"If you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets." – Pauline Kael
Not only a stylistic step up from Woody Allen’s previous movies, but his first in which the laughs were sustained from beginning to end. (Well, nearly the end.) A comic fantasy in which the Allen character, frozen in 1973, is thawed 200 years later to find himself up to his hornrims in repressive Orwellian government forces, rebels, humanoid (and canine) robots, nasal cloning, orgasm-inducing machines and the world’s biggest banana peel on which, naturally, he slips, Sleeper is also the first of Allen’s pictures to co-star Diane Keaton* and to allow her to create a comic persona as distinct and original as Carole Lombard’s or Katharine Hepburn’s. Not that she in any way resembles them, or any other comedienne (to use a word virtually guaranteed to short-circuit the thinking apparatus of any self-respecting Woke birthing person) of the past. Keaton could only exist in the 20th century, even (cf., Reds and Harry and Walter Go to New York) the very early 20th century. She reprises the absurd “Rebels Are We” folk song from Bananas, does a Jewish mother voice that is the last word in ignorant panache (at one point she sounds incongruously Irish), performs a Brando imitation that is both funny and accurate, and even gets to enact a slapstick “George of the Jungle” bit, one of several examples of effective undercranking in the picture. (Although sharp eyes will note that when she hits the tree, “Keaton” is actually a stuntman in a dress and wig.) The evocations of silent comedy are even funnier set against the stark, futuristic backgrounds of the story and Allen too is often brilliantly funny here, far more than in his previous movies. Working with Keaton seems to have liberated his comedy; he’s less smug and self-satisfied than before and they’re a joy together, especially when, as in the cloning sequence at the end, they’re sniping at each other under their breath.
“He’ll do it! I’ve seen him shoot a nose!”
Perhaps because Allen collaborated on the screenplay with Marshall Brickman, the movie is more heavily plotted than his scattershot comedies, and more satisfying. And although he is as much a verbal comedian as Mel Brooks (whom nearly every critic of the period ceaselessly, and boringly, compared him to) Allen has some explosively funny moments of physical humor, occasionally evoking silent comedy generally, and Buster Keaton specifically; his extended stint in Sleeper disguised as a pale, poker-faced robot is among the movie’s highlights. The cinematography by David M. Walsh still looks remarkably good, complimented by Dale Hennesy’s witty futuristic production design. (Best gag: The bright yellow and red McDonald’s sign nestled among the characterless white buildings. The joke of course is that the highly corporate McDonald’s alone would survive where nothing else from its century has, but the familiar architecture and colorful logo, an eyesore in our own time, is a relief in 2173.)
Some of the bits were hoary even in 1973, particularly the ugly sequence in which Allen and Keaton seek aid from a pair of staggering queens and in which for the sake of a cheap laugh one of them calls Allen “you little cutie.” Really, how many gay men ever thought Woody Allen was cute? The bit is redeemed, oddly enough, by the capper, in which the couple’s even swishier robot appears; it’s just ridiculous enough to be genuinely funny. Not that Allen lets Jews off easily either. One of the funniest sequences in the picture involves two bickering robot garment merchants, hilariously voiced by Myron Cohen and Jackie Mason (Mason: “Why do you need so much velvet? Where do we come to velvet?” Cohen: “Drop dead, you wanna drop dead?”)† That the little robots sport identical hooked ethnic noses would render the gag offensive in any other context. But that technicians of the future imagined such an outrage is itself wildly funny. Things move so briskly in Sleeper you don’t mind the occasional lulls, which anyway don’t last long; as in the best of the Marx Brothers and Monty Python movies, there’s always another great line or gag coming up. Only the ending really disappoints; where we’re waiting for a boffo payoff, Allen gives us only an anemic chuckle.
Sleeper contains what is probably, with Manhattan, the best musical score for a Woody Allen movie, new recordings of old songs by Allen on clarinet along with the New Orleans Funeral Ragtime Orchestra and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. The opening titles (the first in the now familiar white-letters-on-black-background Woody Allen style), set to a wonderfully raucous version of “Ain’t Nobody’s Business if I Do,” are almost guaranteed to put a smile on the dourest of faces. So see if you can figure out why, wherever it appears on YouTube, the recording receives a number of thumbs down, and then explain it to me.
However the future might or might not look, it seems the trolls are inheriting the earth.
