Movie Review: Hellzapoppin!

7/10A

Myself and the inestimable Mrs Algo have taken it upon ourselves to try and fill gaps in our classic movie viewing histories along with the help of Empire's Top 500 movies, and our subscription to a DVD rental website (who don't pay me so why should I advertise?).

Ahem, all gaps except French films from the 1960s. I've seen a couple and they made me want to gnaw out my brain. I admit this is a prejudice and many people view French cinema as wonderful. I am not one of them.

The exclusion of French film means more time to see things a little more obscure and less cool (see Danger: Diabolik! for another example), and I was immediately intrigued by Empire's description of this film (and its place - 178 is a good 140 places higher than Airplane!) which I will quote here to back up why I was caught up in it.

"One of the darnedest films ever made, and a template for the who-cares-if-it- makes-sense-so-long-as- it's-funny? mode of comedy."

It's tough sometimes, as it was with seminal serious works like Seven Samurai and Citizen Kane, to make the important distinction between beats and cinematic moves which may feel like cliché now, but of which these were the first examples. The use of the word "template" was my clue (not "darnedest", not sure I know what that means anyhow).

Hellzapoppin' is not Citizen Kane. Not by a long shot. What it is, is a blueprint of future subversive anti-cinematic comedies like Blazing Saddles, Naked Gun and Airplane!

Amazing thing is, it was made thirty years before these, way back in 1942 during the war. It invites the audience to escape not only from the harsh reality of that world, but also from the dull repetition of formula movies - much as those more modern examples did for cowboys & indians, police procedurals and disaster movies, respectively.

Like those examples it takes as optional most of the conventions of movie making - Groucho Marx may have addressed monologues and jokes to the audience, but I'm pretty sure he never told the projectionist to rewind the film so he could see something again - and got his wish. Even if he did, I doubt it was in response to a dwarf exploding a taxicab.

At every stage the fourth wall is consistently broken and, in a very innovative move, other movies occasionally break into this one - sound familiar yet?

The comedy duo at the centre of this comedic melting pot are Olsen and Johnson (eagle eyed or elephant memoried readers will immediately note the Blazing Saddles connection) who, like a less successful Abbot and Costello pretty much sail through the middle of a dumb story while making the most of any opportunity for slapstick and wordplay ("A coat of arms!").

However - unlike those more mainstream comedies, the very movie itself is deconstructed too.

Here's how that works - the film opens in hell (obviously), and Olsen and Johnson are delivered there in a taxi...
(line - "the first cab driver who went straight where I told him to")
...and have a little fun making jokes as surreal events happen all around them, until the director of the movie stops everything and takes them to see a scriptwriter because you can't make a movie without a story. The scriptwriter chucks them into a romantic comedy with a plot described stupid by everyone involved - even the characters in it.

Getting the idea yet? This is a fantastically crazy, frequently headache inducing piece of cinema that I, for one, never anticipate seeing the like of. In my modernocentric, arrogant way I guess I had always assumed that many of the gags, surreal running jokes and setpieces here were simply too "modern" to be in a 67 year old wartime comedy. I am glad to be wrong.

Add in several outstanding comedy performances (the main duo, their Bronxian lady companion, the fake prince who isn't really fake etc) and a Lindy Hop dance sequence that starts out with the audience fearing a sort of mildly racist "black music" jazz sequence but morphs into the most extraordinary, celebratory and energetic dance section I have seen in a long, long time. Thought it should be noted that the African American contingent are all servants and quickly vanish out of the picture - it isn't THAT subversive.

The film is almost worth seeing just for this scene alone, but I have to highly recommend it to all comedy fans for its sheer exuberant subversiveness, anyway.

I cannot bring myself to give it a higher score for two reasons - first, while the romantic story is universally ridiculed and distracted from at all times, and obviously it is a satire on the formula pictures of its time, the two or three love songs are hideously mawkish, and the lovers (particularly the male one) are so immensely punchable it reduced my enjoyment a little more than it was supposed to.

The second reason I cannot score Hellzapoppin' higher is that despite its fast and furious gag rate about a third of the jokes just miss the mark - the innovation of others makes up for this in part, but particularly in the character of the private detective, felt a little dated and obvious in contrast to the rest of the general craziness on display.

It is for this exact reason I invented the blue A so take this as a totally fun, if not very cerebral, movie experience.

A fine example of something I didn't know existed - it comes highly recommended, so long as you don't expect anythign approaching sense or sanity.

'Til Next Time Folks!

A