Angels of Death IX: GOLD DIGGERS of 1935 ("Lullaby of Broadway")

It's a fairly ubiquitous tune today, but when GOLD DIGGERS OF 1935 came out "The Lullaby of Broadway" was brand new, written for the film and, if you see it, as I recently did, shorn of the preceding hour of scheming social climber bellboys, greedy managers, white Russian impresarios wheedling money from a miserly matron whose seducible offspring are off on misadventures with--that's right--gold-diggers, the two climactic Busby Berkeley-directed numbers that close the film bend reality all the better. The first song is forgettable musically but eventually erupts in some dazzlingly precise trippy fractal choreography.

The second number, however, "Lullaby of Broadway" transcends even its Berkeley foundation to become something startling, wry, knowing and the best portrayal of the "walk of shame" in all of cinema.

First, it's the blackness that grabs you, the empty field of nothing. Coming hot on the heels of the preceding number with its geometric infinity the blackness is profound. Then... the single white light illuminating a far-off face staring right at the camera. Like a distant single star, a shadowed young female face moves towards us like a slow rolling flying saucer or moon in a starless sky. As she becomes clearer and larger, a cold chill comes down our spine. That cold look in her eyes as she sings to us is startling. Compassionate and ambivalent, witty but not vulgar, brazen but not haughty, bold but not loud her glare right into the camera bespeaks a dazzling familiarity with strangers; her shadowed teeth give her a cadaverous lupine edge; coiled hair curves up the sides of her face, vaguely evoking a skull before assuming the contours of the island Manhattan. With the brazenness of the city she represents, this singer looks into the camera like it's the leader of a rival gang. She knows that NYC has her back, that she is the city. She is what it's proudest of, its hard-partying beautiful people on their early morning walk of shame, saying hello to their neighbors as they head downstairs to work and she heads upstairs to sleep.

The song (by Harry Warren and Al Dubin) about "the center of it all" becomes, in this strange Busby vignette, no longer a hotel jingle but a dirge. Suddenly shorn of its decades-long association with TV commercials for Times Square hotels, Macy's floats, and revues (all of which make it seem less like a lullaby and more like a wake-up revelry to pep grandma into finding her purse), the lyrics suddenly make an eerie sense. It's meant as a real lullaby for the Broadway "baby" for as she goes to sleep the rest of the city is waking up. The overlap of her and the milkman represents closure of the 24-hour loop, validating the "city that never sleeps" mantra that makes NYC the coolest place in the world

When a Broadway baby says good nightIt's early in the morningManhattan babies don't sleep tightUntil the dawn

As much a symbol as the Statue of Liberty, The Empire State Building or Grant's Tomb, the all-night party girl crooning this ballad (and walking the walk) is a metonym for the Capitol of the World during its dark climb out of the Depression; Roosevelt's lifting of prohibition carries her aloft! Suddenly booze's affordability allows the high-rollers to give her bigger tips at the night clubs. What she does in the hours between four and dawn is all up to her, but she climbs those stairs to sleep, alone but flush with cash, aching feet, and a waning buzz.

NYC never sleeps - and for the all-night girls, the jackhammer and traffic jam bleeping is the sound of the comforting arms of blissful unconsciousness. I've been there, many times from 1993-1998, and it was magic: the exhilaration of dancing and drinking all night, then coming home and slinking into cold sheets, alone, and falling asleep as the traffic outside your window gradually increases until it's a barrage of honking, engines, voices, trains, jackhammers, it is like a lullaby. There is no better way to come down or city to do it in. Underwriting the melody's jubilance, the giddy ecstasy that comes from hearing the clang and bustle of the 9-5 crowd grind the gearshift of the giant NYC business world back into life, but not you, man - you're safe and warm in bed, and pleasantly exhausted.

If you're going to be out dancing and drinking til the dawn every night of the week, there's only one city that can accommodate you without effort. This closing number for an otherwise pretty shrill Gold Diggers movie lets the rest of America know something of this thrill: even as the lead character staggers out into ever wilder parties with ever more regimented lines of dancers, and rich faceless chumps in tuxedoes brandishing jewelry and top hats, we thrill to it.