*I don’t include the movie of his stage comedy Play it Again, Sam (1972) because Allen didn’t direct it, and anyway Keaton had played her role in it on Broadway. Hers was not a fresh creation, merely a re-creation.
†Douglas Rain, the voice of HAL-9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, reprises those distinct cadences here during the cloning sequence.
Note the First: Although I have endeavored to post these capsule review collections as close to the first of each month as possible, I a) have a full-time job, hence a limited amount of time to write; and b) have been finding it harder and harder to concentrate on that writing. The wholesale insanity of the last 18 months; of my mayor and governor and county commissioners using a manufactured viral outbreak as the excuse they’ve been waiting for, presumably all their lives, to behave like would-be dictators; of seeing a sociopathic hack hailed as American’s Doctor™, medical science and sensible care turned on their heads as if the entire world had fallen down the rabbit hole after Alice; a demented old bigot installed in the Oval Office and self-anointed tech billionaire health czars blithely informing us we will likely be “locked down” for years; and of the constant harassment over useless masks and applied duress requiring I either risk my future health by taking an experimental gene therapy masquerading as a vaccine, submit to weekly tests and disclose my health status to my employers in violation of HIPPA laws, or lose my job… these and related stresses have conspired to sap what little mental, physical and emotional energy I have, leaving very little for creative activity. But then, I strongly suspect that driving us all nuts is part of the plan; even jolly old “Santa Klaus” Schwab, who should know, let it slip last year that we are in the midst of “the world’s biggest psychological experiment.” After a year and a half of this psychic pressure, I’m lucky I can write my own name, let alone a monthly digest of coherent critical thought.
Note the Second: As always, click on the highlighted text for links.
Fail-Safe (1964) A quietly terrifying adaptation by the screenwriter Walter Bernstein and the director Sidney Lumet of the remarkable Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler nuclear-nightmare novel with a superb cast headed by Henry Fonda, Walter Matthau, Dan O’Herlihy, Fritz Weaver, Larry Hagman and Frank Overton.
Charley Varrick (1973) A smart, tough crime drama directed by Don Siegel featuring a strong central performance by Walter Matthau. The tight screenplay by Dean Riesner and Howard A. Rodman was adapted from The Looters, a fast, violent little pulp novel by John H. Reese which is even more brutal than the movie: Charley, the older of the two robbers who pull off a bank heist whose proceeds are unexpectedly stuffed with Mafia money, is not only a nasty piece of work in himself but dies horribly at the hands of a psychotic Southern cracker hitman long before the story is finished. The movie Charley is nearly as gruff as his literary coeval but not as ruthless, although he does set up his problematic young partner (Andy Robinson) for possible death at his own hands. Siegel, who literally signed this in the credits as “A Siegel Film,” keeps the action rolling and the violence, while not excessive, disturbing. He’s abetted in this by his screenwriters and by Michael C. Butler’s beautifully rendered widescreen cinematography, Frank Morriss’ effective editing and a taut score by Lao Schifrin with a pulsating, agitated main theme that perfectly encapsulates the picture’s mounting tension. Although Reisner and Rodman used very little of Reese’s novel, which jumps from one character to another in a way that illuminates all of them without digressing from the narrative, they seized on one of its peripheral aspects, to excellent effect: Charley’s crop-dusting business, with its slogan “The Last of the Independents.” (Siegel was so enamored of that he wanted to name the movie after it but was overriden by Universal.) They also used Charley’s piloting, and his past as a barnstormer, to neat affect at the end. Interestingly, their finale was echoed later in Brian Garfield’s book Hopscotch, which in its turn made a memorable vehicle… for Walter Matthau.
Moviegoers of 1973, who had perhaps forgotten that Matthau had a long history of dramatic roles in addition to his peerless way with comedy, might have been surprised by his superb performance here… if they saw it; the picture was a flop at the box office. Robinson, the Zodiac knock-off killer of the atrocious Dirty Harry, sometimes seems to be reprising that performance, the way Steve Railsback couldn’t quite shed Charlie Manson in The Stunt Man. Joe Don Baker is appropriately mercurial as the hitman and the good supporting cast includes John Vernon as the shady bank president; Woodrow Parfrey as his prissy manager; Felicia Farr (the wife of Matthau’s best friend Jack Lemmon) as a secretary with secrets she’s willing to share with Charley along with her bed; Norman Fell as an FBI agent; William Schallert as a small-town sheriff; Benson Fong as a Chinese gangster; Jacqueline Scott as Charley’s doomed wife; Marjorie Bennett as his nosy old trailer park neighbor avidly and with delighted relish assuring anyone who’ll listen that she just knows rapists are after her; and the marvelous Tom Tully as a pawnbroker in a wheelchair who gets a memorable demise. The best performance aside from Matthau’s is that of Sheree North as a cool, savvy photographic forger. What North does with the character is astonishing; she takes an interesting small role and turns it into a complete human being, with an inner life and, for all I know, a soul. And to think that if she’s remembered at all it’s as a plate of 1950s cheesecake.
