I’ve read, and heard from friends, that people are doing low doses of LSD to improve mood and cognitive function. I’m all for anything that gets one through the week, but I’m not ready to pull out my headband, dashiki and Ravi Shankar albums. Besides I still have PTSD from dropping acid with my friend Frank and going to see Mame starring Lucille Ball.
Mercifully I have a vast DVD and Blu-ray collection to sample from for low doses of digital lunacy. And I love scenes from crackpot musicals which I admit is balm for my tattered soul. Here are 10 mind-altering favorites:
The Lady in the Tutti-Fruiti Hat (The Gang’s All Here). Busby Berkeley’s 1943 Technicolor wartime extravaganza about soldier Andy Mason (James Ellison) who falls for nightclub songbird Edie Allen (Alice Faye) and a huge war bond rally staged at his dad’s Long Island mansion. Basically an excuse to stage outrageous musical numbers, which Berkeley is so famous for- but this time in eyeball-scalding color. From the loony opening number “Brazil,” supposedly contained all on a nightclub stage, to the psychedelic, neon-soaked tribute to the polka dot finale. But a high point is Carmen Miranda’s “The Lady in the Tutti-Fruiti Hat,” with showgirls holding giant bananas over their head, and if that isn’t phallic enough, thrusting them down between the legs of female dancers lying on the stage with their limbs spread holding huge strawberries. Carmen uses the word “gay” in the song multiple times and good Lord, is it ever.
Sweet Marijuana (Murder at the Vanities). You know it’s a pre-Code movie when there’s a musical number called “Sweet Marijuana.” This rollicking backstage murder mystery is set during the fraught opening night of the new Earl Carroll “Vanities” show. Someone is trying to drop sandbags on the leading lady Ann (the lovely Kitty Carlisle), and all sorts of backstage intrigue threaten to stop the show. But soon bodies start piling up, and manager (Jack Oakie) calls in a cop (Victor McLaglen) to solve the crime while the show rolls forward. Leading man Eric (Carl Brisson) sings a number on stage with lovely showgirls with feather fans as the waves on the ocean. Rotten Rita (Gertrude Michael) sings “Sweet Marijuana” in front of a giant cactus with topless girls covering their breasts. Later there is a number “Rape of the Rhapsody” that suddenly reveals Duke Ellington and his band. It just doesn’t get any wackier than this.
Too Marvelous for Words (Ready, Willing and Able). Poor Ross Alexander, a wonderful Warner Brothers contract player, who took his own life at the height of his stardom. I wrote about his doomed life here. Ready, Willing and Able was his last film, co-starring lovely Ruby Keeler. It was a tuneful bit of fluff where Alexander and Lee Dixon play two songwriters who try to get a famous British singer for their musical. Ruby Keeler is mistaken for the singer and the show goes into rehearsal- until the actual star (Wini Shaw) shows up. It all ends well with a fabulous number- “Too Marvelous for Words” which Alexander performs with wit, style and good humor. And ends with Ruby Keeler and Lee Dixon dancing on the keys of a giant typewriter with the legs of showgirls typing out the words while Keeler and Dixon dazzle as they dance.
We Want Ice Cream (Kid Millions). Eddie Cantor (a huge star at the time) plays Eddie, living on a barge in the city in a poor neighborhood but looking out for all the kids that live there. He inherits 77 million dollars but has to travel by boat to Egypt to collect the cash. Ethel Merman plays Dot, a jazz singer who believes she is the rightful heir. Oh, who cares? It has a happy ending- and that section was filmed in three-strip Technicolor! It’s Eddie’s gift to the neighborhood- a free ice cream factory, and the musical segment is wonderfully bonkers. Children have lined up banging on the glass shouting “we want ice cream.” Meanwhile, inside, milkmaids are feeding hay to oversized fake cows and dancers are skating around the top of a giant ice cream maker pouring huge bottles of vanilla, chunks of chocolate and massive strawberries into the machine. Down below three-flavored ice cream bars sail out with pretty chorus girls atop. The children finally break down the front door (on top of Eddie Cantor) and stream in, sitting on stools, sucking on straws, drinking from giant milk shakes until they stagger off, incredibly fat. It’s nice to see the cross-section of races of the kids chowing down on the frozen treats, and I recognized a few Little Rascals in the mix. You have to see this to believe it.
