The Mothering Instinct: Frankie Sinatra and his Matrons

From top: Betty Garrett, Celeste Holm, Vivian Blaine

The enduring image of Mr. Frank Sinatra today is from the early 60s: that ring-a-ding-dingin' wiseguy crooner, chairman-of-the-board for the Rat Pack, shtupping a plethora of broads, singing with a cigarette and tumbler of Jack Daniels/rocks in one hand, mic in the other. But did you know that during WW2 he used to be called a skinny little runt? Even into the 50s he was often but a naive wingman to blustery Gene Kelly in MGM musicals, losing girls even to Bing Crosby. He always ended up hooked up with aggressive, strong women; they pursued him, because of 'the mother instinct' --and this Brooklyn beanpole never put up more than token resistance as he wound up with the girl who wanted him, rather than the girl he wanted. If she had a good pitching arm, a car, her own apartment, a money-making job, and refused to take no for an answer, what could he do? Ring-a-ding-done! 

It all began during the Second World War with Sinatra's quiet storm radio broadcasts. Singing torchy ballads with a revolutionary new mic technique that carried right through the speakers clearer and more intimate than all the other crooners on the airwaves, like he was right there in the room, like an early version of an ASMR video. With their men all overseas, lonely women across America swooned in adoration. It made soldiers listening on Armed Forces Radio jealous to hear about it, so in the interest of patriotism and good sportsmanship Frank played up the mother instinct aspect. Nothing to be jealous about, sailor! Frank was just a skinny kid with a golden voice, from the neighborhood - the runt of the block; women could love him and not be unfaithful because they just wanted to cook for him and make sure he had his mittens. He was no threat to a red-blooded mesomorphic serviceman and he was a good sport about being mistaken for a broom or carried off by strong winds when he guested on Bob Hope or The Jack Benny Show.

Anchors Aweigh, w/ Pamela Britton

But after the war he found it a hard persona to shake. Most soldiers were home, but not all of them. War widows were abundant; their mother instincts were more intense than ever. Having been married to a soldier or sailor killed in the war kind of liberated you from having to be a 'good' girl. And now they could do something about it, like make the first move on little Frankie and not take no for an answer.

First there was the savvy Brooklyn girl (Pamela Britton) whose assertiveness in getting Sinatra into the sack in Anchors Aweigh (1945) leaves Kathryn Grayson free and clear for Gene Kelly. She's great, but she comes in only 3/4 of the way through a long, uninteresting slog spent with kids, cartoons, dull classical operetta, and a very distasteful scammer streak of misogyny courtesy cockblocking sailor Gene Kelly. Schooling his buddy the virginal Sinatra in all the wrong ways to woo a sincere girl, first by sneaking onto the studio lot and harassing conductor Iturbi, expecting the world to just bow to the intensity of his manufactured needs. In a bid to escape Gene's connivings, Frank finds an aggressive Brooklyn-transplant waitress; she's an endearing consolation prize and his emotional journey is tempered by some of his best early Columbia torch songs like "I Fall in Love too Easily." That early 40s Columbia period contain maybe my favorite recordings ever, period, but I'm not a huge fan of everything that came after (i.e. on Capitol). And Frank and the girl from Brooklyn provide some grounded relief from the MGM treacle and Kelly's obnoxious braggart persona. It also sets the stage for the best of Sinatra's mothering hometown girls to come, a real she-wolf on no small dancing and singing skill, Betty Garrett.

Take Me Out the Ballgame (w/Betty Garrett)

In Take Me Out to the Ballgame (1949) Sinatra and Garrett' relationship was perhaps best summed up by the song "It's Fate, Baby it's Fate," a duet wherein she makes aggressive passes and Frankie tries to argue his way out while she chases him around the empty ballpark: 

 Betty: Too late, baby, too late,
So accept your destiny,
It's fate, baby, that you were meant to fall into love with me.
(break)
I'm gonna start it out on my astrology, and phrenology

Frank: It does not matter that you are Aquarius, or Sagittarius
Or Gemini or Scorpio or Taurus the Bull, Capriconicus or Pisces the fish.
Betty: Winter, summer, spring or fall,
As long as you were born at all,
Mister, you're my dish. 

It's fate baby, it's fate.
Frank: Can't I even put up a fuss?
Betty: It's fate, baby, the stars have written that you and me is Us.

On the Town (w/Betty Garrett)

In On the Town (released the same year) she's a NYC cabbie who sings "Come up to My Place," and--in a move very bold for 1949--convinces Frank's sailor to abandon planned sightseeing for a quickie / nooner at her place. Their hook-up vibe gets so intense that the clueless cockblocking of her sniffling roommate is almost not funny. We feel the heat. Finally she packs the roomie off to the movies so she and Frankie can presumably have some of the most forthrightly implied casual afternoon sex since Dorothy Malone closed up the bookstore in The Big Sleep (1946).  (See more about my love for the Garrett / Sinatra dynamic in my 2006 piece, "The She Wolf Gets Her Man").