Charles Butterworth, Fred Astaire, Paulette Goddard, Artie Shaw, Burgess Meredith. (ImagoImages. Copyright: Courtesy Everett Collection.MBDSECH EC075)
Second Chorus (1940) Fred Astaire famously referred to this as “the worst film [he] ever made.” I assume he meant the worst musical — he certainly made worse movies — but even then I’m not sure he was right. Silk Stockings had a bigger budget, and a Cole Porter score, but it isn’t much fun. Nor are Three Little Words or Blue Skies, despite the great “Puttin’ on the Ritz” routine in the latter, with its nine reflected Astaires. Not, mind you, that Second Chorus is a patch on his best features. It’s perhaps the most dramatically thin of all his musicals, with a central conflict (Fred and Burgess Meredith as superannuated musical college roommates constantly one-upping each other) that becomes steadily more obnoxious. As one of the picture’s producers Astaire merits as much of the blame for it as anybody, but it’s hard for me to really dislike anything with Fred Astaire in it, or Paulette Goddard, for all that she’s no singer and assuredly no dancer. Playing himself, Artie Shaw comes off as a stiff and Meredith is almost shockingly unlikable, but admirers of the Preston Sturges stock company will enjoy seeing Jimmy Conlin as a collection agent. Best of all is Charles Butterworth as a millionaire big band fiend and amateur mandolinist. It was Butterworth who in Every Day’s a Holiday delivered the immortal line, “‘You ought to get out of those wet clothes and into a dry martini.” He was later immortalized by Daws Butler, who used Butterworth’s distinctive speaking voice as the inspiration for innumerable characters on the Jay Ward Rocky and Bullwinkle shows and for Cap’n Crunch in those ubiquitous 1960s Ward-produced Quaker Oats commercials. The minute you hear his voice you’ll recognize it.
H. C. Potter directed with no particular flavor or distinction at all, from a screenplay by Elaine Ryan and Ian McLellan Hunter, to which Johnny Mercer and Ben Hecht also contributed, the latter without credit. I sense Hecht’s fine Italian hand in the scenes between Meredith and Butterworth, and maybe in some of the nastier stunts Astaire and Meredith pull on each other, which have the feel of warmed-over Gunga Din. What Johnny Mercer added only the Show Biz gods remember, although he did write some nice lyrics, especially to “Poor Mr. Chisolm” and the jaunty “I Ain’t Hep to That Step (But I’ll Dig It).” Bernie Hanighen wrote the music to the former, which becomes a big band suite both danced and conducted by Astaire, and Fred’s longtime RKO musical director Hal Bourne composed the latter. (Astaire and Meredith play dueling trumpeters, and their playing was dubbed by Billy Butterfield and Bobby Hackett respectively.) But the creative poverty of the thing is indicated by the people involved not even bothering to come up with a name for the college at which Astaire and Meredith are perpetual students: At a dance, a cheap sign hanging over the bandstand reads, simply, “University.”
Shaw threw in some nice tunes, including a swinging “Concerto for Clarinet,” but he wasn’t any happier with Second Chorus than Astaire was. He did, however, have this to say about Fred: “I liked him because he was an entertainer and an artist. There’s a distinction between them. An artist is concerned only with what is acceptable to himself, where an entertainer strives to please the public. Astaire did both.”
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) It would be pretty to think this is the last we will ever hear of a franchise that has for years shown itself about as useful as a set of bald tires in a monsoon, but I think we all know it won’t be: Disney spent too much to buy the Lucas empire; it’s not about to slaughter a cash-cow that extensive. Those of us, however, who strongly suspected The House of Mouse would completely fuck up Star Wars have been vindicated. The studio did this partly out of arrogance (refusing to consult with Lucas or even to listen to the man who created these worlds) and partly from its own, admittedly profitable but creatively bankrupt tendency to indulge in endless remakes of what has gone before, a trait I imagine would have driven the founder of the company to a state of permanent conniption. The entire Disney Star Wars series has been a retread of themes and even entire plots that had been exhausted by George Lucas years ago. The final installment is not merely a coffin for a cinematic entity that had nowhere to go unless it jettisoned its own past, but, for anyone above the age of 12 armed with a scintilla of creative intelligence and independent thought, the three final nails in that casket.
