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Would make a good double feature with If...: British Films Starring Malcolm McDowell, The Continued Appeal Of Which Are A Total Mystery To Domino Harvey

Odds and Ends Viewings:

Painting the Clouds With Sunshine (David Butler 1951) Remake of Gold Diggers of 1933 with a bevy of singing "sisters" on the hunt in Vegas for rich men to marry. The main leads are a little dry, and Gene Nelson and Virginia Gibson have a ridiculously impressive acrobatic country dance near the end of the film that begs the question why anyone cared about Virginia Mayo or Lucille Norman in the pic at all. No particularly memorable music numbers. S.K. "Cuddles" Sakall shows up and lends his usual screen presence to the project ("Vat you vant to bet money in my cahsino vor?")

the Emperor Waltz (Billy Wilder 1948) Very cute Wilder b-side, with Bing Crosby's phonograph salesman daring his fawning fans to not like him by hitching himself to an adorable RCA-style mutt. Joan Fontaine is incredibly fetching here as Crosby's countess paramour with an amazing pompadour. The songs are good, there's adorable animal shenanigans, and while it's not particularly funny, it's all still very charming. And only Wilder could end such a sweet film with a climax involving drowning puppies!

Flower Drum Song (Henry Koster 1961) Rodgers and Hammerstein are just the worst the worst the worst. I feel like I understand so much of the 1950s, but their hugely successful career, particularly in this era, is a total mystery. The songs are so godawful and the lyrics only make things worse-- seriously, how can anyone defend "Chop Suey" or the proto-Bye Bye Birdie kids vs adults number or the recurring (why, it was already awful once) "A Hundred Million Miracles" on any level?

R+H musicals have to be graded on a curve, so the real question is, beyond the material it's burdened with, how does the film fare? Not so well, I regret to report. Obviously the big gimmick here is that this Hollywood big budget musical features an all-Asian cast, but that's not enough to bring true novelty to a genre which thrives on the real thing. Nancy Kwan, so vibrant in Quine's the World of Suzie Wong, is mostly wasted in the sex kitten showgirl role, but Jack Soo has some fun with his entirely too genial Joe Cool nightclub owner, Sammy Fong, and the two share one of the more colorful routines in the pic. Reiko Sato's Helen is given a dream ballet that is so disconnected from the plot (as most everything is in the second half) that it betrays the total lack of knowledge on the part of the filmmakers of what makes such sequences work.

A Date With Judy (Richard Thorpe 1948) Here's one OOP musical that's not worth the big bux it's going for on the marketplace. On paper this one sounds like a dream, a mash-up of some of the best elements of the genre: a high school musical about mismatched lovers, affectated nostalgia for small-town values (in big city California, no less), and a great cast of both musical regulars (Jane Powell, Carmen Miranda) and surprises (Robert Stack, Wallace Beery). Unfortunately, the film is hopelessly aimless, far too long, and the songs stink. Funny that this was conceived as a star vehicle for Elizabeth Taylor, as she's given the least likable role (Then again, Teenage Taylor's appeal is a total mystery to me).

the Unfinished Dance (Henry Koster 1947) I'm seemingly the only person in the world who doesn't care for Meet Me In St. Louis (Sorry folks), but here's that inescapable musical tot Margaret O'Brien hero-worshiping Cyd Charisse's ballerina to a dangerous level. The film has a good premise, but the ludicrous attempts at tension and the inability to actually tackle questions of a child's guilt in the second half fall flat, especially once the audience realizes the film should've ended a good forty minutes before it does. Members of this board were debating short films elsewhere on the board recently, and here's a good example of a film that would've been far better running somewhere around an hour. At nearly two, yikes.

TCM showed a 16MM butcher-job print of the 'Scope rarity Let's Be Happy the other night, which if I'd known was cropped I wouldn't have made space for. Oh well, delete it goes.

domino harvey wrote:Would make a good double feature with If...: British Films Starring Malcolm McDowell Whose Continued Appeal Is A Total Mystery To Domino Harvey

Your tastes are a total mystery being the most conservative on the board and insanely out there at random intervals.