Guys and Dolls (w/Vivien Blaine)

Garrett was a blast in both roles and was a tough act to follow. She wound up blacklisted----and Frank had troubles of his own. He finally lost the 'ie' at the end of his name when he landed a major role in From Here to Eternity (1953) but he still made musicals, of course, and still had to contend with bossy broads like Adelaide (Vivian Blaine) in 1955's Guys and Dolls, but it wasn't until 1956 that his musical persona began a transitional phase.

He made two films that year-- The Tender Trap and High Society. The staid, supportive, witty, and patient Celeste Holm took over the hungry matron role for both. Like Garrett she was a working girl. A photographer in High Society and a concert violinist in Trap, she was high class, less aggressive than Garrett but on the other hand started the film already hooked up with Frank. A lady of substance rather than a brassy girl from the neighborhood, Frankie was making the grade from the outset, but there was no sparks with Holm. She was his launch pad, boosting his courage and catching him if and when he ever fell. She was the consolation prize, the holding pattern while he reached for radiant stars like Grace Kelly or fell for unattainable hick virgins like Debbie Reynolds.

High Society (w/Celeste Holm)

In High Society, Holm is in the place usually reserved for Joan Blondell or post-code Jean Harlow, the patient, long-suffering girl friday. It's Grace Kelly of course that Frank really sparks with. She's supposed to be Bing's true love but as soon as Sinatra gets behind the bar, pours some drinks, and sings to her, an alchemical transubstantiation occurs before our eyes and ears, the beanpole kid from Brooklyn vanishes and the super cool 'swinger Frank' is born. The bar is clearly his place of power, his voice the sonic equivalent of the giddy warm flush in your cheeks when the first drink lights up your soul like a beam of cocktail hour setting sun. Kelly's whole body seems to respond to his voice like a kitten to the touch, and his voice reacts to her response to his voice, elevating the voice in turn. The mold of 'Frankie' and the mother instinct shattering from the low throb vibrations. Together they leave Bing looking almost anemic, ready for the hospital matron Celeste to lead him out to pasture.

This moment wasn't just a Hoboken son getting lucky with a future princess but a career-turning revelation. A deep, poetic, sincere romanticism that Sinatra could only really convey in his best recordings comes out onto screen finally, and the last shred of the old innocent 'Frankie' disappears forever. The booze, the bar, the saloon song, the intimacy of two people alone at a bar, this--it was clear--was Frank's place of power, and the world's knees were shaking. He was so in control he could even go flat, slurred and boozy on half-spoken lines like "she got pinched in the Asss/ ter Bar." and get away with it.

But he still had to go back to Holm in the end, because he would never be able to go all the way into high society. He was meant for the quiet hideaway bar with the fishbowl tip jar on the piano, rather than the ritzy soirees. And Holm, at least in High Society, wins him by default. But her mother instinct had just gone obsolete. She expected her Icarus high-flyin' swinger would plummet back into her arms once his wings melted into the morning's hangover and the bar was closed but there was a city where the bars were always open, the crooning, drinking, and seducing could go on 24/7. There was no need for hangovers or Holm in... Las Vegas.

In Frank and Holm's other 1956 film, The Tender Trap, he plays a swinging New York City talent agent with a constant stream of dames, allegedly, but he only ever wakes up with Holm, whose classy carriage (she's an orchestra violinist) and Broadway wit anchor his confidence, one cool swinger to another. Her steadfast availability made him a lazy lover; why bother putting in any effort when Holm's handy? She will put up with his tomcatting because she's got nothing better going on, for now, and so the years pass. Easy sex keeps them dependent until they meet marriage-minded virginal singer Debbie Reynolds (one of Frank's new clients) at a restaurant. Amused by her naive hick integrity, they're like Grant and Russell with Bellamy at lunch in His Girl Friday. Grilling her on her life goals (she wants three kids and a home in the country, all within five years, or bust), she doesn't even recognize they're kidding her along. Holm gets to seem cosmopolitan here but then the censor steps in, presumably, and it's revealed Holm is just a plain old-fashioned girl, too.

The Tender Trap 

Ugh.

Holm is great, was great, before Reynolds' bossy and controlling attitude stains her disposition by contrast. Frank refuses to value her homespun malarkey but his womanizing attitude buckles like arctic summer ice when Reynolds finally falls into his arms; he's finally bigger than someone, and its beautiful to see both of them being swept along against their will, despite the icky censor-sanctified subtexts. Luckily Holm doesn't need to look far to find a man who appreciates her, she doesn't even make it out of the elevator before she's found an upgrade of her own.