The essential disaster at the core of this unnecessary movie is not merely that J.J. Abrams (and Chris Terrio, his co-scenarist) could not let go of the damned Skywalker family and their overworked parent/child dynamics, but that he was reduced to remaking Return of the Jedi. And who in his right mind would want to remake the weakest, more perfunctory movie in the original series? Even granting that the filmmakers were placed in a nearly impossible position by Carrie Fisher’s death following The Last Jedi, the very premise of this one is so ludicrous, so utterly and entirely risible, that it cannot stand up to the slightest scrutiny: That the Emperor, thrown to his explosive death at the climax of Jedi has miraculously not merely survived but become more powerful than before. Pull the other one, J.J. That it took no fewer than four writers to concoct this monumentally stupid narrative probably says more about the 40 year decline and fall of post-70s Hollywood than anything since the worldwide success of Titanic. Worse, Abrams & Co. were so consumed with trying to make this laughable situation work, and with pumping air into the dead-at-birth love/hate rivalry between Daisy Ridley’s Rey and Adam Driver’s annoying Kylo Ren, they neglected the one thing about the series that gave it a simulacrum of actual life: The human relationships around the action. We had every reason, after the second picture, to expect we would see more of Kelly Marie Tran’s Rose Tico and John Boyega’s Finn, yet they are reduced here to glorified walk-ons, Finn not even being allowed to express his feelings for Rey at the end. Things are so shakily inconsistent that, when the young Luke is pictured training his sister, the face we see is not Fisher’s from the ’70s or early ’80s extracted from an earlier movie and digitally edited in (as Hamill’s image obviously is) but that of her daughter, who looks so little like her you don’t realize who she’s supposed to be until the fast little scene is over. Now, what the hell was that in aid of?
The plot, such as it is, and the abundance of Fisher outtakes from the two previous* movies permitted Abrams to keep Leia alive until the mid-point, while Mark Hamill appears as the Jedi shade of Luke and even Harrison Ford gets to show up as a ghost of some sort, or perhaps he’s an hallucination. By that juncture I’d stop caring about the distinction and was able to concentrate once again on speculating how a young man with a mug as militantly unattractive as Adam Driver’s can become a movie star despite lacking a scintilla of charm, humor or photogeneity. And for the first time in the series the unremitting ennui this movie spawned affected even the John Williams score. I’ve never heard this master of cinematic composition so dispirited, marking time with endless reprises of past Star Wars music and generating, if my ear did not deceive me, no new themes at all. If Williams can’t work up any enthusiasm, how can we be expected to? The single saving grace of the picture is the marvelous Daisy Ridley, and even she isn’t enough. Having out of curiosity imbibed in the first installment, I felt obligated out of a similar sense of inquisitiveness to see the wretched thing through to the end. Never again. My adolescence was not such a picnic that I’m eager to revisit it at regular intervals for the rest of my life.
*Or do I mean, as I mistyped originally and which error — or Freudian slip — was caught by Eliot M. Camarena, “pervious”?
The Revengers (1972) A strange, fascinating Western starring William Holden that moves in unexpected directions, manages to be effective in both its horrific and its comic elements, and features beautiful widescreen work by the cinematographer Gabriel Torres and a remarkable performance by Susan Hayward as a sharp frontier nurse that lifts the movie into a realm few genre pictures achieve. Holden plays a former Union officer whose family is brutally massacred by a vicious band of Comancheros and who gathers from a Mexican prison a team of outlaws to pursue the killers. There are elements here of both The Searchers and The Dirty Dozen, although without, thankfully, the lip-smacking sadism of the latter, and the outlaws are entertaining without making you feel they’re about to commit fresh atrocities every 10 minutes. And each time you feel you have the measure of the movie and a surer sense of where it’s going the screenwriter, Wendell Mayes, surprises you. (Steven W. Carabatsos, the author of the screen story, deserves a nod here as well.) William Holden, a personal favorite since as a teenager I saw him in Network, gives one of his thoughtful late-career performances; his character is eaten up with bitterness but he doesn’t know how to focus his anger when the cause of it (Warren Vanders) escapes his grasp. Ernest Borgnine, as the braggart Hoop, is extremely funny and the wonderful Jorge Luke is unexpectedly touching as a young bandito who imagines Holden is his long-lost father. The picture is nicely directed by the veteran Daniel Mann, but Pino Clavi’s music, emulating the archaic/contemporary aspects of Ennio Morricone’s compositions for Sergio Leone, often feels misplaced and overly melodramatic, although it’s one of those curious scores that, while largely inapt in the picture for which it was composed, makes for rather pleasant listening divorced from it.
Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967) A charming, funny 1920s spoof nearly undone by the ’60s mania for big, overlong musical roadshow attractions.
Is a maiden all the better when she’s tough? (Imago Images. Copyright, Everett Collection.)
The Mikado (1960) The enjoyable Bell Telephone Hour reduction of the comic operetta starring Groucho Marx as Ko-Ko. After being introduced to Gilbert and Sullivan during his vaudeville years, Groucho was an aficionado for life, and thrilled to be asked to play the Lord High Executioner on this live broadcast which also starred Robert Rounsville as Nanki-Poo, Barbara Meister as Yum-Yum, Stanley Holloway as the Pooh-Bah, Dennis King as the Mikado and Helen Traubel as Katisha. For a 54-minute truncation, the show, directed by the noted Savoyard comedian Martyn Green, is a fair reading of the original. Holloway is a robust delight as the last word in corrupt officials and Traubel a good match for Groucho, almost a musical Margaret Dumont. But the crowning attraction of anything starring Groucho Marx is, of course, Groucho Marx. He doesn’t attempt to Anglicize his performance in the slightest: His Ko-Ko is Rufus T. Firefly transposed to the stages of the D’Oly Carte; his patter songs could have been written, not by Gilbert but by Harry Ruby and Bert Kalmar. He even, at one point, performs the same herky-jerky dance moves beloved of Captain Spaulding in Animal Crackers, and when you consider that he was 70 at the time, those twisty high backward kicks are even more impressive. He’s so much himself that in “As someday it may happen” the line “And all third persons who on spoiling tête-à-têtes insist” is rendered as “And all thoid poisons who on sperling tête-à-têtes insist…” It’s a shame the only print that exists is a black-and-white kinescope, because photos of the production suggest the original color broadcast was a knockout. Still, it’s got Groucho, and that makes up for almost anything.
A charming, funny 1920s spoof nearly undone by the late-’60s mania for big, overlong musical roadshow attractions. The blame for this presumably lies at the feet of the producer, the taste-free Ross Hunter, especially since the many unnecessary musical numbers all feel inorganic to the story, shoehorned in to justify the enterprise. This is a shame as Richard Morris’ amusing screenplay, while sending up the conventions of the Flapper era, is clever without condescension, and George Roy Hill’s direction is a stylized delight. Julie Andrews (who made her Broadway debut in Sandy Wilson’s own Roaring ’20s pastiche The Boy Friend) is, while admittedly a bit too old for the naïf she’s playing, extremely game, even mugging or offering a moue to the audience while silent-movie super-titles hilariously limn Millie’s unworldly thoughts.
The picture is a spoof of period attitudes more than of the 1920s themselves, with its eponymous heroine determined to become a “modern” by, as she sings in voice-over, raising her skirts and bobbing her hair… and marrying her boss, whoever he might be. Millie thinks she’s Lorelei Lee but she hasn’t the heartlessness to play the femme fatale nor the innate boobery to pull off a dumb act, and the contrast between what she’s convinced herself she wants and what she actually does is a good part of the comedy, which Andrews plays with aplomb. And while his singing voice was dubbed (by Jimmy Bryant, who also doubled for Richard Beymer in West Side Story) James Fox is engagingly peppy as a sort of Nordic-featured Harold Lloyd-type go-getter, an identification that is reinforced in one of the picture’s best sequences, during which he and Andrews trade falls out of a high-rise office window.
