Gene McDaniels, a Black cabaret singer with a very white-sounding voice, artfully filmed with cigarette smoke swirling around him) and British pop-rock (the Brook Brothers, the Paris Sisters, John Leyton and the film’s juvenile leads, Helen Shapiro and Craig Douglas). What makes this film not only interesting but a minor comic masterpiece is the cheeky tone maintained throughout by director Lester and writer Milton Subotsky (who also produced): the film opens with a narrator who says it’s about a boy and a girl (as arrows on screen point to Douglas and Shapiro, respectively) and a mayor (Felix Felton) of a small British town which shall remain nameless (it’s so nameless that we see the “You are now entering … ” sign but the name of the town has been whited out) whose attempt to have a quiet cup of coffee (poured out of a teapot after the counterman at the coffee house pulls a series of levers that make intriguing noises but actually accomplish nothing) is suddenly spoiled by a group of teenagers who crash the coffeehouse and turn on the jukebox and the TV waiting to hear their favorite trad artists.
The boy and the girl hit upon a plan: they’ll go to the Big City (obviously London, though again unnamed) and bring back a disc jockey who will put on a jazz TV show and break the ban the mayor has imposed on the music. (In one grimly funny scene, the mayor is using the city seal to smash to bits LP’s by trad artists — eerily anticipating the record-burnings staged by fundamentalist Christians in the U.S. against Lester’s later stars, the Beatles — and when his aide hands him a Lawrence Welk album, the mayor keeps it and says, “Not that one.”) They’re standing against a wall wondering how on earth they’re going to get to the Big City when the narrator offers to help, and suddenly one jump-cut later they’re in the Big City making the rounds of the TV studios and jazz clubs. They finally get to a D.J. after making contact with Acker Bilk at the fancy club where he performs — when they’re wondering how they can get into a club like that, the narrator obliges them with tickets and evening outfits and then, after they dash off, the narrator says, “You might at least have thanked me for the clothes” (see what I told you about this being a beta version of Lester’s Beatles movies?), and the comedy bits get even loonier, notably the efforts of the mayor and his aides to keep the bus with the jazz musicians in it from reaching the town — which they plot on a relief map in a scene staged deliberately to parody all those super-serious dramas the British were making then about their battles during World War II.
Some of the musical numbers were filmed in the U.S. by a second unit directed by Peter Case, and these are clearly less imaginative than the ones Lester filmed in Britain — the American numbers have the same dull head-on treatment as was common in pop musicals of the day, while Lester’s numbers feature overhead angles, instrument’s-eye views, proto-psychedelic effects (in one scene he zooms into the megaphone of the Temperance Seven’s singer and then starts spinning the camera until his mouth turns into a paisley pattern) and the kinds of split-screen effects that became common and, eventually, an oppressive cliché of their own in later 1960’s music films. The combination of the cheeky comedy of Subotsky’s script and the audacity of Lester’s visual imagination make It’s Trad, Dad! a far better and funnier film than most of the teen musicals of the period (what a shame Lester never made a movie with Elvis!), and had it been a bigger hit — especially in the U.S. — it wouldn’t have been such a surprise when A Hard Day’s Night came out and turned out to be a comic masterpiece, hailed as such even by movie critics who otherwise didn’t especially like the Beatles. — 4/16/08
•••••
I had caught most of the movie It’s Trad, Dad! on Turner Classic Movies, which showed it as the kickoff of a series of rock ’n’ roll (more or less) films from the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. I’d remembered it as a minor classic, a great comedy that married the rock movie to the sort of anarchic British comedy that started in the 1950’s with the Peter Sellers Goon Squad and then flowered with Beyond the Fringe, Flanders and Swann and all the other groups who were recorded by George Martin (who later produced the Beatles, and his experience creating sound effects for comedy sketches on records served him in good stead when the Beatles started making records like Revolver and Sgt. Pepper), and ultimately reached a mass U.S. audience with Monty Python. This time around It’s Trad, Dad! seemed as good as it had the last time even though the “trad” — a British name (short for “traditional”) for Dixieland jazz — seemed to hold up much better than the rather limp attempts at rock ’n’ roll that dominated the pop charts in both the U.S. and the U.K. between the deaths of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper and the advent of the Beatles.
The two juvenile leads, Helen Shapiro and Craig Douglas, both sing, and frankly I’d forgotten how low-pitched Helen Shapiro’s voice was: she basically sang tenor, and if I’d heard her “blind” I’d have thought she was a man. I remember the story she told Philip Norman about the British tour she went on in early 1963 in which the Beatles were her opening act (yes, you read that right!) and at one point John Lennon went up to her on the tour bus and gave her a song he and Paul McCartney had written for her. She recalled he had the air of a scared little schoolboy handing in a late homework assignment to a notoriously stern teacher, and the song they gave her was “Misery” — I don’t think she ever actually recorded it, but the Beatles did: it’s one of the most intense, moving and beautiful tracks on their first album.
The trad, Dixieland, jazz or whatever you want to call them songs in It’s Trad, Dad! seem genuinely timeless (even though there were better Dixieland groups on both sides of the Atlantic in 1962 than the ones we got here), and singer Ottilie Patterson is genuinely a hoot: she comes out in a weird hairdo and a dress that suggests she’s going to go into some 1890’s music-hall ballad, and instead she starts shouting “When the Saints Go Marching In” (and on some of Chris Barber’s earlier records she did quite credible covers of “Weeping Willow Blues” and other songs from Bessie Smith’s repertoire).
The rock — except for Gene McDaniels’ “Another Tear Falls” (a song by Burt Bacharach and Hal David and one that’s virtually forgotten today), beautifully filmed by director Richard Lester in a haze from McDaniels’ cigarette, and the Paris Sisters’ number “What Am I to Do” (written by another legendary songwriting team, Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, and well worthy of revival even though it sounds like a better song than the Paris Sisters’ performance of it) — seems quite a bit on the wimpy side, and Gene Vincent and Gary “U.S.” Bonds both made their reputations with much better songs than the ones they get to do here. (Incidentally Bonds — whose real name was Gary Anderson and who hated the stupid stage name his manager stuck him with — was one of those people who sounded so Black on his records you stare in disbelief when you see him and register that, despite makeup and a hair style seemingly cultivated to create racial ambiguity, he certainly looks white here even though his Wikipedia page lists him among “African-American singers” and his backup singers do look Black.)
It’s Trad, Dad! is still a great movie — and it’s clear just why producer Walter Shenson thought Lester would be a good director for the Beatles: the same combination of good pop music and whacky comedy that makes It’s Trad, Dad! interesting is what made A Hard Day’s Night and (to a lesser extent) Help! so much fun — though the Beatles’ films were even stronger, at least partly because in them the great musicians and the whacky comedians were the same people! — 7/12/11
When Charles came home I ran him the DVD I’d just recorded of It’s Trad, Dad!, a film that because of its formula (a thin plotlet on which to hang a lot of performances by famous music stars, aiming at the teenage audience that was buying the stars’ records) and releasing studio (it was an Amicus production from Britain but Columbia was the U.S. distributor, and they changed the title to Ring-a-Ding Rhythm because the British term “trad” — short for “traditional,” and meaning Dixieland jazz — meant nothing to U.S. audiences) tends to get lumped in with all the cheap movies Columbia had been making stateside for almost a decade with the same formula: Rock Around the Clock and its remake, Twist Around the Clock; Don’t Knock the Rock and its “twisted” remake, Don’t Knock the Twist; Juke Box Rhythm; Cha-Cha-Cha-Boom! and the like — when in fact it’s a lot better than that and manages to turn into a minor comedy classic that at once exploits the clichés of the formula and twits them.
The kudos belong mainly to the director, Richard Lester (billed as “Dick Lester”), whose first feature film this was: before this all he’d done were TV commercials and a short with Peter Sellers called The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film whose title, not surprisingly, accurately and succinctly describes its contents. Lester would go on to make The Mouse on the Moon (an adaptation of writer Leonard Wibberley’s sequel to his own The Mouse That Roared, though without Peter Sellers, whose multiple roles in The Mouse That Roared were that film’s highlight) and then, for the producer of both Mouse movies, he would film the first two (and two best-known) films with the Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night and Help!