I can think of no higher compliment!

Re: the tl;dr Lili discussion, some interested parties might naturally get their curiosity piqued by 1955's the Glass Slipper, which reunited Caron, Walters, and screenwriter Helen Deutsch from the 1953 masterpiece. Unfortunately, their collective take on the Cinderella story is not of particular interest, as it really only exists to give Caron excuses to look cute (even her "dirty" cinder-stained look at the beginning of the film is Vogue-d out). It's been a while since I've watched it, but if memory serves, the only numbers are dream ballets, and while none are offensive or misconceived, they suffer in comparison to Caron's other superior work in this field.

domino harvey wrote: I'm seemingly the only person in the world who doesn't care for Meet Me In St. Louis

One thing I've observed is that no one on the board is ever utterly alone on these things. I'm pretty much with you here. It doesn't help that I'm practically allergic to Judy, but that can be overcome (The Pirate did so).

She's sublime in The Clock, one of about five or six Minnellis that would fit comfortably in my personal top ten (the current champeen is Home from the Hill, but I'm hoping this month will bring forth some challengers [still haven't seen The Band Wagon or The Pirate (!!!)])

Despite her absence from my Top 10, I generally like Garland, but she's still the least of the Big Three for me. The Harvey Girls, Presenting Lily Mars, Easter Parade, and yes the Pirate are all locks for my final 50. Of the Rooney films, I like Babes in Arms, Girl Crazy and Love Finds Andy Hardy, can't stand Babes on Broadway and Words and Music, and was indifferent to Strike Up the Band. In addition to the aforementioned Meet Me in St. Louis, Summer Stock, A Star is Born, In Good Old Summertime, the Wizard of Oz, Ziegfeld Follies, and Till the Clouds Roll By all leave me cold. I've still got Ziegfeld Girl and For Me and My Gal in the unwatched pile, after which I believe I'll have polished off her musical oeuvre.

EDIT: I too like the Clock, but I can't vote for it here of course

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (Joss Whedon 2008) Well, there are some good songs here and the trio of actors are all game, but this is not a film that is even remotely concerned with being a musical in the traditional sense, as its TV coverage composition reveals. This picture consists of wacky situations being presented with realistic authenticity, but for what purpose I couldn't suss. I know budget was an issue here, but artifice is such a key element of the musical, and for something as fantastical as this storyline, why is it played straight?

It does make, I think, an interesting comparison to my Spotlight title, Reefer Madness: the Movie Musical. Both are currently living big lives after the fact as objects of cult fandom, after all, but I just revisited Reefer Madness yesterday and to my mind it gets everything right that so many modern musicals get wrong, and from a relatively-deficient set of budgetary restraints, leaving Whedon's web series with few excuses.

Reefer Madness: the Movie Musical is, as it sounds, a musical adaptation of the scare tactic 30s film Tell Your Children, and while familiarity with the source material isn't necessary for enjoyment (though every home media release of the musical included the original version as a bonus feature), some sense of its propagandic qualities is. The musical presents, quite cleverly, a satire of anti-drug hysteria by hyperbolizing the ill-effects, both real and imagined, of marijuana. The framing device of the film takes a proto-Colbert Report approach, with Alan Cumming, in one of his many disguises in the film, portraying a government agent addressing a 1930s PTA meeting of gullible midwesterners to inform them of a new drug menace endangering their kids. Cumming shows them Tell Your Children, interspersed with commentary and interaction with the audience of parents (one naysayer is silenced by questioning his patriotism, or using phony facts from Hearst papers, or implying that only the properly-educated are fit to make decisions of importance-- hmm, any of these tactics sound familiar?). How funny any viewer finds all this relies less on personal ideology with regards to the war on pot and more on knowledge of said-war. Jokes like the kids attending Anslinger High School or the constant association of marijuana with race fears will seem pretty inexplicable without the background, but such esotericism is at the heart of why this one moves past just being a funny movie with catchy songs. The film's adapted from the off-Broadway play, which had the misfortune of opening the week of 9/11 and it's easy to see that audiences at the time probably weren't craving a musical whose basic message is "the government and mass media are lying to you."