Frank was now drawing the A-list stars, but nothing could prepare him for the Shirley MacLaine experience. Her garish 'party girl' make-up and a solid range of acting chops didn't preclude her playing the doormat, adopting some Vivian Blaine-shrillness as the 'party girl' who won't stop chasing Sinatra even back into his hometown (where he goes for a frigid uninterested English teacher instead) in the non-musical Some Came Running (1958). As he almost did with Holm in Trap, Sinatra marries Shirley for the wrong reason and she runs into her pimp's bullet mere hours afterwards, to save Frank's life and open him up for some more reciprocal relationships. Were any of them coming? Or just some more mothering easy Brooklyn-type broads (whom he considered himself too good for) and slumming college-grad good girl virgins (vice versa)?

Some Came Running (w/Shirley MacLaine)

Pal Joey (1957) was another musical, from the year before, another Sinatra stepping persona stone. Here he's a self-aggrandizing but small-time crooner / strip club emcee, 'mothered' by "mice." A new form of Sinatra film was cohering wherein the songs 'functioned' within a diegetic/organic context, and the babes competing for him were both hot and aggressive and he treated them with more disdain. With his method of seduction stated as: "treat a tramp like a lady and a lady like a tramp" it's natural he would get one of each to fret over: Kim Novak is the small town innocent in the chorus and Rita Hayworth a rich widow / ex-stripper. A bunch of showgirls do his laundry, serve him bagels, and so forth but since none of them get jealous we wonder if they just feel that old devil mother instinct still. If so they don't do a good job mothering: Frank looks very, very thin, wan, undernourished, especially compared with Novak, a big girl more suited to a big man, like Bill Holden with his shirt open in Picnic. 

But Frank had found his inner fire, and it gave off a heat of saloon whiskey and artistic aspiration and that old black magic. He knocks our socks off with his "Lady is a Tramp" rendition, performed for Hayworth in the empty club, and when he starts to walk away from her at the end of the films, in his iconic white raincoat and hat, you can feel an earned gravitas in his step, the dockside fog enveloping him like an admiring friend, with a dog and Novak at his side. Bogey had that same walk and a similar raincoat and fog in Casablanca, and we all know Bogey ran the original Rat Pack, which Frank had been an admiring young pup in. The apprenticeship had paid off. He'd get Bacall and the chairmanship.

Pal Joey (w/Kim Novak)

A mark of his maturity was his willingness to look foolish and asshole-ish as a character in a film rather than just being self-effacing. In one of the Joey songs, "My Funny Valentine," Novak sings of his less-than-Greek figure and unsmart dialogue, so we finally knew who that song was about! For "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered," Hayworth refers to him a "half-pint imitation." Each song is a smoldering high in the film, each asking the eternal Frank question: why is it that this half-pint imitation-- skinny, arrogant, class climbing so-and-so can still deliver the sexual smolder in spades? It's a testament to all three performers that we can feel their rapture so keenly. As Stephanie Zacharek recently wrote about Baz Lurhman's Gatsby, there's a difference between a faker and a phony. And Frank can submit his faker balloon persona to enough withering epiphanies and humiliations to bring down ten Gatsby gondolas, and still be floating over the Brooklyn Bridge.

Pal Joey (w/Rita Hayworth, Kim Novak)

By 1960, due no doubt to all this good bad behavior (and advanced age), his mother instinct stigma had receded even farther, to the occasional needy ex-one night stand cum-stalker or the occasional Rat Pack rib, while in the foreground the McLaine broad types, the slumming socialite types, and the homey types were coalescing into one perfect package, such as Angie Dickinson in 1960's Ocean's Eleven. An ironic mention of the old mother instinct is found in a snatch of dialogue between Dean Martin and Dickinson upon their meeting up:

DM - What made you come back? I've come to the conclusion it must be love. Mother love
AG: I'll consider many things: mistress, plaything, toy for a night, but I refuse to be a mother, that's out.
DM - Don't get me wrong, I'm the mother....

Ocean's 11 (Angie Dickinson)

Then there was one final mother: Janet Leigh in The Manchurian Candidate (1962). This one comes in like a relapse, understandable since Frank's character is in the process of becoming unglued as a result of nightmares and PTSD. Hardly a matron or a broad, Leigh follows him out of the train's bar car after she notices him shaking and glazed with sweat, unable to make eye contact. She gives him a cigarette because his hands are too shaky to light his own, gives him her address and phone number, presuming a man in his DT-esque condition will effortlessly remember both. He finally calls her but it's to pick him up from jail, and in the cab home she announces she's already broken off her engagement before even getting the call, because, why? Because this sweaty, shaky, twitchy, nervous wreck in a uniform is such a catch?