Indeed, much of It’s Trad, Dad! comes off as a sort of beta version of A Hard Day’s Night as well as — ironically enough — a snapshot of British popular music tastes just before the Beatles broke as first national, then international, stars. During the early 1950’s “trad” had briefly become the most popular form of music in Britain, and Brits who led Dixieland bands — notably trombonist Chris Barber, trumpeter Kenny Ball and clarinetist Acker Bilk — became major stars. The “trad” fad also led directly to the acceptance of rock ’n’ roll in Britain, thanks largely to Lonnie Donegan, who played guitar and banjo in the Barber band and would occasionally perform a number with just the rhythm section, augmented by washboards and jugs, to give the horn players a chance to rest. One of those numbers, a cover of Leadbelly’s “Rock Island Line,” became a major hit in the U.K. (and enough of one in the U.S. for Stan Freberg to parody it) and started a fad for so-called “skiffle,” basically jug-band music, which since it was simple to learn inspired hundreds of British kids to form bands. (Among them were three lads from Liverpool named John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison.) Since the guitar was the basic skiffle instrument — and the only one that required much in the way of musical skill — it was easy for people (including the three mentioned above) who’d already learned enough guitar chords to play skiffle to adapt to rock ’n’ roll when the British first heard it from Bill Haley (on records and then on tour) and then Elvis (on records and in films since, aside from three concerts in Canada in 1957, Elvis never performed outside the United States).
So the musical menu in It’s Trad, Dad! is an odd mixture of Dixieland (from the Dukes of Dixieland — a band of young white Americans from the wellspring, New Orleans — to Chris Barber, Kenny Ball, Acker Bilk, the Temperance Seven— who did their vocals through megaphones so they could really capture the 1920’s sound — as well as lesser names like Bob Wallis and Terry Lightfoot), American rock (Chubby Checker, Del Shannon, Gene Vincent, Gary “U.S.” Bonds — his real name was Gary Anderson and he hated that stupid stage name his record company stuck him with — and the fascinating Gene McDaniels, a Black cabaret singer with a very white-sounding voice, artfully filmed with cigarette smoke swirling around him) and British pop-rock (the Brook Brothers, the Paris Sisters, John Leyton and the film’s juvenile leads, Helen Shapiro and Craig Douglas). What makes this film not only interesting but a minor comic masterpiece is the cheeky tone maintained throughout by director Lester and writer Milton Subotsky (who also produced): the film opens with a narrator who says it’s about a boy and a girl (as arrows on screen point to Douglas and Shapiro, respectively) and a mayor (Felix Felton) of a small British town which shall remain nameless (it’s so nameless that we see the “You are now entering … ” sign but the name of the town has been whited out) whose attempt to have a quiet cup of coffee (poured out of a teapot after the counterman at the coffee house pulls a series of levers that make intriguing noises but actually accomplish nothing) is suddenly spoiled by a group of teenagers who crash the coffeehouse and turn on the jukebox and the TV waiting to hear their favorite trad artists.
The boy and the girl hit upon a plan: they’ll go to the Big City (obviously London, though again unnamed) and bring back a disc jockey who will put on a jazz TV show and break the ban the mayor has imposed on the music. (In one grimly funny scene, the mayor is using the city seal to smash to bits LP’s by trad artists — eerily anticipating the record-burnings staged by fundamentalist Christians in the U.S. against Lester’s later stars, the Beatles — and when his aide hands him a Lawrence Welk album, the mayor keeps it and says, “Not that one.”) They’re standing against a wall wondering how on earth they’re going to get to the Big City when the narrator offers to help, and suddenly one jump-cut later they’re in the Big City making the rounds of the TV studios and jazz clubs. They finally get to a D.J. after making contact with Acker Bilk at the fancy club where he performs — when they’re wondering how they can get into a club like that, the narrator obliges them with tickets and evening outfits and then, after they dash off, the narrator says, “You might at least have thanked me for the clothes” (see what I told you about this being a beta version of Lester’s Beatles movies?), and the comedy bits get even loonier, notably the efforts of the mayor and his aides to keep the bus with the jazz musicians in it from reaching the town — which they plot on a relief map in a scene staged deliberately to parody all those super-serious dramas the British were making then about their battles during World War II.
Some of the musical numbers were filmed in the U.S. by a second unit directed by Peter Case, and these are clearly less imaginative than the ones Lester filmed in Britain — the American numbers have the same dull head-on treatment as was common in pop musicals of the day, while Lester’s numbers feature overhead angles, instrument’s-eye views, proto-psychedelic effects (in one scene he zooms into the megaphone of the Temperance Seven’s singer and then starts spinning the camera until his mouth turns into a paisley pattern) and the kinds of split-screen effects that became common and, eventually, an oppressive cliché of their own in later 1960’s music films. The combination of the cheeky comedy of Subotsky’s script and the audacity of Lester’s visual imagination make It’s Trad, Dad! a far better and funnier film than most of the teen musicals of the period (what a shame Lester never made a movie with Elvis!), and had it been a bigger hit — especially in the U.S. — it wouldn’t have been such a surprise when A Hard Day’s Night came out and turned out to be a comic masterpiece, hailed as such even by movie critics who otherwise didn’t especially like the Beatles. — 4/16/08
•••••
I had caught most of the movie It’s Trad, Dad! on Turner Classic Movies, which showed it as the kickoff of a series of rock ’n’ roll (more or less) films from the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. I’d remembered it as a minor classic, a great comedy that married the rock movie to the sort of anarchic British comedy that started in the 1950’s with the Peter Sellers Goon Squad and then flowered with Beyond the Fringe, Flanders and Swann and all the other groups who were recorded by George Martin (who later produced the Beatles, and his experience creating sound effects for comedy sketches on records served him in good stead when the Beatles started making records like Revolver and Sgt. Pepper), and ultimately reached a mass U.S. audience with Monty Python. This time around It’s Trad, Dad! seemed as good as it had the last time even though the “trad” — a British name (short for “traditional”) for Dixieland jazz — seemed to hold up much better than the rather limp attempts at rock ’n’ roll that dominated the pop charts in both the U.S. and the U.K. between the deaths of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper and the advent of the Beatles.
The two juvenile leads, Helen Shapiro and Craig Douglas, both sing, and frankly I’d forgotten how low-pitched Helen Shapiro’s voice was: she basically sang tenor, and if I’d heard her “blind” I’d have thought she was a man. I remember the story she told Philip Norman about the British tour she went on in early 1963 in which the Beatles were her opening act (yes, you read that right!) and at one point John Lennon went up to her on the tour bus and gave her a song he and Paul McCartney had written for her. She recalled he had the air of a scared little schoolboy handing in a late homework assignment to a notoriously stern teacher, and the song they gave her was “Misery” — I don’t think she ever actually recorded it, but the Beatles did: it’s one of the most intense, moving and beautiful tracks on their first album.
The trad, Dixieland, jazz or whatever you want to call them songs in It’s Trad, Dad! seem genuinely timeless (even though there were better Dixieland groups on both sides of the Atlantic in 1962 than the ones we got here), and singer Ottilie Patterson is genuinely a hoot: she comes out in a weird hairdo and a dress that suggests she’s going to go into some 1890’s music-hall ballad, and instead she starts shouting “When the Saints Go Marching In” (and on some of Chris Barber’s earlier records she did quite credible covers of “Weeping Willow Blues” and other songs from Bessie Smith’s repertoire).
The rock — except for Gene McDaniels’ “Another Tear Falls” (a song by Burt Bacharach and Hal David and one that’s virtually forgotten today), beautifully filmed by director Richard Lester in a haze from McDaniels’ cigarette, and the Paris Sisters’ number “What Am I to Do” (written by another legendary songwriting team, Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, and well worthy of revival even though it sounds like a better song than the Paris Sisters’ performance of it) — seems quite a bit on the wimpy side, and Gene Vincent and Gary “U.S.” Bonds both made their reputations with much better songs than the ones they get to do here. (Incidentally Bonds — whose real name was Gary Anderson and who hated the stupid stage name his manager stuck him with — was one of those people who sounded so Black on his records you stare in disbelief when you see him and register that, despite makeup and a hair style seemingly cultivated to create racial ambiguity, he certainly looks white here even though his Wikipedia page lists him among “African-American singers” and his backup singers do look Black.)
It’s Trad, Dad! is still a great movie — and it’s clear just why producer Walter Shenson thought Lester would be a good director for the Beatles: the same combination of good pop music and whacky comedy that makes It’s Trad, Dad! interesting is what made A Hard Day’s Night and (to a lesser extent) Help! so much fun — though the Beatles’ films were even stronger, at least partly because in them the great musicians and the whacky comedians were the same people! — 7/12/11
Sunday, July 10, 2011
The Constant Woman, a.k.a. Hell in a Circus (KBS/World Wide/Fox/Atlantic, 1933)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was a download from archive.org of The Constant Woman, a 1933 independent movie from KBS Productions, releasing through World Wide Pictures (which went belly-up due to the Depression while this and several other films were still in release; the rights were then picked up by Fox, and in 1938 an outfit called Atlantic Pictures picked it up and retitled it Hell in a Circus, and it seems the only extant prints are of the 1938 reissue: that’s the one we got and the one the American Film Institute Catalog reviewers saw). It’s an indication of the general quality of KBS Productions’ productions that though this was an indie, it had “A”-list, or at least “B-plus”-list, talents from the major studios both behind and in front of the cameras. The director was Victor Schertzinger, the writer was F. Hugh Herbert (adapting a one-act play called Recklessness by, of all people, Eugene O’Neill!), the cinematographer was Arthur Edeson (in between his tenure at Universal, where he shot All Quiet on the Western Front and Frankenstein, and his tenure at Warners, where he shot The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca) and the stars were Conrad Nagel and Leila Hyams.