But it is a funny movie and there are catchy songs. Certainly those looking for subtlety on the part of the actors best not waste their time here, but such broad performances give the film a gleeful feel-- it's a sense of "getting away with it." The cast is great, with Kristen Bell and Christian Campbell as the two hopelessly whitebread innocents at the heart of the issue. If you start watching this and can't appreciate the brilliance of the second number in the film, a love song between the two lovers about how their romance will be just like Romeo and Juliet (they haven't finished reading the play yet), give up, there's nothing for you here. It's a joke so funny I wish I'd thought of it first. The film has a limited budget, more obvious in the limited employment of extras than anything else, but it does some marvelous work with what it has, and centerpieces like the nightclub version of Heaven look right out of a Vegas-set Freed film. And perhaps the most important aspect of the film's success is that the filmmakers involved clearly love and understand musicals in terms of form, structure, composition, and delivery, and have a familiarity with their cinematic antecedents-- they may not have the means of Walters' film, but "Down at the Ol' Five and Dime" manages to recall not only a more obvious benchmark like Good News, but also indulges in more obscure influences, like Charlie Chan in Paris! This is cinematic heritage worth praising.

The film also gets a lot of mileage out of period jokes without ever indulging in period fetishization-- clearly the filmmakers did their research, and what's produced is less "look at the time period we've recreated" obnoxiousness and more love letter to an antiquated way of life. The thickness of obsolete slang alone would make this film worthwhile viewing, and certainly the viewer is treated to every single colloquial name for marijuana ever devised. And the period gags are good gags-- we don't just get FDR jokes, we get specific anti-FDR jokes. It's that keen sense of purpose that separates the film from easy-lobbing of political points or easy targets. The film has a good sense of old-fashioned innocence (there's only one swear in the film, and it's well-timed at the end of the film's best, most-memorable musical number) that meets head-on with the rising absurdity of the plot mechanics as this ridiculous anti-drug hyperbole is taken to hilariously violent heights (it's rated R for a reason, folks).

I had watched the R1 DVD release of this numerous times on my old set-up (it comes in a chocolate-scented DVD case, no less!) but was less than thrilled by its appearance when I tried to watch it recently on my HD TV. For some reason, the film is available only in Germany on Blu-ray, but I just got my copy in yesterday and can report that it features no fixed subs and has the original audio. Curiously, the film runs about four minutes shorter than the R1 version, but nothing's missing and the film's in 1080p, which leads me to suspect that for some reason the original master was in PAL and then slowed down for NTSC, hence the lackluster R1 video quality. Weird. But everything's there (I will admit that I probably know every word of the film) and sounds right on the Blu, and it was glorious to revisit an old favorite like this in the proper format.

After managing one whole entry in the Westerns list (what can I say - a second Baby Amicus), let's see if I can do better here.

Anchors Aweigh (George Sidney, 1945) 143 minutes? How? Why? And where's the ending? Still, apart from general overlength, this is actually quite fun - although Mrs Amicus visibly winced whenever Kathryn Grayson started singing. Worth seeing for Kelly's routines - especially the dance with Jerry which is remarkable - but it never seems to really gel, perhaps due to its length and a couple of routines which threaten to turn the whole film into a revue.

Dames (Ray Enright / Busby Berkelely, 1934) I liked this a lot, perhaps because the obligatory Powell / Keeler romance is so perfunctory that (a) it seems nobody's heart was in it and (b) it makes no narrative sense. Still, that means the film is largely carried by Guy Kibbee, Zasu Pitts and Hugh Herbert, which is a huge improvement. On top of that you get the the genuinely bizarre / freaky "I Only Have Eyes For You" number and the almost purely abstract "Dames". On the whole, I preferred much of it to the 1933 Golddiggers, but the latter's "Remember My Forgotten Man" is (currently) my favourite 30s musical number.

I'm pretty much ignorant about the genre, so I figured the best place to start was at the very beginning...