Manchurian Candidate, The (w/ Janet Leigh)

In the car she says she's an orphan, and a reincarnated Chinese laborer (an eerie prefiguring of Mrs. Iselin's Asian connections). Is she a spy, or is the mothering instinct here gone so rogue it's red? Like a cool hottie reflection across the Central Park pond of evil scheming matron Angela Lansbury, Leigh's character is sexy and smart, but her love is so total and so unearned its unnerving. Clearly it's meant to be, as this movie's a paranoid nightmare down to its last cigarette. At least, by the end of the film Frank finally looks great, sober, and secure. The sweat glean is gone, the uniform is pressed, and he's not skinny anymore. He's once more ready to evolve.

Then, JFK died. It traumatized Sinatra deeply and brought an immediate end to all innocence (and shelved the CANDIDATE for years).

Mother instincts were out, for keeps.

Do I have a purpose here, in following this 'mother instinct' thread? Maybe just that-- as a recovering alcoholic ex-rock band bassist/singer, ex-husband--I've had my own 'troubles' with mothering co-dependent women. I've been fought over like a chew toy and then discarded; I've had bad luck finding the middle ground between being ignored and suffocated in a relationship. I've tried to escape and failed; I've stared out hotel windows at dawn onto small town main streets with a bourbon in my hand and unopened Steinbeck on the bed.... not even trying to be legendary, just trying to not shake and sweat, tuning in the TV and feeling lucky to find Artists and Models. Have I suffered for Frank's sins? Is the whole mother instinct thing and Frank's efforts to be rid of it underwriting the boozy misogyny that coursed through his Rat Pack schtick, which in turn infected generations of men like me?

Pal Joey (w/Rita Hayworth, Kim Novak)

Frank would know--he was always more intellectual and caring than he let on--but he's flown off to the next marquee. Hopefully in the next life he won't have to spend a whole first half of a film career escaping, and then submitting to, the tender trap, and then maybe those of us who follow after him won't confuse maturity with womanizing, won't end up settling for the one apron string that ties us up faster than the rest just so we can spend the rest our stage time hacking at it, bemoaning our leash like the courageous dog who's a coward off it. It's not fate, baby, it's not fate, it's just men trying to figure out how the hell they wound up in your bed, again. Once they figure it out, they're gone. They'll call you, baby, but don't let them call you a mother.

Condoms are for Quitters: XANADU (1980) and the Death of the Naked Rock Musical

Once a proud and shirtless beast, the rock musical has all but vanished from the landscape. Fringe events like REPO: THE GENETIC OPERA or DR. HORRIBLE or 'jukebox' fare like ROCK OF AGES and MAMA MIA do not count. The first are freak events courting cult status, the latter incorporate only tried and tested tunes written long before their Broadway shows.  CHICAGO, LES MISERABLES or PHANTOM don't count either. But there was a time when the rock musical soared on wings of brilliance. I'm talking of course of the late 60s-early 70s -the age when impassioned singing met electric guitars and funky bass; bi-curious guys in silver make-up and long hair strutted shirtless, and God was not ignored.

This was the era of Vietnam, and Times Square was not a place to bring the kids, at least not at night, for it was rotten with grindhouses, adult bookstores, prostitutes and flashy pimps, bums, hippies, sadomasochists, junkies and--most shocking of all to our Anita Bryant-poisoned minds--queers. A day trip to NYC to see a show with the family often consisted of waiting in line at the TKTS kiosk on the barrier island in the center of the street, ogling (without making eye contact) the passing freak parade in a mix of veiled horror and sardonic faux-blase' disinterest, like a zoo without bars where the animals wouldn't bother you if you didn't make eye contact. After the show, after the family car finally cleared the morass of sordid swamp outer industrial wasteland running between NJ and NY, you sighed in relief to be back in boring old suburbia, like Dorothy at the end of OZ, with a new appreciation of black-and-white Kansas.

When their later film versions came around, ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR, GODSPELL (all 1973), THE WIZ (1978) and HAIR (1979) all had to be toned down (though porn star Paul Thomas shows up in JCS). Meanwhile crazy Brits like Ken Russell gave us wild album-based spin-offs like TOMMY and films that tried to become a hair musical film without being a show first (like 1975's LISZTOMANIA) and Broadway was cutting out the love child rhapsodizing and playing up the nudity right on the billboard, as in the all-nude musical revue OH! CALCUTTA!

Surrounded by the sleaze of Times Square, CALCUTTA and its ilk managed to stay somehow clean by contrast and so showed Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public that those scruffy homeless kids on the street might be disguised angels, so go ahead get aroused but don't judge. Books like Erica Jong's Fear of Flying with its ode to the "zipless f-ck," the tawdry glam gossip of Rona Barett, and the cute old lady sex specialist, Dr. Ruth (below, right), all created a sense that women should be enjoying their newly-appointed orgasms. Extramarital swinging and casual sex were now as healthy and normal as going to church or making dinner for your family --and as a result, the world was just a little less uptight (especially compared with today, sigh).  All the while, we kids were listening in, soaking up the loose parental prana with our hungry spinal snake-sponges. It all seemed very tawdry to us, though. Like everything after you turned 18 was going to be one of those depressingly sordid Seka movies. No wonder we jumped on the CONAN train and started bashing orgiasts in mid-feast. It all seemed so scary that swords and carnae was less traumatizing to imagine.

