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CaB Film Club #5 - Hellzapoppin

Started by greenman, May 26, 2019, 05:05:17 PM

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greenman

This time its H. C. Potter's 1941 musical Hellzapoppin.



Full film on youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2TOriWWSLE

zomgmouse


Small Man Big Horse



I watched this today and though I had minor concerns that a second viewing might not be as much fun I loved it just as much, the gag rate is amazing and it's constantly inventive and playful throughout, and adorable in general. I'm half way through writing a review which I'll finish tomorrow or Saturday and then post it here then.

the science eel

Looking forward to reading it.

The film really is extraordinary - unlike anything else ever, and enormous fun.

Keebleman

Even Leslie Halliwell said that the film 'now' (ie 1980s) seems "insufficiently daring", and I think it's true. Duck Soup and W C Fields' The Fatal Glass of Beer were nearly 10 years before this and they both have a sense of sustained and inventive lunacy which is only sporadic here.  Also, Olsen and Johnson don't really have distinctive enough personalities.  Chic is the slightly more wisecracking one of the pair, but on the whole the two could perform each other's dialogue with no impact on the film.

I enjoyed Hugh Herbert, Mischa Auer and Martha Raye though, and I liked that the romantic leads occasionally participated in the craziness, which poor Zeppo Marx was seldom allowed to do.

And those Harlem Dancers were incredible.  I had never seen that sequence before, or even heard about it.  It was eye-popping stuff.

Small Man Big Horse

Unsurprisingly I disagree with the above. Here's my review:

Hellzapoppin' is a film which made me feel really stupid, and yet I love it to pieces. The reason it led to me thinking I was an idiot is that I thought I knew my history of comedy rather well and that The Goons, Monty Python and various others were responsible for creating so many comedic ideas and devices, and yet decades earlier Hellzapoppin' did them first, and did them in amazing style too. And while Citizen Kane may be 1941's most famous film despite loving Orson Welles and that movie I'd say this is better, and more impressively inventive too.

Starring music hall duo Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson this had been performed on stage for a good few years before being turned in to a film, but it's a very different work (as the duo mention themselves). It starts off with a crazy opening song set in hell with a huge amount going on as devils leap all over the place, a taxi arrives out of nowhere and an enormous amount of animals come out of it, before Olsen and Johnson arrive on the scene. It's packed with great gags from the get go, including one where Johnson quips "That's the first taxi driver who went straight where I told him to" and in the first ten minutes there's gag after gag at an amazing rate as well as plenty of fourth wall breaking, including a marvellous bit where they ask Cousin Louie the projectionist to rewind the film so they can see what happened, only to find that Louie is flirting with a woman and ignoring them. Louie pops up a few more times in he film too, with each moment a gorgeous bit of meta madness.

The director then stops the film being shot, claiming that they have to have a proper story in the movie, and a love story at that. As they chat they walk through various locations, from a prison to an aristocratic house and then the North Pole, all the while wearing different / suitable costumes for the scene, with the latter containing a beautiful Citizen Kane related joke which is impressive considering both films were released in the same year, these days there's normally a good two or so years gap before movies joke about each other. Shortly afterwards there's another killer joke, quite literally, when a cameraman shoots himself after learning he'll have to work on the picture until it's finished, and then they finally decide that the film will be a farcical comedy about a guy called Jeff who falls in love with a woman named Kitty while staging a play, but one of the performers is in lust with her, and the lead female in the production, Betty, wants to seduce him as she believes him to be a rich Russian.

Not that the plotline is particularly important to proceedings, at least until towards the end, it contains many an extremely funny moment but it's mainly a framing device for Olsen and Johnson to include as many types as jokes as possible. There's a delightful amount of meta comedy and fourth wall breaking - the best being a moment when a couple of captions tell audience member "Stinky Miller" to go home - though the scenes where they're working on the script to the film while it takes place around them are also hilarious stuff. They also rewind or stop the film at several points, a screw up leads to a mirth inducing split screen moment, and they even end up accidentally wandering on to a set of another movie, a western which shortly afterwards is the reason why an Native American Indian ends up on the set of Hellzapoppin' somewhat lost.

This only begins to describe the madness however, at various points there's a woman running around shouting for "Oscar!" (whatever could that be a reference to!) and a man crying out for Mrs Jones, in one part the duo pretend to be racing commentators and in another dub the dialogue taking place in the film. There's also some mirth inducing censored dialogue, it has some beautifully constructed slapstick, a number of songs that I could write pages about and which are never less than an absolute joy and stunningly choreographed too, while the famous Lindy Hop dance sequence has understandably gone down as one of the most memorable ever cinematic scenes. Add to all of this a detective called Quimby (Hugh Herbert) who does little other than pop up from time to time to make ridiculously daft jokes (and a little bit of real magic too) and various other bits of insanity and you've got a film I genuinely believe to be one of the best ever made.

The whole thing really is quite frankly glorious, and it was rare I wasn't either laughing or grinning like the maddest of mad men while watching it. And I haven't even discussed the ending as I don't wish to spoiler it for anyone, but it's a tour de force from Olsen and Johnson and the cast, and has some of the best idiotic tomfoolery I've ever witnessed in my life. At a tight eighty minutes it doesn't even come close to outstaying it's welcome, and unlike too many a comedy is a lean, mean, incredibly efficient creation. Kudos should go to all of the cast and though Olsen and Johnson are the highlights, Martha Raye, Hugh Herbert and Mischa Auer are also fantastic, and even those tasked with straighter characters like the central romantic duo are bloody good too.

Now I'm not saying that Olsen and Johnson (and the film's writers Nat Perrin, Warren Wilson and Alex Gottlieb, and director H.C. Potter) invented or were responsible for creating all of the gags and comedic concepts mentioned above but that they came up with even a good few makes it an outstanding work, and the ones which they riff upon are done so in stunning way. Citizen Kane of course didn't end up winning the Oscar for 1941's best picture with it being awarded to John Ford's How Green Was My Valley, but in a sane and fair world Hellzapoppin' would have won it along with a sod load of others awards. It's one of the funniest comedies of all time, joyful and full of mischief, and if you have even the slightest interest in the genre it's an absolute must watch.

peanutbutter

Found it very hard to place this one, in some respects it felt like something from ten years earlier, in others maybe like a cartoon from ten years later. At times I was loving it but it kept feeling like it was drilling too hard into the same ideas and becoming a bit obnoxious too.

Might type more later