Nagel plays Walt Underwood, an actor and manager of a tent-show theatrical company that advertises its stock of old-chestnut plays as “Direct from Broadway.” His other actors include his wife Marlene Underwood (Claire Windsor) and younger supporting player Lou (Leila Hyams), and the behind-the-scenes factotum who keeps everything running smoothly is Beef (Stanley Fields). The Underwoods’ teenage son Jimmie (Tommy Conlon) is Beef’s assistant, and there’s an early scene in which he receives a telegram and does so much hugging and fondling of the guy who delivered it that I began to wonder about his sexual orientation … but even in “pre-Code” Hollywood they weren’t about to go there. Instead, this film turns out to be six reels of soap opera with an action movie climax grafted on — and anyone who saw the reissue version under the Hell in a Circus title was probably discomfited, to say the least, that the circus didn’t appear until the last reel. The telegram is an offer from someone named Hassett for Marlene to come to Broadway and star in a play, which she insists on accepting — “I’m not getting any younger,” she tells Walt, “and this is my last chance” — even though he pleads with her to stay, not only because they’re finally making a bit of money but so they can stay together and both be there for Jimmie.
A month or so later, Walt’s troupe (with Lou taking over Marlene’s star parts) is booked in Reading, New York and Walt decides that he and Jimmie will take advantage of the proximity to go to New York City and visit Marlene. Only when they get to the hotel where she’s staying, they notice fire trucks outside and are told there was a fire and, while it was confined to one room (the firefighters put it out in time to keep it from spreading throughout the hotel), at least one person died in the room. When Walt and Jimmie show up at the front desk asking for Marlene, the hotel officials start acting very suspiciously and ultimately call Walt in for a private meeting at which they break him the bad news: Marlene is dead, killed in the room fire, and the remains of another victim, a man, were found with her. Evidently both had been drinking and one of them fell asleep with a lighted cigarette in hand, and the cigarette set the bedclothes on fire and ultimately burned both of them. Walt tells Jimmie that his mom’s death was purely accidental and leaves out the part about her having been with another man. Then Walt and Jimmie collect Marlene’s surviving possessions, and among them is a packet of love letters which Lou discovers that reveal that Jimmie is not Walt’s biological son.
Lou tries to conceal this from Walt but he finds it out anyway and, like Al Jolson’s character in The Singing Fool, he responds to the news of his wife’s betrayal by hanging out in speakeasies and drinking a lot. Without either Underwood, the fortunes of the Underwood Theatrical Company plummet, and they’re reduced to playing Galveston in the middle of the rainy season, where they don’t make any money to speak of and what they do gross is attached by the local sheriff. Realizing that the only way to save the business is to get Walt on the wagon and back in charge of it, Lou and Jimmie track him down — and the speakeasy owner says he won’t allow Walt to leave until someone pays the $52 bar tab he’s already run up (in 1933 dollars!). Instead Lou sends Beef and his crew to break Walt out of there if they have to start a fight and wreck the place to do it — which, of course, is exactly what happens. The other actors and crew members desert the Underwoods because they aren’t being paid, but Lou hits on the idea of rewriting their old scripts into episodes of a radio sitcom in which she and Walt can play husband and wife.
The show is a success and Walt and Lou fall in love for real — only Jimmie has a furious hissy-fit over the idea that his father is going to marry someone else four years after his mom died. He runs away, and it’s only a chance clue — when the police officer they’re talking to orders a roast-beef sandwich and both Walt and Lou simultaneously register the name “Beef” — that alerts them to what happened. Jimmie ran off and joined a circus. They go to see him, but in the meantime an elephant breaks loose and crashes the Big Top, which catches on fire (presumably from a cigarette dropped by a fleeing audience member), and the elephant upends one of the wagons used to transport dangerous animals and its occupant, a tiger, escapes. Jimmie is trapped under the wagon and Lou, trying to alert someone to save him, is mauled by the tiger before Biff arrives to save the day, lifting the wagon so Jimmie can escape and shooting the tiger to save Lou’s life. Of course, all this reconciles Jimmie to his (adoptive) father’s remarriage and all ends well.
Victor Schertzinger was best known for musicals and comedies — One Night of Love, Something to Sing About and the first two Bob Hope-Bing Crosby Road movies — and many of his musicals feature songs he wrote himself. But as a soap-opera director he was considerably less interesting, even though this film, whatever its faults, does keep us emotionally tied to the central characters and anxious for them, rooting for them to get over their problems and be successful and happy. It’s also got some neat scenes — the one in which Walt plays a dangerous game of bluff with the radio-station manager to get his contract renewed is especially good — and there’s at least a bit of music, a song in the background sung by a Rhythm Boys-like trio called “The Three Ambassadors.” Though the reissue title is tacky as well as deceptive, it’s nice to have this film — it’s no great shakes as drama but it is involving and emotionally fulfilling — even though most of the major “names” on it did much more illustrious work elsewhere.
The film was a download from archive.org of The Constant Woman, a 1933 independent movie from KBS Productions, releasing through World Wide Pictures (which went belly-up due to the Depression while this and several other films were still in release; the rights were then picked up by Fox, and in 1938 an outfit called Atlantic Pictures picked it up and retitled it Hell in a Circus, and it seems the only extant prints are of the 1938 reissue: that’s the one we got and the one the American Film Institute Catalog reviewers saw). It’s an indication of the general quality of KBS Productions’ productions that though this was an indie, it had “A”-list, or at least “B-plus”-list, talents from the major studios both behind and in front of the cameras. The director was Victor Schertzinger, the writer was F. Hugh Herbert (adapting a one-act play called Recklessness by, of all people, Eugene O’Neill!), the cinematographer was Arthur Edeson (in between his tenure at Universal, where he shot All Quiet on the Western Front and Frankenstein, and his tenure at Warners, where he shot The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca) and the stars were Conrad Nagel and Leila Hyams.
Nagel plays Walt Underwood, an actor and manager of a tent-show theatrical company that advertises its stock of old-chestnut plays as “Direct from Broadway.” His other actors include his wife Marlene Underwood (Claire Windsor) and younger supporting player Lou (Leila Hyams), and the behind-the-scenes factotum who keeps everything running smoothly is Beef (Stanley Fields). The Underwoods’ teenage son Jimmie (Tommy Conlon) is Beef’s assistant, and there’s an early scene in which he receives a telegram and does so much hugging and fondling of the guy who delivered it that I began to wonder about his sexual orientation … but even in “pre-Code” Hollywood they weren’t about to go there. Instead, this film turns out to be six reels of soap opera with an action movie climax grafted on — and anyone who saw the reissue version under the Hell in a Circus title was probably discomfited, to say the least, that the circus didn’t appear until the last reel. The telegram is an offer from someone named Hassett for Marlene to come to Broadway and star in a play, which she insists on accepting — “I’m not getting any younger,” she tells Walt, “and this is my last chance” — even though he pleads with her to stay, not only because they’re finally making a bit of money but so they can stay together and both be there for Jimmie.
A month or so later, Walt’s troupe (with Lou taking over Marlene’s star parts) is booked in Reading, New York and Walt decides that he and Jimmie will take advantage of the proximity to go to New York City and visit Marlene. Only when they get to the hotel where she’s staying, they notice fire trucks outside and are told there was a fire and, while it was confined to one room (the firefighters put it out in time to keep it from spreading throughout the hotel), at least one person died in the room. When Walt and Jimmie show up at the front desk asking for Marlene, the hotel officials start acting very suspiciously and ultimately call Walt in for a private meeting at which they break him the bad news: Marlene is dead, killed in the room fire, and the remains of another victim, a man, were found with her. Evidently both had been drinking and one of them fell asleep with a lighted cigarette in hand, and the cigarette set the bedclothes on fire and ultimately burned both of them. Walt tells Jimmie that his mom’s death was purely accidental and leaves out the part about her having been with another man. Then Walt and Jimmie collect Marlene’s surviving possessions, and among them is a packet of love letters which Lou discovers that reveal that Jimmie is not Walt’s biological son.