But that carnage-preference only came in the 80s, after VHS dulled us to the adult sex mystique. Going back to the 70s, now, and remembering how it ended, self-destructed, we recall that in midst of all the tawdry Broadway sex came the arrival into the mainstream suburban swinger lexicon of my least favorite drug, cocaine. And as coke became 'hip' so did disco and at last kids and adults found something to agree on.

We kids loved disco. You could dance like a maniac to it, jumping around and jive talking and every other kid in town had parents or siblings with the Saturday Night Fever (1977)  soundtrack, a mainstay at every birthday party I went to, it was as present in parental and older sibling record collections as Frampton Comes Alive. Disco was crossing boundaries the Christian-pagan decadent arias of Broadway and the best-seller list never could, for the homosexual and coke aspects were sublimated deep by the time it all got to prime time TV, and we kids loved the spangly costumes and were learning disco moves in gym class.

BUT HOW DID THIS COKE-FUELED DANCE MUSIC CROSS OVER TO KIDS? (Answer: at left, Vinnie Barbarino)

We kids had long pondered the electric strangeness of the Hair and Sgt. Pepper's album covers in our parents' record rack. And yet we were afraid to play them. But we loved John Travolta from Welcome Back, Kotter, so seeing him on the Saturday Night Fever cover made everything all right. He had the working-class Italian vibe we were now familiar with via ROCKY, and the Fonz (and the hated Cha-Chi, and tolerated Carmine) but he could also sing and act stupid with a winning smile that let you know he was far smarter than he'd ever let on. As long as he was connected to it, disco could cross over to suburbia, where, as I've said before, we loved The Village People because they were dressed like all our favorite icons as kids - cowboys, Native Americans, motorcycle cops - and not one of us ever imagined they were, you know...

We also found the relative sexlessness of, say, TV variety shows like The Captain and Tenille, Donny and Marie, and Shields and Yarnell very soothing, a buffer from all the sordid sleaze and electric shocks. I recall that towards the end of the 70s, when I was 12-13, sex was starting to get on my nerves. I had a lot of 'pent-up' energy by then. Not that anyone molested me, on the contrary - I initiated what would now be considered minor molestation with two babysitters, my dad's secretary, two of my mom's friends, and one very nubile young daughter of one of said friends, all before I was 12 years-old. And in the malls I would sneak into Spencer's Gifts and marvel at the dirty novelties and thumb though Fear of Flying and get massive 10 year-old boy hormonal surges. But being only ten or so I had no orgasm, or even knew about them. I had been led (thanks to some Judy Blume book) to think that the orgasm discharge was a gush of blood, and thus I was terrified to even try. And while sex was considered normal and healthy at the time, masturbation was considered a deranged, sad act. Wet dreams were discussed, in terrified tones, at the playground, and widely considered far more humiliating than merely wetting the bed.

It was only natural with all that stored venom that when the right bad influence friend came along I would give up girls and turn my attention to WW2, and with war arose the need for 'clean' home front entertainment, time to organize our HO scale SS Panzer divisions, time gather the other barbarians and clean out Thulsa Doom's sex dungeon.

And as we were gathering up our fear and loathing... XANADU did a stately 80s pleasure-free dome decree.

Sandahl Bergman at far right

1979: GREASE had broken the mold on 'the past' (it played in theaters for years) and Happy Days was a huge hit with kids in TV. In other words, at the very end of the 70s, the 50s were cool again (ayyyyy!) and the 40s dance club variety show schtick of the 70s--brought up like the Titanic for XANADU--was out. Some piece of crap called "Disco Duck" was a hit on the chart, the guy who 'sang' it (Rick Dees) wondered what to do for a follow-up. He came out with "Disco Gorilla" - i.e. "Discor-illa" (It's so cheesy I can't even post it but you can check it out here). Disco was almost solely in the realm of children by now. And even we sneered at his Disco-rilla. It died, and dragged disco down with it. Yes, Rick Dees killed disco, but it had been already dying. Coke kills, man. The intensity of a craze was directly in proportion to the speed in which it burned itself out.

Meanwhile, whatever 'free love' had represented before the mid-70s was being swallowed up into blue collar triumphs (ROCKY in 1977) and old school nostalgia, reaching back too far, past the greasers and do wop (which GREASE and Billy Joel had initiated along with HAPPY DAYS) and to see how far they could take it, producers reached into the dusty attic of Gene Kelly and Glen Miller. Hordes of films set in the 20s, 30s, and 40s had saturated the theaters. THE STING won best picture in 1973 (see my piece The Period Piece Period), but that was back in the early part of the decade; now the only nostalgia we cared for was 50s working class suburbia, or Brooklyn street gangs, and lo, in came WELCOME BACK KOTTER and John Travolta.