But what of this goddess? Whose face, laying down in bed (?) with cigarette in mouth, becomes the lower half of the island Manhattan? Played by Wini Shaw, a nearly-star in the Warners musical pantheon, she's already halfway to being a psychopomp, halfway to being some killer from a film noir or horror film. With her beguiling, chilling stare right into camera we are forced to consider death in a whole new light - and to see the frivolous professional reveler who is the subject of the vignette as Orpheus and Persephone rolled into one. Hades as both the NYC gangster underworld and its smitten ruler. Shaw is almost like the dead version of the dancer, re-absorbed into the collective Manhattan pulse.

Hers is a stare with its own inexorable tractor beam pull. From the initial distance, her white face is like the end of a long tunnel at the end of the road in reverse; she is the city as the 'next step' that lurks beyond the illusory split between dreaming and waking. Shaw's sultry shadowed stare lingers long after the movie fades; it bores right into me every time I see it. No matter how long ago it was made or old I've become between viewings, it is immediate and startling.

Maybe it's a dream, a warning, real or a metaphor - one look in her deep ambivalent eyes and you know the score. Life and death are the same; alpha and omega; the sleepy dancer and the sleepy milkman passing each other in the hall; one wakes, the other crashes, but the city that houses them never sleeps. Here the grim reaper and baby new year share the same stairwell. She pours some milk (!) for a kitten out there in the common hallway, looking up expectantly.  Like this errant kitty, she coasts along like a leaf in the wind, trusting that there's always a generous soul somewhere.

Even in the film itself she is separate from the rest of the characters. There's no curtain raising or fourth wall jump-off point for this number like there are in so many others. The film doesn't find her - she just appears out of the darkness, a star in the distance coming closer with a steady, relentless momentum, staring us dead in the eye, the way a beautiful woman giving you a haughty beckoning stare across a room can muffle the party around you to a dry school dance blur, beguile, excite and terrify you where you stand.

After the dancer subject's tragic fall from the skyview balcony of the rooftop club, we see the poor kitten has no one to pour it some milk and the bed is unslept in - no one is maybe there to miss her.  She dissilved back into the skyline - it's a very eerie ending to the number but with that eerie opening we're not surprised. This is a real Broadway Angel of Death, hardly fazed by her own demise. She becomes Ms. Death in a way that's unique to the city, which is the reason we all fall in love with it and her. She and NYC strip death of all the skull and bones posturing.

I certainly relate to this girl's odyssey. No NYC youth is complete without a period of walks of shame, NYC being so clearly where the phrase was invented. Where else can you even walk home from some new lover's bed on a regular basis but NYC? You get out at dawn, the smell of your lover or the dance club still all over you, with cigarettes fresh and warmly beguiling in the air, newsstands and awnings groaning open like the maws of giant friendly dragons; trucks, garbage men who should have finished up hours ago now rushing against the onslaught of rush hour. You dance home--or it feels like it though it comes off more as staggering, in torn stockings or borrowed sweatshirts. Maybe you hope your roommate is still there since you lost your keys. Well-laid or just well-danced and content, still high, the music throbbing in your blood still, you pass the showered-and-shaved people going to work around you either still groggy or freshly perked from their early AM jogs or coffees. Either way, it's nice to see them, as you're headed off to bed, and you remember being one of them and remember how badly you wanted to turn around and go back to bed, so you are kind of living that dream for them. Your destination is their fantasy. But there's no animosity; you and the commuters share a conspiratorial smile, for the gap in consciousness between the danced/laid reveler staggering or sauntering home to bed and the freshly woke commuter off to work, is so vast that there is no uncanny valley - no resentment is possible.

Good night, baby / Good night / The milkman's on his way /Sleep tight, baby / Sleep tight / Let's call it a day

1935 marked a Hollywood's total submission to the draconian code, but--perhaps it's because there's no dialogue--the "Lullaby" vignette is  remarkably risque. Maybe they got to keep it intact as there's almost a moral: wanton harlots weren't yet barricaded from ye olde folks at home by steel shudders, as long as they suffered. See a good insight on this via the Grand Old Movie blog ("In the End, she Dies")

The code may be in effect, but the "walk of shame" carries no stigma for this Broadway baby, anymore than any of us slumping home from our day job. The men she meets on her way upstairs glare not, neither do they scold, neither do they leer. This isn't Hicksville. This is NYC and everyone knows she works as hard for the money as they do.

But the working man's and the milkman's familiarity with the sight of this jazz baby coming home every day/night at dawn bodes ill. One can't keep this lifestyle up forever. The dancing and the partying whirl and whirl until one is accidentally thrown off a 30th floor balcony (2) or winds up in Bellevue, loaded with digitalis, screaming one's head off.