The Jazz Singer (1927)
I didn't know anything about this one except for its role in film history and its poster (I was shocked to learn that Al Jolson was white! ), so I was quite suprised that the 'first sound motion picture' is actually

Spoiler

a silent movie with a few badly-synced musical performances, some sound effects and two short bits of dialogue.

After the first scenes that are set in the past I was kind of expecting a move to full sound for the present-day story (like how The Wizard of Oz goes to color), but this of course never happens. That makes it all the more remarkable that there are two instances in which music is used for dramatic effect (one when a little boy runs away from home while we hear the sad sounds of a Jewish song, and the other when the main character experiences a flashback of his father while he watches a performance of a cantor), more than just recording a performance.
The story consists of some very clichéd conflicts, some of which are completely forgotten (like a potential romance with a showgirl), and the most interesting one (the choice between theatre and tradition) deflated rather than resolved.
I'll file this with 'interesting footnotes to film history' and look forward to better films - and to real musicals, because The Jazz Singer obviously doesn't count as one.

Yeah, the movie's nothing special (it's pretty much a special feature on its own DVD release when you compare it to the wealth of material on the three-disc set), and you can get the whole basic story in a far more pleasing and digestible eight minutes here (or that Simpsons episode, even)

Re: Anchors Aweigh-- you've done better than me, as I can find no redeeming qualities in it!

ArchCarrier wrote:The Jazz Singer (1927)
I didn't know anything about this one except for its role in film history [as] the 'first sound motion picture'

It's not even the first sound film (not by a long shot) just the first big, popular one.

Yes, I know. I was only quoting this:

In any case, if you want to see the logical extension of Jolson's minstrel act to the burgeoning studio musical era, be sure not to miss the Berkeley/Bacon film Wonder Bar.

In case anyone is tempted to buy Athena from the Warner Archive: it's probably the oddest musical I've ever seen, maybe even the oddest film out of a Hollywood studio in the 1950s. Jane Powell is a vegan numerologist and organic gardening enthusiast who falls in love at first sight with uptight smoker, lawyer, and potential congressional candidate Edward Purdom. The plot, however, is your basic "opposites attract" deal, with each person getting put in "fish out of water" situations until everything is magically and suddenly okay. And it all just goes on far too long.

Debbie Reynolds plays Powell's younger sister (one of six) who falls for Vic Damone, who plays a TV singer not unlike Vic Damone in real life. They have a cute number in the sisters' family's health food store (in which, if you look closely, you'll see they sell Ritz crackers and Mallomars - my kind of health food). Also woven through the film is a bunch of bodybuilders in posing trunks including Steve Reeves and Dick DuBois (appearing here as "Richard Sabre"). This is probably the best reason to watch this film, along with Louis Calhern as the girls' father, a health and exercise guru in the Charles Atlas mold.

The music by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane is pretty forgettable, which is too bad since they are the guys who wrote all those wonderful songs in Meet Me in St. Louis (one of which, "The Boy Next Door," is reprised here by Vic Damone as "The Girl Next Door"). There is not a lot of dancing except for one number in which the sisters and their beefy friends redecorate Purdom's house.

It does have a good amount of oddball charm and it was nice to see characters so amusingly original even if the plot was pretty rote. Powell, Reynolds, and Damone are all much better-used in Hit the Deck. You may be distracted through most of the running time trying to figure out if Jane Powell and Debbie Reynolds were wearing bras or not. I know I was. Distracted, that is.

Two crackerjack musical remakes of great screwball comedies:

My Sister Eileen - I actually only watched the original last month, and I was surprised by just how faithful this remake is, even down to the basic design of the main apartment set. (So, while it does seem to conform to my tentative auteurist hypothesis about Quine and the built environment, that aspect of the film is not really Quine's.) After half an hour or so, the plot is hollowed out somewhat, since they have to make room for the songs, so the film ends up being somewhat less satisfying at that level - though it's probably something you wouldn't notice if you hadn't seen the original, or saw it afterwards. And it's the songs that matter. No standards here, but it's a smart crop of tunes with no duds, and no overweening production numbers that outstay their welcome. Great performances makes this one of the most sheerly charming musicals on my list: small scale, warm, perfectly formed and perfectly delightful.