Cleaned Travota on Captain and Tenille

Some Scientology angel was looking out for Travolta, because he made a vast fortune just from appearing on the cover of both the Grease and Saturday Night Fever albums. They were beyond huge and sold consistently for years. But while the film of Saturday Night Fever was dingy and depressing in its lower-strata blue collar seediness, Grease was smartly moved the story out of the actual realm of the regular (misogynist/rapist) Italian-American guys in the post-greaser era, and into the sunny safety of Burbank, making the greaser haircuts and cigarettes and unwanted pregnancies little more than rich kid slumming. Fine with us, we in the suburbs didn't know the difference, only that the environment of Grease didn't make us want to kill ourselves from depression over graffiti and urban blight the way the movie of SNF did. On the other hand, the album of SNF was way better.

Anyway, it was a monster hit. And so why not merge the GREASE with the NIGHT and add the then-emerging roller disco craze? Throw in a fantasy element and an old duffer or two, and whammo! You do for the 40s big band zoot suit sound what GREASE had done for the 50s do wop.

That was the plan.... for XANADU! 
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Terrible plan! 1980 was not 1978. And while he was great as Swan (from THE WARRIORS), Michael Beck was no Travolta, and he was not believable as a frustrated artist forced to reproduce album covers for a living (ala Travolta's frustrated dancer forced to tote paint cans in SNF). Olivia Newton John played the literal muse who inspires him and old duffer Gene Kelly joins forces with them both to open up a post-modern roller-rink, where time collapses and wartime big band sound collides in a roller skating accident with ELO, the Tubes, and lots of static long shots where you can see the edges of the sets and the studio darkness all around the backdrop.

Just compare the two stills below - the top one from DOWN TO EARTH, a 1947 comedy musical that XANADU more or less remade, notice the inept blocking of XANADU's shot, which leaves a ton of dead space at the right and left of the backdrop, leaving the widescreen shot looking inept in every detail.

(below: Xanadu - What were you, blocked in a barn?)

You can smell the weird blend of child-friendliness, coded homosexuality, old character actors eking out a living in cameos, nearly empty sets, and cocaine. Xanadu took all the ingredients that made these sorts of musicals uniquely ahead of and behind their time (at the same time), and swished them together like a Hail Mary from a terrified Iron Chef contestant. ELO and The Tubes jam unsuccessfully with a Glenn Miller-style ghost ensemble and Olivia sings "Forget about the blues / tonight!" --it's like a TV remote control battle between your older brother and grandmother, yanking the dial between Lawrence Welk and Soul Train while your parents are off playing bridge.
 

Top: New York, New York (1977); 1941 (1979)

Even today it's hard to imagine what they were thinking, presuming if the 30s worked in the early 70s, just move to the 40s as the decade ends. The mishmash of styles in Xanadu could have been meant to tie-in with the expected blockbuster success of Spielberg's zoot suit-encrusted mega-shrillfest 1941 which came out the year before, and Scorsese's big band ego-fest, New York, New York (1977). But that was the wrong horse to bet on. While 1941 was not a total flop it wasn't a hit either, and neither was NY, NY -- and for the first time since he broke big, Spielberg had laid a non-golden egg and Scorsese's critical darling status was stopped dead in its tracks.

What happened in a sense was America's taste in retro memories was flattening out. The age of three channel TV was ending, and with it the need for 'variety' shows that appealed to children, the elderly, and adults all at the same time. And without long hair and sleaze to produce rock gravity, the empty glitz of disco was just another toot up nostalgia's porous straw. By the time it got to us, disco had become sexless, leaving us with no choice to find the stuff straight from the source.

And so it was that, as children, our interest in sex was rekindled with the rise of the VCR.

Among other things the VCR brought a chance for us all--parents and kids alike-- to finally see X-rated movies. As with any huge sea change, the censors and critics need time to catch up and for awhile, freedom reigned and for awhile every child above 12 saw all there was to see, all at once. Our first rental ever, in the afternoon one day while my dad was out of town, was Clockwork Orange. I'd never even seen nudity outside of the occasional Playboy. All that aversion therapy violence Alex is subject to was very apropos to how flattened the movie left me (13 years-old), as well as my brother (ten), and our mom watching it in the middle of a Saturday.  Censorship had chastened TV for so long we felt protected from anything it could deliver on our invulnerable home screen , so we weren't about to admit any of the ultra-violence phased us. But looking back I'm confident that the huge paranoia witch hunt outcry against pedophiles and Satanic child molestation ring that began around the same time was no doubt inspired by parents and children finally seeing--together--all those films we'd been afraid to see at the drive-in or inner city theater back in the day. In the 70s we had never been ashamed of our bodies or our desires, perhaps because we just never really saw them so nakedly depicted.