On the other hand, when everyone around you is screaming too, you begin to realize at last just what 'hitting bottom' really means. It's so terrible it's kind of grand. Even after the splat, you can keep dancing, or at least singing. Sleep tight, baby. The Milkman Cometh...

NOTES:
1. There's no brief of small town morality to guide our understanding of what's going on here - what the original purpose of an 'engagement ring' was for, or promissory notes of marriage being valid tools to sue for breach of promise, as in taking of virginity = $$. If you want to have sex before marriage, an engagement ring says at least you'll have something to pawn when it's time to pay the midwife. The ideal state was divorced or a widow and with the Great War slaughters, widowhood was not uncommon. 
2. For me, the balcony itself crashed (from 1997-9/11 our Thurs. haunt was Windows on the World on the top floor of Tower A.) 

Cuspidor of Greatness: DIPLOMANIACS (1933)

The red man was the big man

and then came the great big white man 

a white man? / that's the right man.

The whites got the reds and the reds got the blues, 

and the red white and blue was born. 

The above is a snatch of song sung by Wheeler and Woolsey, with dancing Native American maids all in rows, and while sardonic as fuckall it's rather callous, as if casting a bloody stain on America's conscience is the same as patriotism, and no one really seems to care, because now Native Americans have oil wells and gambling and educated spokespersons. But where exactly do Wheeler and Woolsey fit in? In DIPLOMANIACS (1933),  Woolsey can best be imagined by picturing a lipless George Burns aiming for Groucho Marx's arrogance and way with a cigar; Wheeler is like Nathan Lane pureed together with Frank McHugh, and slid under Charlie Chaplin hair oil. Always, always there's the sense that these guys are really stage show vaudevillians more than film stars.

Some great comics like W.C. Fields, Mae West (pre-code) and the Marx Brothers (at least pre-DAY AT THE RACES) have stood the test of time. They are eternal. Others, popular in the early dirty turn-of-sound 30s---Eddie Cantor, Jolson, Wheeler and Woolsey--have not been so lucky. They have faded into niches were only freaks like me do scrounge. But thanks to the Warner Bro. Archives, a horde of their surreal pre-codes are finally available on DVD, and man you can learn a lot about the era's social stigmas and stigmatisms and all the things the code would wipe away. I've already written about one such eye-opener, WONDER BAR (1934). Why? How do I know? I follow my bliss, and online reviews: my hunger for pre-code surrealism is, however, always accompanied by my liberal PC brainwash afterburn.

Open the closet door!

DIPLOMANIACS (1933) came out the same year as, and is very similar to, the Marx Brothers' DUCK SOUP, and was co-written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who wrote W.C. Fields' MILLION DOLLAR LEGS the year before, and that it can be compared to them is an honor, for Wheeler and Woolsey have not aged as well as Fields or the Marxes. Unless you like both the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy you might find yourself put off by the freaky squareness of these boys, even if only in some uncanny way you can't explain. Me, I don't care for the grotesque infantile tantrums of Laurel and Hardy. Something about them creeps me out. And there's something similarly sticky about Wheeler and Woolsey, some uncanny quality that makes their resemblance to other comedians of the day most disturbing.

And man do they love to play dress up. Wheeler and Woolsey share the same sense of infantile queerness as Laurel and Hardy --is that why they creep me out? They lack the amok heterosexuality of the Marxes, or the singleminded pursuit of oblivion that elevates Fields. Woolsey does get drunk in one scene but he's really more interested in..... ugh.... soup. By the second time he asks for more soup in the first class dining room I'm feeling the polar opposite of watching Fields grab all the table service bottles on his way off the roof of INTERNATIONAL HOUSE (1933). Booze = funny. Soup= yuck! Why? Because food, like life, is gross. Drunkenness, divine. And as someone with near fifteen years sobriety, I should know!

