September 2007
Monthly Archive
Monday 03 Sep 2007
Random camera phone snapshot of a filmmaker’s office
Entrance to Martin Scorsese’s office in midtown Manhattan. The man has more Italian versions of classic movie posters lining the hallway walls than you thought still existed. Though the prize possession (other than the 6,500+ title video vault) is David Niven’s pilot jacket from A Matter of Life and Death. (Why just the other week I had claimed that Niven didn’t have a film in the TSPDT 1000…)
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Sunday 02 Sep 2007
935. Hellzapoppin’ (1941, H. C. Potter)
Screened Saturday September 1 2007 (on 16mm print) at Anthology Film Archives, New York NY
TSPDT rank #639 IMDb
This thoroughly cinematic adaptation of a legendary stage show that had set the record for performances on Broadway is unequivocably one of the most relentlessly inventive and ruthlessly funny movies in Hollywood history. Hellzapoppin’s absence from the AFI’s list of 100 greatest comedies can only be attributed to its longtime lack of availability on video (apparently due to legal entanglements). There really is no other excuse; for my money this film is even more anarchic and aesthetically daring than Duck Soup, trading the verbal wordplays of its predecessor with an onslaught of metacinematic sight gags.
Five minutes into the film, comedy duo Ole Olson and Chic Johnson make an explosive entrance, only to abruptly ask the film projectionist (Shemp Howard of Three Stooges fame) to replay the reel. Pressured to conceive of a filmic version of their stage revue, they walk through several period sets, instantaneously changing their outfits accordingly (the last is an snowy Eskimo set where they come upon the Rosebud sled from Citizen Kane). Moments later, they review footage depicting the nominal romantic narrative that Universal Studios imposed on their initially plotless production until they reluctantly decide to literally enter the film within the film.
The madcap invention is improbably sustained for most of the 84-minute runtime, working around a banal love story much like the Marx Brothers’ films with MGM. A vivacious Martha Raye lampoons the love theme by chasing around the stork-like Continental cad Mischa Auer (hilarious in lame underwear). But the show-stopper is the much celebrated Lindy Hop sequence involving several Black domestic servants who without warning launch into the most jaw-dropping swing number captured on film. Throw in a few girls in hell being roasted on spits, synchronized swimmers and tight-bodied male divers cavorting in an Olympic pool, a talking bear on a pogo stick, and a host of other surreal visions, and you have a landmark in the history of humankind’s liberation from common sense.
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