A Song Is Born - In which Howard Hawks remakes his 1941 Ball of Fire only 7 years later. This one, too, is eerily similar to the original (which already included one - but only one - phenomenal musical number: Barbara Stanwyck doing 'Drum Boogie' with Gene Krupa). It's such a winning vehicle that it works twice, even with the extremely variable Virginia Mayo subbing for Stanwyck (she's absolutely fine here) and the more lateral and logical sustitution of Danny Kaye for Gary Cooper. In fact, the most important substitution - trading jazz for slang - is a stroke of genius, but only because Hawks follows through with a dream cast of jazz greats (including Armstrong, Hampton, Dorsey, the Golden Gate Quartet and - in an honest-to-goodness acting role - Benny Goodman, who very meta-ly gets to sit in on clarinet for the absent Goodman at one point). The look of avid awe on Kaye's face when he stumbles in on a tiny Harlem club hosting a jam session with Louis Armstrong and Lionel Hampton is precisely the look of avid awe any sane human being would sport in those circumstances.

Unlike Eileen, Hawks strives to keep every scintilla of plot and character detail from the first film (if it ain't broke. . .), so the film runs long (like a lot of Hawks) and there's not room for much music in the back half, and once again we're indulged by a bevy of aging character actors playing the sweetly infantilised professorial hangers-on. It's a great comic device that also serves Hawks' central theme of the mutually supportive band of professionals, and it's utterly delightful when Armstrong, Dorsey et al. join the throng. In the final analysis, what's most valuable about this film is that it communicates the sheer joy of making music better than any (non-documentary) film I've seen, and considering the amount of joy that radiates from so many of the great MGM musicals, that's no trifling achievement.

As for Anchors Aweigh!, I'm afraid I'm with domino on this one: a terminal case of MGM Prestige Bloat - something we'll no doubt be seeing a lot more of we work our way through this project.

I can see where Domino and Zedz are coming from with Anchors Aweigh - it doesn't half go on and then just stops - but there are enough decent routines and likeable performances from Kelly (Oscar nominated? How?) and Sinatra to just about carry it through.

Anyway, a couple more recent viewings:

Dimples (William A Seiter, 1936): Only just a musical really, but there are 4 or 5 songs, one of which is a definite shift in register. The first pre-war Temple film I think I've seen but have a few more on the Kevyip (I picked up the collectors tin for about £8 in my local HMV a couple of years back - now going for silly prices on Amazon) and I gather many of them are pretty much the same plot. Still, apart from some spectacularly ill-judged blackface in the final 20 mins or so, this is all fairly inoffensive and watchable. And Henry Morgan, as Temple's Grandfather, offers good value for money. The dance routines are pretty good although only arranged by Bill Robinson, not featuring him.

Calamity Jane. Somehow always managed to miss this until the other day - and was amazed at just how queer it was. It's almost like an undergrad set text for Queer Theory. I really like this - although I have to say I just didn't buy the Day / Keel romance so, good though Secret Love is, I just couldn't relate it to what the film has shown of their relationship. Of course, if you take the song to be directed elsewhere...

The Singing Fool (Lloyd Bacon, 1928)

From the start, Jolson's second sound picture feels more technically accomplished. There are still a few intertitles scattered throughout the film, but most of the dialogue is spoken, the sound design is a little subtler (the sound of an orchestra gets louder when a door is opened) and in the beginning there are some elaborate tracking shots through a dance hall. But the story is even flatter than in The Jazz Singer and the addition of sound makes it even clearer that Jolson might have been 'the world's greatest entertainer', he certainly wasn't the world's greatest actor. It also doesn't help that most of the actors pause for half a second or more after each line, like they're speaking into a walkie-talkie (or was this standard practice during the silent era, to leave room for intertitles or something?).
Still, Jolson's musical performances are pretty good (I'm even warming up to his peculiar singing style after having a compilation of his Warners tunes on repeat all afternoon), and the final number, where he is forced to sing about his dead son in front of an audience is actually quite moving (although I have to say that ever since I became a father most scenes involving sick and/or dead children have me close to tears).