I Could be Happy with You (The Boy Friend). Ken Russell’s fiercely enjoyable film adaptation of the Sandy Wilson play starring the glorious Twiggy. This is a major go-to movie for me when I’m blue. Twiggy, the 60s super-model (now featured in a terrific documentary by Sadie Frost) stars as Polly, a stage manager at a run-down theater in London. When the star of the show (a hilarious cameo by Glenda Jackson) breaks her leg, Polly has to jump into the lead. She has a major crush on the lead dancer (handsome Christopher Gable– a trained dancer who appeared in several films for Russell). The whole cast is a-twitter because a famous film director is in the audience. This gives Russell the opportunity to have the director fantasize certain numbers as fantastical Busby Berkeley extravaganzas. The number “I Could be Happy with You” has bellboy Christopher Gable and Twiggy dancing to a record, so the director imagines them tap dancing across a giant revolving record, eventually joined by showgirls in elaborate headdresses forming geometric patterns on the enormous platter. It’s a fun homage to Berkeley. Twiggy has incredible sweetness, beauty, and charm on screen. She is a true delight. So is the movie.
Coming for You (The Apple). Set in the future- 1994- this jaw-dropping, ludicrous, sci-fi musical posits the devil as a record producer named Mr. Boogalow (Vladek Sheybal). who has started a dance craze called “The Bim.” He uses drugs and sex to seduce a sweet, folk-singing duo- Alphie (George Gilmour) & Bibi (Catherine Mary Stewart), until an old hipster named Mr. Topps (Joss Ackland) saves the day by taking everyone to a new planet to start over. This beats out other musical turds like Godspell and Jesus Christ, Superstar in terms of hippie horror. It’s hard to pick one number that is more preposterous but I have to go with “I’m Coming for You,” when Alphie shows up at Boogalow’s pad in an attempt to rescue Bibi, where everyone is costumed and partying. Seductive Pandi (Grace Kennedy) offers Alphie “a special drink,” and in a drugged haze he is led down corridors with open doors showing orgiastic shenanigans. All the while Pandi is singing, “Let me tempt you and tease you and hold you and squeeze you and feel every inch of your love!” They end up in a bedroom where Alphie is stripped and ravished by Pandi and we get to see other half-nude dancers writhing and undulating to the music. Like a disco/MTV glitter wet dream. If this scene makes you horny there is no hope for you.
Oobala Baby (Untamed Youth). Oh hell, everyone needs a Mamie Van Doren fix from time to time. In this teensploitation classic- Mamie plays Penny, hitchhiking to Los Angeles with her sister Jane (Lori Nelson). They get arrested for hitchhiking and are sentenced to a “Correction Farm” on a vagrancy charge. The whole thing is a scam by a farm owner and his Judge girlfriend to get kids toiling out in the fields picking cotton for free. Eddie Cochran makes an appearance as one of the cotton-picking delinquents. They all get to unwind at the rec hall where they really go wild, dancing up a storm to rock and roll on the juke box. That is until Mamie decides to serenade the kids with “Oobala Baby,” wearing the most revealing skin-tight sweater and jeans. The poignant lyrics go like this, “Dancin’ at a party when Joe walked in. Came with Pete, but I left with Jim. Ah, Oobala baby, he’s my Joe. Ah, Oobala baby, love him so. Oobala baby, never, never, never let me go.” Besides, you have to love a movie with snappy dialogue like, “With two heads you’d still be a moron.”