Mary Tyler Moore as Millie’s unworldly pal Miss Dorothy is endearingly dopey but I wish her role was lengthier, and that she’d been given something to sing or at least a bit more dancing. But John Gavin is surprisingly funny as an ultra-straight country club stiff; the way his eyes widen when he’s been shot with a paralyzing blow-dart is more memorable than anything he ever did in a serious role. In the large supporting cast, Philip Ahn makes the most of his extended cameo as a wealthy Long Island family’s loyal if somewhat mysterious retainer and Pat Morita and Jack Soo are perfect as the villainess’s henchmen… although you will be left to wonder at the appalling inadequacy of Soo’s bald-head makeup and perhaps to ask why two Japanese character actors were cast as Chinese (which among other things reverses the wartime practice of casting Japanese roles with Chinese performers, all American citizens of Japanese descent being busy submitting to internment.) Cavada Humphrey gives good account of a pinched-faced bat of a corporate termagant, Herbie Faye gets to polish off his patented disgruntled New York curmudgeon and Mae Clarke, once famous for having a grapefruit shoved into her face by James Cagney in Public Enemy, shows up in an un-credited bit as an irritated secretary.
The two major supporting roles populated by theatre stars illustrate both the acumen of the people who put this movie together, and their simultaneous wrong-headedness. As Mrs. Meers, the white-slaving girls’ hotel proprietor, the great Beatrice Lillie, whose film career was nowhere near as extensive as it merited, exhibits her uncanny gift for doing much with little; a mere grimace, a rolling eye and an aggravated ersatz Chinese expletive (“Oh, shoo sho, shoo sho!”) from Lillie is wittier than a dozen wisecracks in almost any contemporary comedy of the period. At the extreme other end of this small splendor, alas, lies Carol Channing.
One of those Broadway freaks who used to crop up periodically in movies and television (Ethel Merman was another) Channing somehow managed to get an Academy Award™ nomination for her outré performance here as the emaciated mother hen gathering in Fox, Moore and Andrews, and if you aren’t a fan you’ll likely be scratching your head wondering what the hell everyone was thinking. It isn’t just that she’s broad, as Merman also was before the camera, or that her recurring laugh is as phony as her big blond wig. Had the conception of the role been made non-musical, “Muzzy Van Hossmere” could have been captivating. With Channing blasting out the songs in her wide-eyed steamroller fashion, however, Muzzy is a conspicuous bore, as irritating as a Midwestern hausfrau laboring under the weird delusion that she can out-sing Maria Callas. I hope the Academy members who nominated this weird, vulgar (and somehow unsavory) turn were properly shamed in the spring of ’68 when Angela Lansbury showed up to perform Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen’s snappy title song for the Oscar telecast. Although the song-and-dance was so overproduced it could have been the work of Ross Hunter himself, with her savvy, her ebullience, her energy, her high-cut skirt and her enviably shapely gams, Lansbury walked off with the evening and showed Hollywood what its increasingly expensive string of big flop musicals might have had. (Not that it ultimately did her movie career much good.)
Aside from their possible (if dubious) value as cautionary warnings, the traditional musical numbers in Thoroughly Modern Millie add nothing to the picture, and in fact detract from our interest and amusement. The only ones that do not, and that have a feeling of cleverness or integrity are those (“Baby Face,” “Jimmy,” “Poor Butterfly,” the title song) which take place in Millie’s head. It’s worth noting as well that these voice-over songs are related to the character’s thoughts and emotions; they aren’t just there to be Big Musical Numbers. They also have the advantage of visual irony, adding a layer, however thin, of wit. (Moore and Gavin also get one of the musical jokes: whenever their eyes meet we hear an anachronistic but amusing Jeanette MacDonald/Nelson Eddyesque rendition of Victor Herbert’s “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life,” which must have given either Gene Wilder or Mel Brooks an idea for Young Frankenstein.) Similarly, the best dances in the picture are the smallest: The way the various characters (Millie and Miss Dorothy first, then Mrs. Meers and later her Chinese henchmen) break into terpsichorean routines to kick the hotel’s ancient, stalled elevator into life. It’s here that Joe Layton’s choreography really shines as Millie and Dorothy perform a nonchalant series of ’20s tap steps to an arrangement of “Stumbling,” Mrs. Meers kicks the wall and pointedly stomps her elaborately shod feet in a parody of automation, and her minions do an elegant deadpan sand-dance to — wait for it — Richard Whiting’s “The Japanese Sandman.” (It would be a good joke if they hadn’t made these two characters Chinese.)