Lou tries to conceal this from Walt but he finds it out anyway and, like Al Jolson’s character in The Singing Fool, he responds to the news of his wife’s betrayal by hanging out in speakeasies and drinking a lot. Without either Underwood, the fortunes of the Underwood Theatrical Company plummet, and they’re reduced to playing Galveston in the middle of the rainy season, where they don’t make any money to speak of and what they do gross is attached by the local sheriff. Realizing that the only way to save the business is to get Walt on the wagon and back in charge of it, Lou and Jimmie track him down — and the speakeasy owner says he won’t allow Walt to leave until someone pays the $52 bar tab he’s already run up (in 1933 dollars!). Instead Lou sends Beef and his crew to break Walt out of there if they have to start a fight and wreck the place to do it — which, of course, is exactly what happens. The other actors and crew members desert the Underwoods because they aren’t being paid, but Lou hits on the idea of rewriting their old scripts into episodes of a radio sitcom in which she and Walt can play husband and wife.
The show is a success and Walt and Lou fall in love for real — only Jimmie has a furious hissy-fit over the idea that his father is going to marry someone else four years after his mom died. He runs away, and it’s only a chance clue — when the police officer they’re talking to orders a roast-beef sandwich and both Walt and Lou simultaneously register the name “Beef” — that alerts them to what happened. Jimmie ran off and joined a circus. They go to see him, but in the meantime an elephant breaks loose and crashes the Big Top, which catches on fire (presumably from a cigarette dropped by a fleeing audience member), and the elephant upends one of the wagons used to transport dangerous animals and its occupant, a tiger, escapes. Jimmie is trapped under the wagon and Lou, trying to alert someone to save him, is mauled by the tiger before Biff arrives to save the day, lifting the wagon so Jimmie can escape and shooting the tiger to save Lou’s life. Of course, all this reconciles Jimmie to his (adoptive) father’s remarriage and all ends well.
Victor Schertzinger was best known for musicals and comedies — One Night of Love, Something to Sing About and the first two Bob Hope-Bing Crosby Road movies — and many of his musicals feature songs he wrote himself. But as a soap-opera director he was considerably less interesting, even though this film, whatever its faults, does keep us emotionally tied to the central characters and anxious for them, rooting for them to get over their problems and be successful and happy. It’s also got some neat scenes — the one in which Walt plays a dangerous game of bluff with the radio-station manager to get his contract renewed is especially good — and there’s at least a bit of music, a song in the background sung by a Rhythm Boys-like trio called “The Three Ambassadors.” Though the reissue title is tacky as well as deceptive, it’s nice to have this film — it’s no great shakes as drama but it is involving and emotionally fulfilling — even though most of the major “names” on it did much more illustrious work elsewhere.
Saturday, July 9, 2011
Action in Arabia (RKO, 1943)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Action in Arabia, a 1943 RKO “B” which was actually more or less begun a decade earlier under much more impressive auspices. The filmmaking team of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack had just finished shooting King Kong in late 1932 and for their next project decided to film a story by Philip MacDonald called Arabia, based on the life of T. E. Lawrence and to have starred John Barrymore. While Cooper stayed in the U.S. and supervised the post-production on Kong, Schoedsack took a crew out to the Syrian desert and shot some spectacular footage of local scenes and massed tribes preparing for war — and then the Lawrence film was canceled by RKO’s top brass in New York. Though there were periodic attempts to revive the project under such titles as The Uncrowned King and A Fugitive from Glory, the Cooper-Schoedsack Lawrence biopic never reached the screen (and in the next 30 years there were enough failed attempts to film Lawrence’s life that it acquired the reputation of a “jinxed” project until producer Sam Spiegel and director David Lean successfully made Lawrence of Arabia, an excellent movie artistically and also a blockbuster commercial hit).
In 1943 the Middle East was a hot topic for filmmakers because a good deal of World War II was taking place there, so RKO decided to commission a script that could use Schoedsack’s old footage and couple it to a wartime setting. Ironically, one of the writers they hired was Philip MacDonald, and they partnered him with future blacklistee Herbert J. Biberman — which made it odd that TCM was showing this film as part of a month-long series on reactionary Hollywood stereotypes of Arabs. Action in Arabia stars George Sanders (one of the few times, other than the Saint and Falcon detective series, he was top-billed) as an American reporter — the casting of Sanders as an American itself strains credibility almost to the breaking point! — named Michael Gordon, who’s supposedly in Damascus just for a vacation (yeah, right) but ends up in the middle of international intrigue when his friend and traveling companion William Chalmers (Robert Anderson) is murdered.
It turns out that there’s a good Arab chief, Abdul El Rashid (H. B. Warner — well, he played Jesus Christ so we know he must be a good guy!), who wants to unite all the Arabs on the side of the Allies, and a bad Arab chief, Eben Kareem (Jamiel Hasson), who wants to unite them on the side of the Axis. The film plods through quite a few situations, and offers some characters of decidedly mixed loyalties — like fellow American Matthew Reed (Robert Armstrong, ill-used as usual after King Kong and its sequel, Son of Kong); supposedly French card cheat Josef Danesco (Gene Lockhart); his daughter, Yvonne Danesco (Virginia Bruce, as generally ill-used as Armstrong; she made one genuinely great film, the 1934 Jane Eyre, but because it was a Monogram production and almost nobody saw it she continued in the salt mines of tacky supporting roles in “A” movies like Born to Dance and almost as tacky leads in “B”’s like this); André Leroux (André Charlot), another pretend Frenchman who seems up to no good (in the opening scene Gordon and Chalmers mention that he’s changed his name and the cut of his beard since they saw him on the plane, but this may relate to footage that wasn’t used in the release print since nothing of this is made in the film itself); and Abdul El Rashid’s daughter Mounirah (Lenore Aubert, a beautiful actress who deserved more of a career — her biggest role was as Count Dracula’s girlfriend in the 1948 Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein), whom Gordon meets as soon as he gets off the plane in Syria and to whom he reacts so lasciviously, in that marvelously practiced seduction routine of his, we practically expect this film to be called The Saint in Damascus.
By far the best parts of Action in Arabia are the scenes Ernest B. Schoedsack had shot in real-life Syria a decade before (even though they’re noticeably grainier than the new footage), suggesting that this mediocre film is where a potentially great one went to die (and what film buff wouldn’t have wanted a chance to compare John Barrymore with Peter O’Toole as Lawrence of Arabia?), and the next best parts of it are the scenes between Sanders and Bruce, playing a part (like almost all of hers) for which she was way overqualified but still bringing it a welcome dignity and grace even though it’s obvious that her casting was fulfilling a Hollywood stereotype — “blonde girl good, dark-haired girl bad.”
The director was Léonide Moguy, a Frenchman who had an odd and not especially successful career — the next year he made Whistle Stop with George Raft and Ava Gardner, not a great movie but at least a reasonably good film noir that led Ava to an even better one, the original The Killers, and the noir world of Whistle Stop was obviously one he felt more at home in than the international intrigue of Action in Arabia. Curiously, Action in Arabia begins with a prologue showing a map of the Mediterranean with a narrator explaining that the Axis was attacking the “Allied lifelines” through the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas and the Suez Canal — obviously the folks at RKO were hoping viewers would watch this prologue and think they were in for another Casablanca, especially since they used the same narrator, Lou Marcelle.
The film was Action in Arabia, a 1943 RKO “B” which was actually more or less begun a decade earlier under much more impressive auspices. The filmmaking team of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack had just finished shooting King Kong in late 1932 and for their next project decided to film a story by Philip MacDonald called Arabia, based on the life of T. E. Lawrence and to have starred John Barrymore. While Cooper stayed in the U.S. and supervised the post-production on Kong, Schoedsack took a crew out to the Syrian desert and shot some spectacular footage of local scenes and massed tribes preparing for war — and then the Lawrence film was canceled by RKO’s top brass in New York. Though there were periodic attempts to revive the project under such titles as The Uncrowned King and A Fugitive from Glory, the Cooper-Schoedsack Lawrence biopic never reached the screen (and in the next 30 years there were enough failed attempts to film Lawrence’s life that it acquired the reputation of a “jinxed” project until producer Sam Spiegel and director David Lean successfully made Lawrence of Arabia, an excellent movie artistically and also a blockbuster commercial hit).
In 1943 the Middle East was a hot topic for filmmakers because a good deal of World War II was taking place there, so RKO decided to commission a script that could use Schoedsack’s old footage and couple it to a wartime setting. Ironically, one of the writers they hired was Philip MacDonald, and they partnered him with future blacklistee Herbert J. Biberman — which made it odd that TCM was showing this film as part of a month-long series on reactionary Hollywood stereotypes of Arabs. Action in Arabia stars George Sanders (one of the few times, other than the Saint and Falcon detective series, he was top-billed) as an American reporter — the casting of Sanders as an American itself strains credibility almost to the breaking point! — named Michael Gordon, who’s supposedly in Damascus just for a vacation (yeah, right) but ends up in the middle of international intrigue when his friend and traveling companion William Chalmers (Robert Anderson) is murdered.
