Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion - "Paula Prentiss, Ditto!"

Successful Camp... even when it reveals self-parody, reeks of self-love

- Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp"

"Yvette Mimieux as herself"* - this is the kind of phrase that real camp-film aficionados - me, of course, among them - live for.  And poor Paula, just a ditto...

This movie appears to a nexus - actually, almost a Black Hole - of unwise trends and regrettable choices.  Among other things, Looking for Love manages to combine a whole raft of tawdry movie genres.  First, it's a prime example pop-star movie placement, no matter how unlikely the poptart (a trend that recently came back for a while - viz. the maiden films of such distinguished thespians as Britney Spears, Mandy Moore, Brandi, the Spice Girls, and, of course, Miss Mariah Carey, whose remarkable Glitter appears to have sent the trend back underground for a while).  Then, as so often happens, it's a "youth" picture apparently aimed squarely at the 42-55 demographic (Johnny Carson? Danny Thomas?).  It's a movie about television (in the same way that lesser thirties films tried to seem "hep" by promoting radio acts), as well as an "insider" story about the showbiz - a genre that sustained a near-fatal blow two years after this with The Oscar (which, in its screaming reds and self-conscious go at stylishness, Looking for Love oddly resembles).  Last, but hardly least, it's an example of that odd bird, the demi-sequel (I especially like how the narration all but promises that you won't have any nasty casting surprises - "nearly all the wonderful gang!").

And then there's Connie Francis, of whom no more need be said than that she is nothing if not enthusiastic.  She's had a hard road since, but here she's all bubble and nerve, and if that doesn't really translate into being very good, well, she's in there trying.  A lot.

* Actually, herself seems like rather an interesting person.  Yvette ended the sixties recording a spoken-word album of Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal with Indian sensation Ali Akbar Khan, was a longtime Hollywood Wife as Mrs. Stanley Donen, became an avocational anthropologist and real-estate magnate, and by the '90s had retired to enjoy her second marriage, to a rich executive and philanthropist.  We should all be such a camp-movie punchline.

Trailer Trash: Doña Zarah

While we're in a '30s mood (not all that uncommon a phenomenon hereabouts, I know), let's stop for a moment and consider that Fab Fräulein, the lady who put the "Fasc[ism]" into Fascinating, the Prima Donna Assoluta of the Axis Screen, Swedish thrush Zarah Leander.  Z-Lo, as I've taken to thinking of her, may have been from Stockholm, but she made a string of pictures in Berlin right through '43, becoming in the process Goebbels's de facto replacement for the One That Got Away, Dietrich. 

This little epic, La Habanera, is from early in her UFA contract, but it's still very much a Nazi picture:  Nordic girl falls for shady Latin; repents in a Tropical Hell (and a helluva mantilla); Latin engineers epidemic, dies; Nordic girl skedaddles back home with heroic German doc's help, reassuringly blond son in tow.

It's all pretty incoherent actually, not least because it's set in Puerto Rico but filmed in the Canaries at the height of the Spanish Civil War, features not even a trace of a Spanish accent, and is graced with costumes the silliness of which would make Marion Davies blush.  Truth to tell, I've not seen the whole thing, but from the above, I think you could engineer a drinking game involving every time Zarah finds a new way to wear spit curls.

After the War, Leander spent the rest of her long career calling herself a "political idiot" who had had no idea what was going on while she filmed and filmed and filmed (and the Deutsche Marks, conveniently deposited directly into her Swedish account, kept rolling in).  Now where have we heard that kind of thing before?  One wonders what, as the years went by, she thought about, for example, the songwriter on this movie who would shortly disappear into the camps, or whether she ever cared that the little boy who Dickie Moored his way through Habanera playing her son died at 17 on the outskirts of Berlin, killed defending the capital that she fled only a year or so earlier (and, apparently, only because her villa got flattened - how inconvenient...).

Zarah's co-stars - Ferdinand Marian, Karl Martell, Julia Serda - may not be terribly familiar today, but one name that flashes by here certainly is.  That spielleitung may be credited to Detlef Sierck, but within a few years young Detlef transformed himself into Douglas Sirk, who applied the lessons he learned from Zarah into his direction of Hollywood ladies for the next thirty years or so, culminating in that greatest of all soap operas, Imitation of Life.  Which, come to think of it, could just as easily been the title for La Habanera...

Trailer Trash: They Say Someday You'll Find...

Actually, pretty much the very reverse of trash, I know, but I'm in a FredandGinger mood, so indulge me.