The production numbers, by contrast, are formed along, on the one hand, tired old lines (the New Dance Sensation in “The Tapioca,” Channing’s acrobatic vaudeville turn to Gershwin and DeSylva’s “Do it Again”) and, on the other, to rip-off (the wedding dance to Sylvia Neufeld’s “Trinkt Le Chiam,” obviously intended as a sop to lovers of the then-current Broadway smash Fiddler on the Roof, specifically to Jerome Robbins’ Bottle Dance at the climax of Act One.) And why is Millie engaged to sing at a Jewish wedding, or any other function? It’s Miss Dorothy who’s supposed to be the aspiring performer and Muzzy who’s the former chorus girl; Millie is a career girl on a matrimonial path. This is exactly what I mean when I say these numbers are shoehorned in. They have nothing, but nothing, to do with Millie, or with the movie’s plot. They have to do only with nervous studio executives convincing themselves that if they stuff a sufficient number of songs into a picture it could be the next Sound of Music. Conversely, when the songs remain in Millie’s mind they work, and even add to the fun, as when André Previn’s arrangement of “Baby Face” interpolates an unseen choir evoking Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus.
Morris (who also wrote the book for the Meredith Willson stage musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown) had a way with an unemphatic comic line, which reaches a kind of apotheosis when Millie, whose stolid boss (Gavin) thinks of her as one of the boys and calls her “John,” decides to go the sexpot route, tarting up her makeup, perching on his desk and breathing her lines huskily at him until, inevitably, she goes too far:
Millie: Do you have a mo’? Trevor Graydon: A what? Millie: A moment. I would just love to get a man’s opinion of Rudolph Valentino. Graydon: Huh? Millie: I mean, in The Sheik, he takes Agnes Ayres by brute force, and she enjoys it. She enjoys it… a lot. What is your opinion of brute force, Mr. Graydon? Graydon: Well, I’m not for it. No, I’m not for it at all. No, that is not what women really want today. The late war has upset them. Now they are disillusioned. They yearn for truth. Give them a young man they can trust. Tom Sawyer, at twenty. Millie: I never read Tom Sawyer. Was he… sexy? Graydon: He was only twelve. Millie: (Seductively) So? If ya got it, ya got it.
Which is when Graydon sends Millie scurrying.
George Roy Hill, while not necessarily a great filmmaker, was a great popular entertainer, and I don’t think any opprobrium ought to be attached to that. If he only directed 14 pictures, the list includes some of the most enjoyable, or at least most interesting, pictures of their time: The World of Henry Orient, Hawaii, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, The Great Waldo Pepper. Slap Shot, A Little Romance, The World According to Garp and The Little Drummer Girl. He was a journeyman director, perhaps, but also a stylist, and Millie is almost a companion piece to The Sting in its rich evocation of an era and its playful self-consciousness, at least about transitions; sequences in the picture do not fade, they iris out, with various geometric shapes taking the place of the conventional iris. There’s a wonderfully staged and edited scene with Andrews and Fox necking in his car, in which the couple repeatedly disappears into the cushions, only to almost instantly reappear where they logically can’t. Millie also shares with The Sting Hill’s fondness for working on sets, including elaborate city streets.
And here is as good a place as any to acknowledge the picture’s splendid art direction (Alexander Golitzen and George C. Webb), set decoration (Howard Bristol), special effects (Dave Fleischer and Albert Whitmore, both uncredited) and the superb matte work by Albert Whitlock, especially those he painted for the high-rise sequence. The only exceptions to the general excellence in these departments are the notably poor rear-screen projection during the aerial scenes; this must have pained the director, an aviator and airplane buff. Hill is also ably abetted by the beautifully colored, deep-focus cinematography by Russell Metty (credited) and Russell Harlan (uncredited… there’s a story in that) and Stuart Gilmore’s witty editing. And whatever my reservations about the musical numbers, André Previn‘s arrangements of the songs are delicious, as is the incidental score by Elmer Bernstein, who won his only(!) Academy Award™ for it. Since Bernstein composed magnificent scores for two of Hill’s best previous pictures (The World of Henry Orient and Hawaii) I can only assume his involvement here was at Hill’s insistence.
That Thoroughly Modern Millie is so engagingly written, designed, directed, photographed, edited, scored and (with one glaring exception) acted, only makes its flaws more dispiriting. Just as you’re having a breezy good time, you’re hit with another inane, overstated musical number and (to take a leaf from something Pauline Kael once wrote) it’s like coïtus interruptus recurring at irregular intervals. Although draped in imported silk sheets and cushioned by the softest of queen-size mattresses, the movie never comes.
So few critics, so many poets 