You're dead sons, get yourself buried: Sgt. Peppers, Can't Stop the Music

So that's why now XANADU seems so hopelessy cheesy and antiquated in 1980. Old people--as embodied by Gene Kelly--were supposed to now be cool? Everyone was invited to the roller rink, ala GREASE inviting us to the 50s diner, drive-in, and hairdresser, but we didn't want to go to the roller rink. Still, in loyalty to GREASE (which I saw three times at different birthday parties), we dutifully trudged as massive multiple family packs to see XANADU, and then fell asleep. While the older kids were disappearing into midnight showings of THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME (1976) we in the too young for R category had (also) dutifully seen SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND (above, 1978) starring the Bee-Gees, but that was at the drive in, so if something sucked you just got out of the car and rode on the swings and then alater fell asleep in the back seat. XANADU we saw in the theater, so there was no escape.

When we emerged from XANADU, sick from popcorn and Olivia Newton John sweetener, we found the world had changed. Disco was dead, crushed in the roller rink stampede (for a brief period, the roller derby and roller skating movie was super popular). Rock and roll would mutate into hair metal with the rise of cable and MTV, but disco was over. Cocaine gives you a terrible hangover... and you can see a little of it in Olivia Newton John's sickly yellow aura and devil eyes below. Surely we could do better... we needed to renounce our sins! We needed to 'phone home...' and ET was summoned.

Meanwhile, Alan Carr--one of the key figures behind  GREASE (and on Broadway, LA CAGE AU FOLLES), had troubles of his own, namely a huge disco flop centered around the Village People, Bruce Jenner, Nancy "You're soaking in it" Walker, hottie Valerie Perrine and struggling songwriter (and tight white pants enthusiast) Steve Gutenberg, known as CAN'T STOP THE MUSIC (1980). Like XANADU it cost $20 million, but bombed even worse. And in the case of both of them there's very little of that money visible on the screen. Sure there's dancing and glitz but the blocking, pacing, and acting are a mess. I'm just speculating, based largely on a book I'm reading about Carr, but I'd venture to guess where a lot of that 20 million went, and it certainly wasn't into hiring a good DP, editor, art designer, choreographer or continuity editor. Nothing translates more poorly to film than a hack's sweaty coke-fueled ego trip delusions of spectacle.

On the other hand, this was still the age of multi-generational 'family entertainment' - variety shows on all the major networks. And the people with the kids and $$ to buy tickets remembered fondly the 50s. Any further back and no one really cared, except old people who got senior citizen discounts anyway so they didn't impact the box office. The days of romancing a past decade with music and glamor were over, at least until the 90s when suddenly the 70s looked like the last great, free unprotected moment America was ever going to have.

A Tale of Three Anti-Capitalist Musicals: HALLELUJAH I'M A BUM, BRIGADOON, MARAT/SADE

HALLELUJAH I'M A BUM

1933 -  Dir. Lewis Milestone

****

A pre-code salute to vagrancy, anarchism, and the days when Central Park was a bucolic Arden for the eloquent "books in the babbling brooks" breed of Depression-era homelessness. Milestone's delightful film is crammed with half-spoken Rogers and Hart songs lamenting the amount of work it takes to remain unemployed ("You own the world / when you don't own a thing"). There's enough economic savvy and cool Central Park set design here to make it both Brechtian and bucolic, an AS YOU LIKE IT with Central Park as Arden, Jolson as exiled king (he would not change it), and his men a bouncing band of singing bum types played with refreshing lack of hokey sentiment. Frank Morgan is the real mayor of NYC, the kind of duty-bound consciousness type that wistfully tosses change to Jolson's king tramp like he'd love to trade places - their weird symbiotic friendship creates a very cool core that gives the film bounce when it needs to avoid the snares of its second half's collapse into the usual Jolson-gives-up-the-girl City Lights-style melodramatics. Madge Evans is the girl in question: Morgan's neglected mistress, eh takes a jump off central park bridge into the surprisingly deep river where Jolson rescues her, completing the Shakespearean-Jungian geometry, which Ben Hecht has so cagily drafted (Naturally she comes to with amnesia and no place to sleep). With a cool black turtleneck and the swagger of a Bronx Maurice Chevalier, until he turns all plutocrat and schmaltzy, Jolson shows why he was once a box office draw. Aside from the eventual soup stock pathos, the only bad guy is a thousand dollar bill Jolson finds in the trash --the very rumor of which sends the park's once-happy denizens into violent riot. Oh capitalism, could you not spare this one tree? Imagine the Lubitsch touch on a SCARFACE spittoon and you have of course Warner Brothers. One of its many awesome little joys is hearing Frank "The Wonderful Wizard" Morgan saying "there's no place like home, there's no place like home, there's no place like home," six years early!  Capitalism may be the key to getting lovely things--and Evans is lovely, especially when covered in delicious Central Park creek water--but Joson must learn the hard way: sacrifice of happiness for spending power is not admirable! In the end, for all her loveliness, Evans is worse than a dozen thousand dollar bills!