It turns out that there’s a good Arab chief, Abdul El Rashid (H. B. Warner — well, he played Jesus Christ so we know he must be a good guy!), who wants to unite all the Arabs on the side of the Allies, and a bad Arab chief, Eben Kareem (Jamiel Hasson), who wants to unite them on the side of the Axis. The film plods through quite a few situations, and offers some characters of decidedly mixed loyalties — like fellow American Matthew Reed (Robert Armstrong, ill-used as usual after King Kong and its sequel, Son of Kong); supposedly French card cheat Josef Danesco (Gene Lockhart); his daughter, Yvonne Danesco (Virginia Bruce, as generally ill-used as Armstrong; she made one genuinely great film, the 1934 Jane Eyre, but because it was a Monogram production and almost nobody saw it she continued in the salt mines of tacky supporting roles in “A” movies like Born to Dance and almost as tacky leads in “B”’s like this); André Leroux (André Charlot), another pretend Frenchman who seems up to no good (in the opening scene Gordon and Chalmers mention that he’s changed his name and the cut of his beard since they saw him on the plane, but this may relate to footage that wasn’t used in the release print since nothing of this is made in the film itself); and Abdul El Rashid’s daughter Mounirah (Lenore Aubert, a beautiful actress who deserved more of a career — her biggest role was as Count Dracula’s girlfriend in the 1948 Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein), whom Gordon meets as soon as he gets off the plane in Syria and to whom he reacts so lasciviously, in that marvelously practiced seduction routine of his, we practically expect this film to be called The Saint in Damascus.
By far the best parts of Action in Arabia are the scenes Ernest B. Schoedsack had shot in real-life Syria a decade before (even though they’re noticeably grainier than the new footage), suggesting that this mediocre film is where a potentially great one went to die (and what film buff wouldn’t have wanted a chance to compare John Barrymore with Peter O’Toole as Lawrence of Arabia?), and the next best parts of it are the scenes between Sanders and Bruce, playing a part (like almost all of hers) for which she was way overqualified but still bringing it a welcome dignity and grace even though it’s obvious that her casting was fulfilling a Hollywood stereotype — “blonde girl good, dark-haired girl bad.”
The director was Léonide Moguy, a Frenchman who had an odd and not especially successful career — the next year he made Whistle Stop with George Raft and Ava Gardner, not a great movie but at least a reasonably good film noir that led Ava to an even better one, the original The Killers, and the noir world of Whistle Stop was obviously one he felt more at home in than the international intrigue of Action in Arabia. Curiously, Action in Arabia begins with a prologue showing a map of the Mediterranean with a narrator explaining that the Axis was attacking the “Allied lifelines” through the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas and the Suez Canal — obviously the folks at RKO were hoping viewers would watch this prologue and think they were in for another Casablanca, especially since they used the same narrator, Lou Marcelle.
Friday, July 8, 2011
MOXIE’s Poster Boys at Diversionary: Funny … and More
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
You wouldn’t know it from the press materials on Poster Boys, the current U.S. premiere co-production of Diversionary and MOXIE at the Diversionary space, 4545 Park Boulevard in University Heights, but the play is inspired by a true story. In 2003 Vancity, a credit union based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, mounted an ad campaign that tried to build business by highlighting — or shamelessly exploiting, depending on your point of view — Vancity’s Queer members. The ads featured photos of same-sex couples and bore the slogan, “I want to bank with people who value all partnerships.” The Vancouver archdiocese of the Roman Catholic Church responded by pulling out of a school program sponsored by Vancity.
Playwright Michele Riml was working at Grey Global Group, the advertising agency that had created Vancity’s “value all partnerships” campaign, and she saw a great idea for a play about the controversy. Only it took her a while to write it, she told interviewers before Poster Boys had its world premiere in Vancouver in March 2008, because she first had to work through her anger at the incident. “For me, anger is not a good place to write from,” she said. As she began to work out her plot, she created the central character of Caroline, a 40-something ad executive at the Zenspiration agency who’s angling for a promotion to vice-president even though her personal life is a mess.
Caroline sees the chance for a career breakthrough when the executives at the Clearwater Credit Union in Orlando, Florida decide to do a series of ads promoting “cultural diversity” — which, it soon develops, is code for “Gay.” She instructs her ambitious assistant and out-of-office boy-toy, Brad (Justin Lang), to come up with the perfect Gay poster boy for Clearwater’s campaign. Brad brings back an unprepossessing middle-aged man named Jack (John Anderson), who shows up at Zenspiration in the sweat shirt and blue bike shorts he was wearing when Brad ran into him. Caroline is unexpectedly (at least if you haven’t read the promotional material for the play) on edge about getting involved with Jack professionally — because, it turns out, 13 years previously she was involved with Jack personally, not only as his lover but as his fiancée. The two had actually got as far as setting a wedding date before Jack decided he’d had enough and came out as Gay — “He wanted to wear a purple cummerbund,” Caroline grimly jokes; “that should have been the giveaway” — and Caroline has been gun-shy about anything resembling a serious relationship ever since.
The plot thickens when Caroline and Brad realize that a photo layout of one man really doesn’t say “Gay.” They decide they need two men in a committed relationship and rather nervously ask if Jack has a partner. He does: Carson (Charles Maze), a rising young architect who’s been with Jack for five years. Carson is also a hard-core Roman Catholic who insists on saying grace before every meal he and Jack share, and given his church’s belief (stated 27 years ago by the current Pope) that homosexuality is “an objective moral disorder” and their extensive donations to anti-Queer political candidates and ballot measures, being a Queer Catholic is close to the mother of all cognitive dissonances. The plot of Poster Boys turns on Jack’s and Carson’s discomfort with the process by which they’re made over into images for Queer equality and both their appearances and backgrounds are remodeled into commodities that will sell a product.
The promotion line for the Diversionary/MOXIE production — “An advertising executive’s ‘diversity’ campaign runs afoul of the Catholic Church. She can handle that. What she can’t handle is that one of the poster boys is her ex-fiancé” — suggests that Poster Boys will either be a sitcom or a farce, and that it will turn into a romantic triangle (or a romantic quadrilateral) as Caroline and Jack find themselves re-attracted to each other and Carson gets jealous. Nothing of the sort happens; though Poster Boys is quite funny it’s also a much richer drama than the ads for it suggest. Riml clearly regards Jack as definitively Gay — whatever drew him to Caroline in the first place, which is kept ambiguous, it’s clear he’s committed not only to Carson but to a Gay identity and, if anything is going to break them up, doubt about Jack’s sexual orientation is not going to be it.
Riml’s great gift as a playwright is a kind of sly subtlety that enables her to say quite a lot — about advertising, capitalism in general, the social creation of “reality,” emotional relationships and how people react differently to them as they age — without hammering the audience over the head with it. In one scene we see Jack and Carson at dinner — and then, in a staging maneuver director Delicia Turner Sonnenberg makes look more like a quick cut in a film than anything we’d expect in live theatre — Caroline is in Carson’s place and the scene becomes a dream of the marriage they could have had. Riml’s gag is that Jack and Carson are behaving like a typical straight couple — the issues in their relationship aren’t sex but money and careers (indeed, we get the distinct impression that whatever sexual fires brought them together are pretty well banked by now) — while Caroline is behaving like a stereotypical middle-aged Gay man, reliving her youth by seeking a much younger male partner for frenzied, emotionless sex.
Throughout the play, Caroline is bedeviled by two authoritative voices coaxing her, sometimes to the point of browbeating her. One comes from her boss at Zenspiration, Marty (who was an unseen voice in the Vancouver production but, in an inspired touch from director Turner Sonnenberg, is seen here as an image as well as a voice, supposedly in wireless communication with Caroline via computer, though the program doesn’t credit the actor who plays him), who’s hectoring her to come up with the “branding” for the Clearwater account that will turn it from a one-shot ad to something that will make people what Caroline calls “brand believers” in Clearwater. The other is a character identified only as “The Woman,” whom Riml stipulates must be played in drag by the same actor who plays Carson, who materializes in Caroline’s consciousness (usually accompanied by memories of airplane flights — Caroline is chronically airsick but her job requires her to fly a lot) and gives her a ragbag of advice, some good (like “be yourself”) and some bad (like “take Botox”).
Poster Boys is an engaging script that builds to a riveting climax in which the whole task of pushing Jack and Carson as the ideal Gay couple flashes back to Caroline’s own trauma when Jack left her and declared himself Gay, while Jack and Carson both rebel against the whole idea of going through a wedding ceremony sponsored by a corporation. It seemed to be leading up to an ending in which Jack and Carson would have realized that, like it or not, in today’s hyper-capitalist age virtually the only way to get a political or social message out to an audience large enough to matter is to get a corporation or a rich person to sponsor it — and so they would go through the showcase wedding, Clearwater would get their branding (and the boost to their business they were hoping for) and Caroline her promotion — or maybe younger, cuter, more energetic Brad would have back-stabbed her out of it and got the vice-presidency himself. Instead Riml resorted to a clichéd finish straight out of the 1945 novel The Hucksters (and the 1947 film based on it) and quite a few other stories since that have dealt with advertising and how one can’t succeed in it and still maintain a conscience.