Roberta is just about my favorite of their pictures - not the best, necessarily, or the most lavish, but just the one that somehow gets its right. It's startling to be reminded by the title card that they didn't even lead the bill, that honor going to Miss Irene Dunne as a White Russian princess who gets to wear one of the all-time great tiaras and sing "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes."

This trailer, sadly, is saved from total fabulosity by the sad absence of the title character, the marvelous Helen Westley as Roberta herself, not to mention the toothsome Randolph Scott. Still, there is that tiara, and Fred, and Ginger. Enjoy.

Trailer Trash: un ataque de nervios

For no better reason than that I took its name in vain earlier today, I thought we'd check in with one of the genuine masterpieces of '80s filmmaking, especially teasing here with its glimpses of divinities like La Maura and the exquisite Rossy, along with the now-seems-impossibly young Banderas.

Almodóvar really hit his international stride with this one, and like a first love, it has a special place not eclipsed by his later triumphs. And it just looks so damn great. In memory, everywhere in 1988 was those colors, and while I never hijacked a biker or got to dub Joan Crawford, it all feels very nostalgic. Sigh...

Trailer Trash: "Trust Me, I'm a Doctor..."

Richard O'Brien's Shock Treatment landed with a dull thud on release in 1981; this semi-sequel to Rocky Horror didn't please that film's rabid fan base and failed to find one of its own, hampered by one of those seemed-like-a-good-idea marketing concepts, screening the movie only at midnight.

Seen three decades on (!*), it actually looks both fabulously proto-80s and really rather clever. Despite the lamentable absence of Tim Curry, having Barry "Edna" Humphries around in what looks like a key role must provide some diversion, and anything that give us another glimpse of Little Nell really ought to be worth a look.

*Geez we're all getting old, fast, no?

Trailer Trash: We Were Yawning

Norma Shearer ended her onscreen days with a trio of pictures that proved, more or less definitively, that what had seemed like a new direction in The Women (Norma playing a spirited, contemporary woman with a sense of humor) was actually a dead end, for they took her back to the aristo settings and Great Lady moments that had made up too much of her work in the '30s.

This isn't, as some have suggested, a case of a studio easing out a falling star (as Warner's did Kay Francis) by throwing her into quickies or stinting on production values. No; it's simply that suddenly it's the 40s, and what Norma does just doesn't play any more. Escape, Her Cardboard Lover, and this one, We Were Dancing, all had respectable sources (a popular novel, a stage favorite, and a pair of Coward one-acts) and were given the full glossy MGM finish - sets, costumes, lingering flattering close-ups, and hordes of extras when necessary. Escape had a Special Prestige Guest Star in Alla Nazimova, and both it and Cardboard Lover paired Norma with rising favorite Robert Taylor.

We Were Dancing is the Shearer picture that time forgot, and this trailer goes a long way in showing why. It's perfectly fine to fill out out a movie with people like Lee Bowman and veteran character player Alan Mowbray; it's quite another to claim that they constitute part of a "7 Star" cast. It doesn't help that Norma's been burdened with a coiffure that appears to be equal parts meringue and Sue Ann Nivens, or that even when being slapped, Melvyn Douglas looks to be waiting for his next date with Ninotchka. This is the Norma Shearer parodied by Charles Busch - lavish, exquisite in her self-regard, and totally pointless.

All of which is to say I can't wait to see it in its entirely when next the opportunity arises - on top of Norma, Norma, Norma, it has a bit by a very young Ava Gardner, a turn by Marjorie Main as a lady judge, and a moment or two for professional dowager Norma Varden. With all that and Norma's dresses, what more could one ask?

Trailer Trash: Here She Comes

If there is any proof at all that even the best drugs only do so much, it is the quite extraordinary version of the 1927 silent classic Metropolis that disco overlord Giorgio Moroder brought to birth in 1984. Moroder took one of the most visually overwrought and (thanks to generations of ruthless cutting) thematically incoherent films ever made and provided it with an electro-dance soundtrack that matches it in being both entirely overwrought and completely incoherent.

So, of course, I love and revere every hand-tinted, staircase-running, transforming-vamp-roboted, Bonnie-Tylered, Freddie-Mercuryed, for-God's-sake-Loverboyed minute of it. The many hours spent during the summer of '84 watching it repeatedly (at Philadelphia's old TLA, if memory serves) are a treasured part of my 80s experience, and even having seen other, significantly more solemn restorations, I think Moroder may still have done best by Fritz Lang's demented vision.

In Berlin's fabulous Film Museum, a significant amount of space is devoted to all things Metropolis, but I was disappointed to see that they strongly deprecate this unique version of the great work. They don't exactly use words like "abortion" to describe it, but you can tell how they feel. It's a rare lapse on their part, and if they didn't also have a truly heartstopping gallery of Dietrich costumes, I might never have forgiven them.