That said, if DIPLOMANIACS landed on the college revival circuit the way the Marx Bros. and Fields films did back in the late 60s-80s, it too might have garnered a hipster cult. The pair do, after all, go for the weird with unhesitating brio, as in the still above where they're sent aloft by being tossed up in a Native American blanket (from here on in I'm switching to 'Indian' for reasons that will be made clear) en route to the Lausanne peace conference or when they battle a tribble-like crawling scalp. Fans of Broadway shows like THE PRODUCERS, or revivals like ANYTHING GOES (which I saw in London in 04) will probably feel themselves on very familiar ground here. Some of the numbers have a lived-in, well-rehearsed feel, especially the big shipboard number where Wheeler tries to shake a lovestruck vamp named Dolores (Marjorie White).  A definite scene stealer, she arrives in villain Louis Calhern's stateroom wrapped in plastic after the following bizarre and racist exchange between him and Hugh Herbert as Calhern's Fu Manchu sidekick, trying to pass Yiddish off as Chinese:

Calhern: I need a vamp
Herbert: What kind?
Calhern: ...a female vamp!
Herbert: What color?
(...)
Calhern: A white one.
Herbert: White ones get dirty much too quickly
Calhern: Well, for this job she'll have to get dirty.

It's funny thanks to Calhern's robust delivery of the phrase "have to get dirty." But of course they make a mistake in presuming the boys are straight rather than ensconced in an infantile, closeted misogyny, which renders any vamp's come-ones powerless to sway them. They have the closeted queer's malice towards straight sex, presuming brusque burlesques of hetero courtship will satisfy doubters as to their manliness. The boys sleep in the same bed, and Woosley is clearly the top, you can tell by his big erect cigar and Wheeler's BIRDCAGE-y nightgown (below). And then rather than getting their morning drink on like real men they're more concerned with mani-pedis. "If we can get away with wearing these pants we can get away with anything," notes Woolsey, and when someone overhears him whispering that something's a secret, he asks "What's a secret?" and he replies "A secret is something you tell everybody, confidentially," you know he means the celluloid closet! (1)

Working in the film's favor is the feeling that the filmmakers just saw the amazing LOVE ME TONIGHT (1932) and presume the audience has too. The song sung during the boys' first Parisian morning clearly apes the famous opening montage of Parisian noises that ends with Chevalier saying "Pariee / you are too loud / for me," and shutting his window. Here the lyrics include, "from the taxi honks/ it might be the Bronx but no / this is Paris." (also Wheeler sings a bar of "Isn't it Romantic" while rushing through a montage of lyrics). Another favorite moment occurs after the bulk of first class passengers leave the dining room, and the captain of the Geneva-bound ocean liner gravely addresses the remaining gentlemen at his table: "As we are men of the world, let us consume alcohol." I knew that if I was seeing this with my fellow Fieldsian Max while splitting a 1.75 of Ten High, we'd have looked at each other in stunned delight, but he's married now with a kid, I'm long sober, and these guys are lightweights. Where's my Sean Regan?

That all works maybe, though, in the context of the film, which I saw by myself at three AM high only on herbal tea and cigarettes, after finishing my big previous post on isolationist themes in the films of John Monk Saunders. For if nothing else this film, like MILLION DOLLAR LEGS is really about America's post-WWI contempt for Europe, and the buffoonery of defeated nations still bristling against the post-WWI border alterations and expecting us to give a shit.

What is being satirized in short, is the world political scene immediately prior to the Nazi's re-mobilization, a build-up contingent on that very same weary unwillingness of the allies to step in again. So these films provide an illuminating time capsule look at something that no longer exists, a sense of out-of-touch posturing in Europe that American comics saw as a great chance for satirization, and Hitler saw as a perfect chance to defy restrictions. When a bomb goes off at the Geneva conference in DIPLOMANIACS it just turns into an excuse for a crazy blackface musical number, one of the reasons maybe this doesn't get screened very often, and an insight into the idea of 'deathlessness' in comedy, ala Laurel and Hardy and the Three Stooges, wherein explosions and accidents that would kill or cripple or kill a normal man just leave one with blackface and maybe an exploded cigar. Wishful thinking like that kept us neutral!

The second vamp is named Fifi and her kisses make men literally smoke under their collars and fall to earth a burned-out mess. We're supposed to believe that one kiss from the lipless Woolsey's makes her smoke and fall to the ground, too. More believable is the concept that a mincing French attendant is considered too oafish when the boys get their hair and nails done in Paris, and overall there hangs some horror movie oddness to the caricatures, reminding us that an element of the grotesque was alaways assumed in pre-code comics. For an example just dig the monstrousness of below poster, the eyes of all of them bugged maniacally or shadowed with lewd conspiracy. DUCK SOUP also satirized war, but it bombed; by then, apparently, the ominous tom-tom of a second world war wasn't comical.