Next up: The Broadway Melody

Zedz, glad to see I'm no longer crazy for loving A Song is Born-- I still remember the pile-on when I revealed that it's one of my favorite Hawks films! As I've said before and you've concurred, the story actually makes more sense with music rather than grammar, and though the performers aren't at the same level as the original cast, everything else here improves on what was already great source material.

That must be the twelfth film that we both love. We should be able to make our own list sometime around 2030!

I've never been a great fan of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (though I'll certainly rewatch it for this project), so it hadn't really occurred to me just how well suited Hawks's values (both filmic and personal) were to the musical form.

zedz wrote:I've never been a great fan of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

This thread is certainly unsettling me. I seem to love all of the films you guys are indifferent to and yet can't fathom what any of you see in particular films you all seem to love. Well, it will make for an interesting discussion and final tally.

Cued up for tonight (barring a veto from my viewing partner): Hit the Deck, another Jane Powell, Debbie Reynolds, and Vic Damone job. I remember it having quite a bit of low-key charm but a jarringly extravagant finale out of keeping with the rest of the film.

The Broadway Melody (Harry Beaumont, 1929)

Shit like this wins the Oscar for Best Picture and people complain about Shakespeare in Love? I understand the film set the template for the genre (including the use of prerecorded sound), but that doesn't make it easier to watch. One of the few bright spots is Bessie Love, who has an enormous amount of energy, especially in her first couple of scenes with Anita Page, as well as some of the best lines - my personal favorite was: "One more crack from you, bimbo, and you'll be holding the lily!". The opening scene in a music publishing office is funny, with all musicians playing their songs all at once, and the names of two of the 'bad guys' - Francis Zanfield and Jacques Warriner (!) - obvious digs at producers of rival studios.

Next up: Broadway

Matt, we at least agree on Hit the Deck's virtues-- actually, it sounds like I like it even more than you do. Highly recommended for the matching boy-girl "Why Oh Why" numbers and the insane Debbie Reynolds-tossing finale that gives I Love Melvin a run for its money. And I'll weigh in more in the Oscars thread, but I like Broadway Melody too (not enough to vote for it here, but still)

At Long Last Love (Peter Bogdanovich 1975) Seeing this new director's cut is a revelation-- I don't know why it's been relegated to Netflix (or why it's still P+S), but many of the structural problems and peculiarities are explained away by a film that is now a full 25% longer. Even if you've already seen and judged the film based on the widely-circulated third-generation boot, this is necessary viewing. I have the soundtrack LP, so I already knew some of the cut songs exist (and there's a pic of Shepherd's first number in the liner notes), but I was most surprised at how the original version of the film often cut the initial musical number but retained the reprise (and once vice-versa). Now that these 23 (!) minutes are folded back in, the film feels smarter than ever in structure (it now opens with each main character getting a song, a necessity so obvious that I'm glad to see it wasn't an actual oversight on Bogdanovich's part) and the new inclusion of several numbers is so vital to the film's success that I defy anyone seeing the film for the first time to guess what was initially cut. And whoever decided the world didn't need the number with Cybill Shepherd gallivanting around in her underwear doesn't deserve to make decisions anyways!

The inferior cut isn't the real reason the film bombed on release, as it was right in the middle of the media's violent love affair with hating Bogdanovich and Shepherd's too-public relationship. And what better way to follow up the (also unfair) blood in the water post-Daisy Miller than to attack something as ballsy as this? It's an easy target, but an unfair one. You almost want to shake its detractors by the shoulders and ask for a list of references. Bogdanovich publicly bragged that the film is in the style of the Depression-era hoofing musicals, but while the time depicted may bear this out, it really resembles more closely the late period Freed works (Bells Are Ringing comes to mind) in terms of technological marvel, proficiency, and budget. The film is so technologically impressive, with its convoluted long takes and unbroken shots, that the first time I watched the pic I kept getting distracted from the main narrative by gob-smacked admiration at how hard much of the film must have been to shoot!