But the disappointing conclusion doesn’t invalidate what’s gone before — or the marvelous work MOXIE’s and Diversionary’s people have done bringing Riml’s finely honed play to life. Director Turner Sonnenberg has staged it with such precision that, as noted above, at times it seems more like a movie than a play, and she and lighting director Michelle Caron have worked out a series of cues that allows us to follow multiple planes of action without ever having to wonder which we’re supposed to think is more important. Turner Sonnenberg has also cast the play perfectly — indeed, if the reviews of the Vancouver premiere online are to be believed, she cast at least one part better than they did. Vancouver critic Colin Thomas said Carson was “as camp as a row of tents” — but fortunately that’s not how he’s played here. Charles Maze delivers a rich characterization that projects Carson as proud of his career and also his homemaking skills, accepting himself as Gay while still being burdened by the clash between his sincere belief in the faith of his fathers and the nasty things it has to say about him as a Gay man. He’s equally good — and non-campy — as “The Woman,” delivering his lines matter-of-factly and without a hint of flounce.
The other cast members are equally fine. Julie Anderson Sachs nails both Caroline’s assertiveness and her underlying vulnerability. She’s a genuinely attractive woman but, thanks to Caron’s merciless lighting and a minimal makeup job (oddly, here as in the past MOXIE doesn’t credit a makeup artist), we see her crow’s feet and the lines on her face and feel for her fears about advancing age. John Anderson is good in a befuddled, what-have-I-got-myself-into? mode as Jack, and he achieves pathos when he has to admit that he too shaded his background (representing himself as co-owner of an independent bookstore when in fact he’s just the store manager), though Riml rather underwrote the character and didn’t make him strong enough for us to see what attracted either Caroline or Carson to him. Justin Lang is genuinely hot and nails Brad’s irrepressible energy while keeping us guessing whether he’s really attracted to Caroline or just screwing her to boost his own career.
The action of Poster Boys is punctuated by a series of pop songs played over the theatre’s sound system, and sometimes sung by the cast (the scene in which Caroline and Jack perform “I Got You, Babe” at a karaoke bar, with Caroline taking Sonny’s part and Jack taking Cher’s, is especially precious). Some of the records are by k. d. lang, who’s actually mentioned in the script, while others are genuinely surprising — Eric Carmen’s tacky 1970’s power-pop ballad “All By Myself” becomes the center of one of the play’s most powerful scenes. Sound designer Tom Jones proves effective at D.J.’ing all this music and also supplying effects like the airplane noises that accompany “The Woman”’s appearances. The play takes place on a simple set — or rather a pair of sets, one for Caroline’s office and one for Jack’s and Conrad’s dining room, which the action cuts back and forth between — ably rendered by Matt Scott with aid from “media designer” Luke Olsen’s back-wall projections. Costume designer Jeannie Galioto has outfitted Caroline with convincing simulacra of the designer dresses she boasts of wearing, and David Medina’s props are convincing if not especially challenging.
Poster Boys is a must-see, a typical MOXIE production — a powerful script that takes aim at some of our most cherished stereotypes of sexual orientation (in general artists have been a lot more flexible than the Queer community’s political leaders about how people can change from opposite-sex to same-sex relationships — or, more controversially, the other way around), religious belief, capitalism, personal integrity and authenticity. Riml’s play is expertly realized by director Turner Sonnenberg and an excellent cast and crew, though there’s one irony she probably didn’t intend: on the inside front cover of the program is a paid ad from Wells Fargo Bank with a photo of two men (considerably hotter-looking than John Anderson and Charles Maze!) in the street, leaning into each other in an unmistakable “we’re together” pose, with copy boasting that Wells Fargo has “made significant contributions to LGBT organizations over the past 20 years.” In other words, they’re using the program to sell themselves in the same preposterous ways the play itself so hilariously and devastatingly ridicules!
Poster Boys runs through Sunday, July 31 at Diversionary Theatre, 4545 Park Boulevard in University Heights. A MOXIE Theatre co-production. Performances are 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and 2 p.m. Sundays, with special performances Monday, July 18 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, July 31 at 7 p.m. For tickets and other information, call (619) 220-0097 or visit www.diversionary.org
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Springtime in the Rockies (20th Century-Fox, 1942)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I screened Springtime in the Rockies, a 1942 20th Century-Fox musical starring Betty Grable, John Payne, Carmen Miranda and Harry James and His Music Makers (they were one of the few big swing bands that actually had a name instead of just “So-and-So and His Orchestra”), and according to Robert Osborne, when they made the movie, James was still dating his great singer, Helen Forrest, and he didn’t seem all that interested in Grable — which made it a shocker a year later when James and Grable married each other (much to the surprise of just about everybody at 20th Century-Fox and the disgust of Helen Forrest, who didn’t appreciate having been jilted and especially not for someone whose legs and ass were prominently featured in pin-up pictures liberally distributed through the ranks of U.S. servicemembers in World War II).
It was an O.K. musical but hardly in the same league as some of the other Fox productions of the time — The Gang’s All Here was made a year later and, though the female lead was Alice Faye instead of Grable, it carried over three cast members from Springtime in the Rockies (Carmen Miranda, Charlotte Greenwood and Edward Everett Horton) and had a much better score (Harry Warren composed the songs for both films, but in Springtime in the Rockies he came up with only one great song, “I Had the Craziest Dream,” and aside from that the best songs in Springtime were oldies from his previous scores — “At Last” heard on the background track and “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” marvelously sung by Miranda in a samba version, in Portuguese — remember that Miranda’s contract with Fox required that they let her sing at least one number in her native tongue in each movie).
The main problem with Springtime is too little music and too much plot: it started as a story by Philip Wylie (which had previously formed the basis for a non-musical comedy, Second Honeymoon, made at Fox in 1937 and starring Tyrone Power and Loretta Young), and given that his best known credits were When Worlds Collide and a supposedly “nonfiction” book called A Generation of Vipers that blamed all American men’s problems on their mothers, his seems like an odd name to see on a movie that was supposed to be a light, frothy musical. The story (adapted by Jacques Théry and scripted by Walter Bullock and Ken Englund, and directed by Irving Cummings — who’d improved from the early-talkie crudities of In Old Arizona and Behind That Curtain but still was far from the most scintillating director in Hollywood, and as the helmsman for a musical was miles behind Busby Berkeley!) starts on the last night of a Broadway musical co-starring Vicky Lane (Grable) and Dan Christy (Payne).
They’re more or less in love but she can’t stand his seeing other girlfriends (there’s a nice gag scene in which she explains to her confidante, the Charlotte Greenwood role, that she can always tell which other girlfriend he’s just seen because of which perfume he smells like), and when the show closes she hooks up with her former dance partner/boyfriend Victor Prince (César Romero, looking like an animated tailor’s dummy as usual) and the two get a job at a resort in the Canadian Rockies (they’re billed together as “Victor and Victoria”!), where most of the rest of the film takes place. Dan goes into a drunken binge from which he recovers to find that he’s been offered a new show, but only if he can persuade Vicki to be in it with him. Along the way, thanks to further drunken sprees, he finds himself with valet McTavish (Edward Everett Horton) and “secretary” Rosita Murphy (Carmen Miranda), and there’s the usual series of romantic misunderstandings before Dan finally seduces Vicki, the backers of the new show turn up, Vicki has a hissy-fit and thinks that Dan romanced her only to get her in his cast, so Dan relocates their New York “honeymoon” to California and thereby loses his backers, only McTavish turns out to have money and finances the show — whose opening number is our big finale.
The best parts of Springtime in the Rockies are all that azure-blue scenery from cinematographer Ernest Palmer (even though it’s all too obvious that none of the stars were ever near the Canadian Rockies during the shoot and it’s all process work) and two songs, “I Had the Craziest Dream” (though the great ballad is not staged terribly well — Helen Forrest is obliged to come in during the middle of it dressed in Native American costume, and two genuine Native Americans, including the legendary Hollywood Indian Iron Eyes Cody, stand at the sidelines and make comments) and the finale, “Pan-American Jubilee.” It’s also nicely bizarre to see two women (Greenwood and Miranda) fighting over the dubious charms of Edward Everett Horton, and eventually (contrary to our expectations that the two Latinos in the cast would pair off) Horton ends up with Miranda, Romero with Greenwood and Payne with Grable — though how much longer their relationship will last, given that he’s still in New York City and still greatly tempted by all the other women who were tempting him before, is anybody’s guess. The opening number is called “Run, Little Raindrop, Run” and is staged in a fake rainstorm on stage — and for choreographer Hermes Pan, this must have been an unpleasant moment of dèja vu given that seven years earlier he’d worked on the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film Top Hat and staged a similar, but far greater, number in the rain to a better song (Irving Berlin’s “Isn’t This a Lovely Day?”) and, of course, far superior performers!