Mr. Beebe (Carolina Blues). I had to hunt down a bootleg of this because there’s one musical number in it that drives me insane. This Columbia Pictures wartime comedy features popular band leader Kay Kyser, who plays himself, planning on taking a long-needed vacation, who is coerced to perform at a concert for defense plant workers. Ann Miller, before she landed at MGM, plays an aspiring singer who muscles into the show. But the big musical number, set in Harlem, is called “Mr. Beebe,” starring Harold Nicholas of the Nicholas Brothers and a host of astonishing black dancers in a lengthy, flabbergasting number. Several highlights in the number is when June Richmond– a large gal with one hell of a voice- sashays in and belts out a few choruses. Also, Nicholas’ sublime dance with the wildly talented Marie Bryant. There are zoot-suited dancers flying over their partners and between their legs; young shoe shine boys dancing alongside (and keeping up with) Nicholas, and a finale where Harold Nicholas really detonates your mind with his acrobatic genius. In the film, there is another song by Jule Styne & Sammy Cahn– “There Goes That Song Again,” which sounded so familiar it drove me crazy- until I realized they used it in the background of William Castle’s ax-murder classic- Strait-Jacket, starring Joan Crawford.
Do the Milk Shake (Can’t Stop the Music). The camp, idiotic film capitalizing on the marginal popularity of the heterosexually-challenged disco group The Village People. Poor Nancy Walker, the wonderful character actress, was way over-her-head as director on this Allan Carr-written & produced stink-bomb. How could anyone make this mess work? Especially with the script that can’t make up its mind what it really is about. Or how gay it needs to be to reach its core audience. One feels bad for Valerie Perrine, Steve Guttenberg, Paul Sand, and Tammy Grimes. But, God forgive me, I will always buy any new digital restoration if just for the jaw-dropping Busby Berkeley-like number set in a locker room in which partially nude men whip towels at each other and dive into a pool to “WMCA.” Oh yes, before “Caitlyn,” here is a young Bruce Jenner prancing down Christopher Street in cut-off shorts. There is a scene where the Village People are hired for a TV commercial and the result is “Do the Milk Shake.” The commercial begins with Valerie Perrine as a mother in the kitchen fetching milk from the refrigerator and then calling for her children. Into the room come six tykes- mini versions of The Village People. A little cop, cowboy, construction worker, soldier, leather-boy and Indian. Perrine says, “If you want to grow up to be big and strong and sing and dance, you’ve gotta drink your milk.” This segues into a glittery, over-produced, commercial with the Village People and solid silver dancers wildly dancing and repeating “Do the shake…the milk shake…do the shake…the milk shake…the milk shake!” A flop at the box office, this probably should have been retitled “Can’t Sit Through the Movie.”
Satan’s Alley (Staying Alive). I remember seeing this sequel (to the blockbuster hit Saturday Night Fever) with a preview audience and my heart sank when, during the credits, it stated, “Directed by Sylvester Stallone.” And then it went from bad to worse. Audience members audibly groaned around me listening to all the clichéd dialogue. At least John Travolta, revisiting his Tony Manero character, buffed up big time for the role- his body is incredibly ripped. His Tony is now living in NYC, trying out for dance roles while working as a waiter at a disco and teaching dance classes. He lives in a seedy hotel and washes out his underwear in the shower. There’s this dumb subplot about a love triangle between a sweet, dancer girlfriend (Cynthia Rhodes) and the bitchy, beautiful star of an upcoming show (Finola Hughes), but it all culminates when Tony lands the lead dancer role in this big production called “Satan’s Alley” (and with costumes by Bob Mackie). Suddenly the audience around me started perking up because the movie just jumped the tracks and the whole final dance number was giving Mel Brooks’ “Springtime for Hitler” a run for the money. There’s even a shot of Tony’s mother crossing herself in the audience, which is understandable. Travolta is leaping around in purgatory in practically a loincloth and there’s dry ice on the floor and writhing, tormented dancers jumping up now and then, wearing shiny outfits. It was finally a relief to start laughing in the theater and the laughs built and built as the pretentious choreography intensified. I would have left the theater truly disappointed but “Satan’s Alley” saved the day, and still does whenever I start taking life too seriously. Just seeing Travolta leaping and twirling in hell is indeed comfort for my battered brain.
So, saluting the spirit of Timothy Leary, I say, “Turn on, tune in, and hit ‘play.’”