The cast is ideal, with all parts going to Bogdanovich regulars. That they're not professional singers is the point (though I'll perhaps be the first to ever openly admit that not only do I like Shepherd's singing here, I own and enjoy her much-lampooned Cole Porter LP too), and there's an indelible charm to their efforts that would be lost with looping and overdubs. That all the songs were recorded live on film, besides adding to the difficulty and complexity of the filming conditions, means that the imperfections are part of the package-- great moments of life amidst the artifice, like Shepherd and Reynolds breaking into laughter during their "It's De-lovely" are what makes the film charming, not a self-satisfied technological experiment (looking at you, One From the Heart).

This was already hanging around in the middle of my list on virtue of its flawed success, but now that I can appraise the film in whole, it clearly belongs closer to the Top Ten on my list.

The Girl Can’t Help It

How could anybody not fall in love with this movie? Even if it’s just a case of staring agog at the legendary performers that are shoehorned in every five minutes. Like A Song Is Born, this film works in part because they get the guest stars and the music right, but also because, despite Tashlin’s natural satirical inclinations, it takes them seriously as performers. It’s sort of an odd musical, because, despite the wall-to-wall music, the vast majority of the numbers are delivered by single-scene cameo performers, which gives the film a revue-like feel.

Ultimately, apart from the music, there are two keys to the film’s success. The first is Tashlin’s perfectly pop mise-en-scene: clean sets, bold primaries, stylized movement – an impeccable live-action Looney Tune look. The second is Jayne Mansfield. Oh boy. Mansfield makes Bugs Bunny look like neo-realism, and that’s the genius of her performance and the genius of Tashlin’s deployment of it. She embodies the human-as-cartoon ideal so completely and enthusiastically that she simultaneously elevates it to some kind of Platonic ideal and undermines it completely. By surrendering so completely to the stereotype of the dumb blonde, she manages to come across as the smartest person in the room at all times. Effectively, she twists the cliché inside out and inflicts it back on the other characters and the audience in an act of double- or triple-subversion ( the first subversion is that she apparently wants to be a different kind of feminine cliché, for instance).

The thing is, her character /caricature, who might as well have “DUMB BLONDE” emblazoned across her chest, is not dumb at all. But the film is so smart that it doesn’t bother to do any special pleading for the character – there’s no big reveal of her reading a philosophy textbook, or coming up with profound gobs of folk wisdom – her character’s non-dumbness is just sort of subtly there, and the only ‘evidence’ the film presents to the contrary is her physique. Which is no kind of evidence at all, and the realisation as the film progresses that she’s just a charming, natural, ordinary person acts as a challenge to all of the stereotypes everybody in the film (and in the audience) tries to project onto her. Even in the “ask my agent” scene, where she is instructed to efface her own agency completely, and dutifully does so, effectively reducing herself to the status of a man’s puppet voluntarily, she manages to remain the puppet-master, completely in control of not only her supposed ‘master’, but of every man in the vicinity. And furthermore, Mansfield lets us know how much she’s enjoying dominating everybody with her faux-submissive performance.

But that rewarding core of emotional realism doesn’t detract from the spectacular, gleeful artificiality of her appearance and performance. She’s the greatest sight gag in a film full of them, and Mansfield is completely in on the joke and completely in control of her own special effects (just look at how her walk evolves as she goes from nightclub to nightclub). Structurally, she’s the butt of any number of the film’s jokes, but that’s not the way it plays on screen: she’s the film’s animating comic presence and a great comedienne, and this is a great comedy as well as a great musical.

I guess Tashlin used Jerry Lewis as a similar ‘human cartoon’ in a number of films, but Lewis always seems to me like he wants to hedge his bets. He’ll only surrender to caricature up to a point, and wants to snatch at pathos in the most direct and obvious way in the final reel, which tends to compromise the comic architecture of the films. No such problem here, and Mansfield gets to have her cake and eat it simply by playing to the caricature throughout – though only on the surface, since that’s what cartoons are all about.