I screened Springtime in the Rockies, a 1942 20th Century-Fox musical starring Betty Grable, John Payne, Carmen Miranda and Harry James and His Music Makers (they were one of the few big swing bands that actually had a name instead of just “So-and-So and His Orchestra”), and according to Robert Osborne, when they made the movie, James was still dating his great singer, Helen Forrest, and he didn’t seem all that interested in Grable — which made it a shocker a year later when James and Grable married each other (much to the surprise of just about everybody at 20th Century-Fox and the disgust of Helen Forrest, who didn’t appreciate having been jilted and especially not for someone whose legs and ass were prominently featured in pin-up pictures liberally distributed through the ranks of U.S. servicemembers in World War II).
It was an O.K. musical but hardly in the same league as some of the other Fox productions of the time — The Gang’s All Here was made a year later and, though the female lead was Alice Faye instead of Grable, it carried over three cast members from Springtime in the Rockies (Carmen Miranda, Charlotte Greenwood and Edward Everett Horton) and had a much better score (Harry Warren composed the songs for both films, but in Springtime in the Rockies he came up with only one great song, “I Had the Craziest Dream,” and aside from that the best songs in Springtime were oldies from his previous scores — “At Last” heard on the background track and “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” marvelously sung by Miranda in a samba version, in Portuguese — remember that Miranda’s contract with Fox required that they let her sing at least one number in her native tongue in each movie).
The main problem with Springtime is too little music and too much plot: it started as a story by Philip Wylie (which had previously formed the basis for a non-musical comedy, Second Honeymoon, made at Fox in 1937 and starring Tyrone Power and Loretta Young), and given that his best known credits were When Worlds Collide and a supposedly “nonfiction” book called A Generation of Vipers that blamed all American men’s problems on their mothers, his seems like an odd name to see on a movie that was supposed to be a light, frothy musical. The story (adapted by Jacques Théry and scripted by Walter Bullock and Ken Englund, and directed by Irving Cummings — who’d improved from the early-talkie crudities of In Old Arizona and Behind That Curtain but still was far from the most scintillating director in Hollywood, and as the helmsman for a musical was miles behind Busby Berkeley!) starts on the last night of a Broadway musical co-starring Vicky Lane (Grable) and Dan Christy (Payne).
They’re more or less in love but she can’t stand his seeing other girlfriends (there’s a nice gag scene in which she explains to her confidante, the Charlotte Greenwood role, that she can always tell which other girlfriend he’s just seen because of which perfume he smells like), and when the show closes she hooks up with her former dance partner/boyfriend Victor Prince (César Romero, looking like an animated tailor’s dummy as usual) and the two get a job at a resort in the Canadian Rockies (they’re billed together as “Victor and Victoria”!), where most of the rest of the film takes place. Dan goes into a drunken binge from which he recovers to find that he’s been offered a new show, but only if he can persuade Vicki to be in it with him. Along the way, thanks to further drunken sprees, he finds himself with valet McTavish (Edward Everett Horton) and “secretary” Rosita Murphy (Carmen Miranda), and there’s the usual series of romantic misunderstandings before Dan finally seduces Vicki, the backers of the new show turn up, Vicki has a hissy-fit and thinks that Dan romanced her only to get her in his cast, so Dan relocates their New York “honeymoon” to California and thereby loses his backers, only McTavish turns out to have money and finances the show — whose opening number is our big finale.
The best parts of Springtime in the Rockies are all that azure-blue scenery from cinematographer Ernest Palmer (even though it’s all too obvious that none of the stars were ever near the Canadian Rockies during the shoot and it’s all process work) and two songs, “I Had the Craziest Dream” (though the great ballad is not staged terribly well — Helen Forrest is obliged to come in during the middle of it dressed in Native American costume, and two genuine Native Americans, including the legendary Hollywood Indian Iron Eyes Cody, stand at the sidelines and make comments) and the finale, “Pan-American Jubilee.” It’s also nicely bizarre to see two women (Greenwood and Miranda) fighting over the dubious charms of Edward Everett Horton, and eventually (contrary to our expectations that the two Latinos in the cast would pair off) Horton ends up with Miranda, Romero with Greenwood and Payne with Grable — though how much longer their relationship will last, given that he’s still in New York City and still greatly tempted by all the other women who were tempting him before, is anybody’s guess. The opening number is called “Run, Little Raindrop, Run” and is staged in a fake rainstorm on stage — and for choreographer Hermes Pan, this must have been an unpleasant moment of dèja vu given that seven years earlier he’d worked on the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film Top Hat and staged a similar, but far greater, number in the rain to a better song (Irving Berlin’s “Isn’t This a Lovely Day?”) and, of course, far superior performers!
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (Apatow/Columbia/GH Three, 2007)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I got home in time to watch a movie, and I wanted to screen one of the ones we recently picked up from the bargain table at Vons: Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, a so-called “mockumentary” (one of those made-up words from P.R. people I can’t stand — it’s not as bad as “dramedy” but it’s close) about the decidedly fictitious pop-music star Dewey Cox (John C. Reilly, voice-doubled by Michael Andrews), who first makes it big in 1953 with a hit song called “Walk Hard” that sounds like primitive rockabilly and keeps going until 2007, when the film was made. It opens with Cox being told he’s expected on stage in a minute or two, and we see him leaning his head against a wall as an offstage voice says, “Before he can go on, he’s got to review the whole story of his life.” The whole story of his life then unfolds for us in a series of flashbacks that starts out with Dewey growing up dirt-poor in Springberry, Alabama with his father (Raymond J. Barry), mother (Margo Martindale) and brother Nate (Chip Hormess), of whom his parents expect great things: he’s already a classical piano prodigy and he lists all the things he wants to be when he grows up, from astronaut to President.
Needless to say, Nate is not long for this world; in what’s pretty obviously a spoof of Walk the Line, the Johnny Cash biopic from which writers Judd Apatow and Jake Kasdan (Kasdan also directed) took the basic spine of their plot, the two brothers have a fight in the barn with machetes and Dewey slices Nate in half — in a gag pretty obviously borrowed from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the top half remains animate for quite some time — while throughout the rest of the movie Dewey’s dad sometimes mutters, sometimes spits out and sometimes sings, “The wrong kid died.” Dewey learns to play blues guitar from a (presumably) homeless Black person, played by real-life ancient blues singer David “Honeyboy” Edwards (this is pretty clearly an offtake on the legend that Hank Williams, Sr. learned guitar from an itinerant Black musician named “Teetot”), and picks it up with impressive speed. Then he gets a job sweeping and mopping the floors at a Black nightclub until one day the star attraction, a Jackie Wilson-style soul singer, shows up with his hands heavily bandaged from a household accident and Dewey goes on in his place and sings an ode to being — and having a woman who loves — a “Negro man.” (In 1947 Frankie Laine actually recorded “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue?,” so as ridiculous as this scene seems it actually has some grounding in reality.)
His performance is witnessed by three Jewish scouts who become his managers and get him an audition with Planet Records (read: Elvis Presley at Sun Records), which he nearly blows by coming in with a rock version of Dean Martin’s hit “That’s Amore” (an in-joke reference to the real Elvis, who likewise came into the Sun studio and tried to impress owner Sam Phillips by sounding like Dean Martin; Phillips asked Elvis if he knew any blues, and it turned out he and the band members there to accompany him, Scotty Moore and Bill Black, knew several songs by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup and started jamming on them; Phillips picked out “That’s All Right, Mama,” and that became Elvis’s first record). Then on the spot he makes up the song that will be his star-making hit, “Walk Hard.” The 14-year-old Cox becomes a major star and marries his 12-year-old girlfriend Edith (Kristen Wiig, who’s been much talked about recently as the next major talent to break from independent films to mainstream stardom) even though she continually belittles him and says he’s going to fail … after he’s already bought her a house and they’ve had three kids. The film’s plot then loosely follows the evolution of pop music over the next 30 years or so, as Dewey becomes a Zelig-like character. He meets and falls in love with a church singer named Darlene Madison (Jenna Fischer), and in yet another scene clearly “borrowed” from Walk the Line they sing a song together called “Let’s Duet,” with more double entendres than any song I can think of since back in the 1920’s and 1930’s when double entendres were the only way you could write a song about sex.