Then there are the other odd reminders of the pre-WWII sense of anything goes, As Dreamland Cafe (from where I lifted these images) points out:

"One of the unnerving aspects of the film for a modern viewer is that there are several swastikas in the Indian costumes. Apparently swastikas were actually common in Southwest Indian design work until WWII. The Nazis had come to power in Germany by 1933, but it doesn’t appear that the film-makers were associating swastikas with them, even if the threat to world peace was on everybody’s mind."

World peace was on everyone's mind, and it's important to note that swastikas weren't just Native American (and Buddhist) symbols, but universal good luck charms (in 1931 Joan Blondell sells swastika key chains in BLONDE CRAZY).

The strange thing about the celluloid closet is that by hiding in plain sight and 'passing' their racist, misogynist mincing off as American straight, gay Hollywood broadened the scope of what 'straight' was. Now such business--prancing, mincing, jumping into one another's arms, avoiding women like the plague but presuming they could get one to fall for them no problem if they cared to-- seems pretty queer - when we see that behavior in contemporary film and TV (ala Sal in MAD MEN) we spot it right off and it causes a shudder of realization about the parameters of 'masculinity'. These characters/actors might be unconscious even of their own closetedness; it happens, and probably happened an awful lot back then. But there's a side effect of the recent decades of positive social change: men still afraid of seeming gay can't do half the things they used to do, like mince and sleep in a negligee in the same bed as their best buddy. They also can't be racist, sexist, or crude without catching instant PC flak. Everything is, in short, reversed. Depending on what state you're in, of course.

It's not that I'm PC myself, just trained like a bird dog to sniff and point. Thus Wheeler and Woolsey linger on the lip of the cuspidor of greatness, alongside Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor, defeated in the end from draining down into the pot of cine-hipster rediscovery by their own propensity for blackface and closeted mincing.

Well, thanks probably to Mankiewicz, at least their politics are hilariously bleak, the script sharp, lyrics clever,  the men very old, the women warm, the champagne cold, but over all lingers the presumption that hetero masculinity will continue to encompass this kind of infantile feyness in the century to come instead of delineating certain attitudes and actions as either gay or straight, and either choice preferable to the double blind sneer of the unconscious closet. And so it has come to pass that what was once a good luck charm is now a symbol of racism so vile it's permanently stained the fabric of our conscience, and our PC evolution has rightly rendered blackface and 'red man' tomfoolery accessible only via Warner's DV-R archive by those brave few willing to shell out for the strange and dubious privilege. But there is justice in popularization: The Marx Brothers (2), Mae West, and Fields deservedly endure in the mass produced DVDs and if that's in part from avoiding racism, closeted queerness, fascism, and misogynist objectification through most of if not all their films, well, I'll drink to that any day... So Oooga Booga to you too, you upstart! And if there is such a thing as a tartuffle, then you are just that thing!

NOTES:
1. I should say at this point that I find an out gay person is a thing of joy and beauty, but a closeted 'lover' unaware of the vile misogyny underwriting his straight burlesque is most dispiriting (see also: MONTE CARLO)
2. Since posting I've been thinking about the moments of blackface in Marx Brothers films but they are brief and serve the story: in DAY AT THE RACES they cork up to hide from the cops, but it's after a big dance number that basically expands the "All God's chillun got guns" section of SOUP's "Going to War" number, where are all the black people come to the rescue of the brothers, and sing and dance wondrously and are at least legitimately black. Racist or not it gives work to a vast stock of blazingly talented and legitimately black singers and dancers and one senses throughout a kinship between the black cast and the Jewish Marxes --a well documented simpatico extending even to Al Jolson. And one need only watch the sassy black maids sashaying after Mae West as she struts around her apartment in I'M NO ANGEL, and hear her rich bluesy voice to know that in other circumstances West could be their maid, and not feel at all chagrined by the reversal. W.C. Fields splits a bottle of whiskey with an Indian, appears in blackface only to hide from a constable (in a scene edited from TV prints), and means Native Americans when he talks about carving through this wall of human flesh, carrying his canoe behind him. None of it seems 'unconsciously' racist --it is indirect, and more to paint Fields as a scalawag and mountebank full of nosegay, than as a tool for enhancing one's sense of Aryan superiority. Amen. 

ADDENDUM. Don't let this rant stop you from seeing DIPLOMANIACS! Woolsey might be a lipless freak but Manckiewicz wouldn't let you down. I'll even sell you mine! xo

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!

-------------

 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.