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 BRIGADOON

1954-  Dir. Vincente Minnelli

**1/2

If you never thought a magical Scottish hamlet could be boring, you thought wrong. Vincente Minnelli shows he is not Ford, and thus has no grasp of what makes Scottish culture great, i.e. Scotch whiskey. Alcohol here is clearly associated with a crowded Manhattan bar Gene Kelly and sourpuss drunk Van Johnson inhabit before and after their trip to Scotland (to shoot grouse, like they'd know one if they saw one). Scotland is played by various uninspired sets on which Kelly climbs and taps and sings like a `silly monkey.

Minnelli stacks the deck by making everyone at the bar vulgarians and Kelly's fiancee a social climbing materialistic bitch - there's no redeeming value in the city and nothing but redeemable value in the country. But associating booze with big city shallowness does little to allay the dull piety of the mythical town itself, which is stranded in a fundamentalist annex of John Ford chaperone-and-plow malarkey but without Ford's magic touch (the only way, perhaps, to see the magic in the mossy glens is to be lit up from within by Glenfiddich. This ain't the Scottish musical version of THE QUIET MAN, much as it would like to be, and the widescreen formatting--meant for giant Cinemascope stretch screens-- eschews close-ups and fast edits (such things made audiences nauseous and disoriented on such large canvases) in favor of long shots on obvious stage sets, where, for example, everyone's dancing feet are at the bottom of the screen, and their heads at the top, duplicating a Broadway theater experience, perhaps (the screen matching the height and width of the stage), but in failing to explore the magical possibilities of its subject, even on the big screen it's enough to reduce you to napping in all the wrong places.

If you want something magically Scottish, check out I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING or LOCAL HERO. What you get from BRIGADOON is the dry notion that Scottish culture is so inhibited it makes Irish Catholics look like Haight-Ashbury hippies  Considering the awesomeness of the stars--Kelly and my favorite Cyd Charisse--there's some surprisingly awkward dancing amidst the finery, and the super sexy Cyd is barely recognizable: her legs hidden in thick skirts, shapely upper regions sheathed in a highlands sash. She's supposed to look wan and bonny but often just seems sad and hungover.

Meanwhile Van Johnson is the ugly American personified, grousing about how he came to Scotland to shoot grouse and making alcohol look bad as he drawls off his endless flask and shotguns treed locals. Why does Kelly insist on bringing him along? He's like Ronald Coleman's ungrateful brother in LOST HORIZON. Why go to Scotland just to deal with that kind of crap? Just don't hang out with him! On the other hand, does Kelly really want to eat haggis and smell burning peat moss and offal for the rest of time immortal? Why doesn't he just go back to New York and find a different bar? One less crowded and boorish? He's a grass-is-greener type is our Gene, aye, and sure'n the grass is no greener than in a wee place you can never get to except once every hundred years.

MARAT/SADE

1967 Dir. Peter Brook

****

Glenda Jackson stabs a guy named Marat during the French Revolution, while the Marquis de Sade looks on, delighted, and corrects flubbed lines--or are his corrections part of the play within the play? That's so Brechtian! Meanwhile the mental institution director interrupts too, but in rhyme, so is he part of the play or not? What are all these interruptions! Madame et monsieur, in the vein of Brecht et Artaud, I present la Revolution.

Dats real pretty, Glenda

Based on Peter Weiss's play-within-a-play about some drama therapy at the insane asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade, the full UK title is "The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade." And since now you're watching a video of a movie of a play within a play about the French Revolution, you could add onto the title in your head at the end "and filmed by Peter Brook, screened on TCM and watched by me in the 21st century") there's guillotines, a whole maze of fourth walls, and long twisted half-sung monologues about walking through the bloody streets of Paris back when they were flooded by a river of noble blood, bath steam, and the special way syphilis makes you insane (antibiotics had yet to be invented) and hydrotherapy might help for the moment but there's no cure for the madness of trying to create a government for the people when the people are all corrupt, murderous, uneducated, unwashed and  ridden with brain-corroding STDs!  I used to intern in the creative arts therapy drama department at Bellevue, so I know the score, and this here's real! At least it was... on some level... onstage. Watch out Glenda Jackson doesn't reach right out from the screen and stab you too. In her weird swaying narcoleptic way, she's fucking sexy as hell.

Superb on every level, some of the songs are almost Fairport Convention-level psych-folkish but most wind their way into a weird madness that seems to slowly build from murmurings of the masses to become the sort of numbers that would send the entire cast of Les Miserables running for their lives to the safety of foreign ports. Enjoy the digital fruits of your capitalist bourgeois internet whilst you might, noble literate.  New Marats are born every day, or am I thinking of mallrats?

Either way, we're doomed.