Then Dewey discovers politics and turns into a Bob Dylan-esque protest singer (the songs he sings in this phase, which take Dylan’s famously imagistic lyrics and push them into total gibberish, are among the most hilarious in the whole movie), after which he meets the Beatles (three of whom are played by reasonable simulacra, though Jack Black makes an ill-advised cameo as Paul McCartney even though the two look nothing alike), and after that he goes to India to meditate with the Maharishi and the Beatles and comes back majorly hooked on LSD (needless to say, Cox gets nearly every drug habit known to real-life music stars — though Kasdan and Apatow stopped short of having him do heroin — all in the same way: he bursts into the dressing room occupied by the rest of his band, and his long-time drummer says, “You don’t want to mess with that shit,” and of course he does) and involved in a demented recording project obviously patterned on Brian Wilson’s Smile (at one point he decides that one didgeridoo isn’t enough for him and he needs 50,000 of them) that isn’t finished and ends when he’s busted for PCP and, for the second time in the movie, he goes into rehab. Eventually he settles things with his father — he cuts him in half with a machete the way he did with his brother — and one of his kids comes along and whines that they never played catch, so Dewey retires and spends the next couple of decades playing catch with his kids — all 36 of them by his two wives and various groupies and tricks. Then he’s recruited to receive a lifetime achievement award on a live TV show for which he writes his final song, “A Wonderful Ride,” and he performs it with a real-life all-star aggregation — and the film fades out as a title tells us Dewey Cox died just three hours after giving that performance.
Though not quite at the level of This Is Spinal Tap, A Mighty Wind or the virtually forgotten granddaddy of all mock/rockumentaries, All You Need Is Cash (the brilliant coming together of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and the original Saturday Night Live cast to spoof the Beatles as “the Rutles, the Pre-Fab Four”), Walk Hard is great fun. The gross-out gags and blatant sexual references the Apatow school of comedy is known for are here but they’re not as offensive as usual, and Apatow and Kasdan clearly knew (or had done their homework on) rock history: much of the fun of this movie is trying, moment by moment, to guess what real rock stars they’re making fun of. There’s even a bit of full-frontal male nudity in this one — Dewey Cox is polymorphously perverse — and overall Walk Hard is a great light-entertainment movie, held together by Reilly’s performance as well as a great set of gags. My favorite moment is when Edith catches him sucking Darlene’s toes and Dewey informs Edith that he’s married to Darlene — and Edith reminds him that he’s married to her and it’s illegal to be married to two people at once. “It is?” says Dewey. I also liked the scene in which Dewey talks about how he’s surrounded by temptations — and then the film cuts to five old Black guys singing “My Girl” in close harmony, and Dewey says, “Oh, no! The Temptations!”
Charles and I got home in time to watch a movie, and I wanted to screen one of the ones we recently picked up from the bargain table at Vons: Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, a so-called “mockumentary” (one of those made-up words from P.R. people I can’t stand — it’s not as bad as “dramedy” but it’s close) about the decidedly fictitious pop-music star Dewey Cox (John C. Reilly, voice-doubled by Michael Andrews), who first makes it big in 1953 with a hit song called “Walk Hard” that sounds like primitive rockabilly and keeps going until 2007, when the film was made. It opens with Cox being told he’s expected on stage in a minute or two, and we see him leaning his head against a wall as an offstage voice says, “Before he can go on, he’s got to review the whole story of his life.” The whole story of his life then unfolds for us in a series of flashbacks that starts out with Dewey growing up dirt-poor in Springberry, Alabama with his father (Raymond J. Barry), mother (Margo Martindale) and brother Nate (Chip Hormess), of whom his parents expect great things: he’s already a classical piano prodigy and he lists all the things he wants to be when he grows up, from astronaut to President.
Needless to say, Nate is not long for this world; in what’s pretty obviously a spoof of Walk the Line, the Johnny Cash biopic from which writers Judd Apatow and Jake Kasdan (Kasdan also directed) took the basic spine of their plot, the two brothers have a fight in the barn with machetes and Dewey slices Nate in half — in a gag pretty obviously borrowed from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the top half remains animate for quite some time — while throughout the rest of the movie Dewey’s dad sometimes mutters, sometimes spits out and sometimes sings, “The wrong kid died.” Dewey learns to play blues guitar from a (presumably) homeless Black person, played by real-life ancient blues singer David “Honeyboy” Edwards (this is pretty clearly an offtake on the legend that Hank Williams, Sr. learned guitar from an itinerant Black musician named “Teetot”), and picks it up with impressive speed. Then he gets a job sweeping and mopping the floors at a Black nightclub until one day the star attraction, a Jackie Wilson-style soul singer, shows up with his hands heavily bandaged from a household accident and Dewey goes on in his place and sings an ode to being — and having a woman who loves — a “Negro man.” (In 1947 Frankie Laine actually recorded “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue?,” so as ridiculous as this scene seems it actually has some grounding in reality.)
His performance is witnessed by three Jewish scouts who become his managers and get him an audition with Planet Records (read: Elvis Presley at Sun Records), which he nearly blows by coming in with a rock version of Dean Martin’s hit “That’s Amore” (an in-joke reference to the real Elvis, who likewise came into the Sun studio and tried to impress owner Sam Phillips by sounding like Dean Martin; Phillips asked Elvis if he knew any blues, and it turned out he and the band members there to accompany him, Scotty Moore and Bill Black, knew several songs by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup and started jamming on them; Phillips picked out “That’s All Right, Mama,” and that became Elvis’s first record). Then on the spot he makes up the song that will be his star-making hit, “Walk Hard.” The 14-year-old Cox becomes a major star and marries his 12-year-old girlfriend Edith (Kristen Wiig, who’s been much talked about recently as the next major talent to break from independent films to mainstream stardom) even though she continually belittles him and says he’s going to fail … after he’s already bought her a house and they’ve had three kids. The film’s plot then loosely follows the evolution of pop music over the next 30 years or so, as Dewey becomes a Zelig-like character. He meets and falls in love with a church singer named Darlene Madison (Jenna Fischer), and in yet another scene clearly “borrowed” from Walk the Line they sing a song together called “Let’s Duet,” with more double entendres than any song I can think of since back in the 1920’s and 1930’s when double entendres were the only way you could write a song about sex.
Then Dewey discovers politics and turns into a Bob Dylan-esque protest singer (the songs he sings in this phase, which take Dylan’s famously imagistic lyrics and push them into total gibberish, are among the most hilarious in the whole movie), after which he meets the Beatles (three of whom are played by reasonable simulacra, though Jack Black makes an ill-advised cameo as Paul McCartney even though the two look nothing alike), and after that he goes to India to meditate with the Maharishi and the Beatles and comes back majorly hooked on LSD (needless to say, Cox gets nearly every drug habit known to real-life music stars — though Kasdan and Apatow stopped short of having him do heroin — all in the same way: he bursts into the dressing room occupied by the rest of his band, and his long-time drummer says, “You don’t want to mess with that shit,” and of course he does) and involved in a demented recording project obviously patterned on Brian Wilson’s Smile (at one point he decides that one didgeridoo isn’t enough for him and he needs 50,000 of them) that isn’t finished and ends when he’s busted for PCP and, for the second time in the movie, he goes into rehab. Eventually he settles things with his father — he cuts him in half with a machete the way he did with his brother — and one of his kids comes along and whines that they never played catch, so Dewey retires and spends the next couple of decades playing catch with his kids — all 36 of them by his two wives and various groupies and tricks. Then he’s recruited to receive a lifetime achievement award on a live TV show for which he writes his final song, “A Wonderful Ride,” and he performs it with a real-life all-star aggregation — and the film fades out as a title tells us Dewey Cox died just three hours after giving that performance.
Though not quite at the level of This Is Spinal Tap, A Mighty Wind or the virtually forgotten granddaddy of all mock/rockumentaries, All You Need Is Cash (the brilliant coming together of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and the original Saturday Night Live cast to spoof the Beatles as “the Rutles, the Pre-Fab Four”), Walk Hard is great fun. The gross-out gags and blatant sexual references the Apatow school of comedy is known for are here but they’re not as offensive as usual, and Apatow and Kasdan clearly knew (or had done their homework on) rock history: much of the fun of this movie is trying, moment by moment, to guess what real rock stars they’re making fun of. There’s even a bit of full-frontal male nudity in this one — Dewey Cox is polymorphously perverse — and overall Walk Hard is a great light-entertainment movie, held together by Reilly’s performance as well as a great set of gags. My favorite moment is when Edith catches him sucking Darlene’s toes and Dewey informs Edith that he’s married to Darlene — and Edith reminds him that he’s married to her and it’s illegal to be married to two people at once. “It is?” says Dewey. I also liked the scene in which Dewey talks about how he’s surrounded by temptations — and then the film cuts to five old Black guys singing “My Girl” in close harmony, and Dewey says, “Oh, no! The Temptations!”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)