Trailer Trash: Ease on Down

Here's a picture that had it all: big stars, a hit Broadway show, infinite reservoirs of goodwill from the source material, and a hip disco sound.

Unfortunately, in having it all, it also had all you can think of go wrong - Sid & Marty Krofft-calibre costumes; a cheesy neo-Metropolis design scheme; busy, pointless numbers full of flailing extras; terrible stop-motion animation; and rear-projections that wouldn't have passed muster in a Poverty Row programmer.

Still, it also had Lena Horne, and the only on-screen pairing of Motown's two greatest stars, and if nothing else it entirely sums up, good and bad, the times that made it.

This week it seems to mark the end of a certain road, or one not taken. Imagine if it had been a hit, with both its stars then leading a revival of the musical genre that rolled on for a half-dozen years or so - maybe Miss Ross in a neo-Lady in the Dark, or Jackson paired up with someone like Irene Cara for a string of song-and-dancers. Well, didn't happen; the same year brought us Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and a musical drought that even the success of Grease couldn't stem.

On the other hand, its failure freed Jackson up for Off the Wall - and everything else that happened after. Maybe it really is a shame it flopped.

Trailer Trash: On the Brink of Something Fantastic

It just seems appropriate. She was sensational. Come to think of it, I think I saw her a couple of times at the parade, too...

Trailer Trash: No Pinkies?!

Three decades before Mel Brooks took on Broadway (and triumphed, at least the first time out of the gate), Rialto favorite Neil Simon decided to tread the Brooksian route with a spoof of classic Hollywood whodunits.

The result, Murder by Death, may not be a great film, but it has a peerless cast, amusing situations, some funny lines (Maggie Smith really gives her all to "Where's my Dickie?"), and the peculiar spectacle of Truman Capote trying to be a movie star. Throw in unbridled hammery from the likes of Nancy Walker, Alex Guinness, and Estelle ("Murderpoo?") Winwood, and you've got a perfectly satisfactory night out. It's not Young Frankenstein, but then again neither is it (thank God) Won Ton Ton...

Trailer Trash: The Singing Baroness

Interrupted Melody is a gorgeous guilty pleasure - a surefire mix of to-die-for sets, fab stage and "real life" costumes (check out the fur-trimmed hostess gown at 1:46), Eleanor Parker's emoting, Eileen Farrell's voice, and "Over the Rainbow", all of it captured in glorious CinemaScope. Who could ask for anything more?

Well, aside from something a little more eye-candy oriented than Glenn Ford as the leading man...

Trailer Trash: The Dress Doctor is In

Well, okay - this is less a trailer than a featurette. And yes, you do have to sit through the annoying TCM intro. Still, I think you'll agree that it's worth the wait to hear the one and only Miss Edith Head introduce the sensational fashions that enlivened the otherwise not-so-sensational Natalie Wood vehicle Penelope.

This is the kind of movie that if you enounter a bit of it late one night, you think "Gee, why haven't I heard of this? It's kicky, fun, and great to look at! Why don't they make movies like this anymore?

Then one day, you set aside time to catch the whole thing, and you walk away thinking, "Oh. That's why."

So now you don't have to, because you've seen the most important parts - believe me: after that white gown, it's all downhill from there.

Trailer Trash: The Meaning of Propriety

There's something about this movie that never fails. If she had never taken herself more seriously than she does here (and if by '75 she wasn't stuck in dreck), La Streisand could have been the greatest of them all, instead of just the greatest pipes of all.

And who knew Bogdanovich was such a flirt? And who remembers that Ryan O'Neal was so very lovely?

But the great mystery of this trailer: where is the person called Eunice?

Trailer Trash: "Whatever it is, it Must Exist!"

I've been told that there's no truth to the persistent legend that the producers briefly considered repackaging this epic as a wacky comedy called The Scientist Wore Hostess Pajamas. Pity.

Trailer Trash: Miss Mellie Goes to Hell

We've had a run of fluff and low-budget wonders (not that there's anything wrong with that) the last few weeks, so I thought this time around we'd go with a little prestige. When do you suppose was the last time a film - pardon me, a "filmization" - was given enhanced credibility by its status as a "Book of the Month Club See-lection" and appearance in the Reader's Digest?

This may not be the very start of actresses seeking validation by deglamorizing themselves, but it's pretty close. It didn't work as well as it could have (Olivia didn't pick up her second Best Actress Oscar until the next year, for deglamorization of a different kind in The Heiress), but all involved seem pretty thoroughly de-glammed.

For a clearly "A" and generally well-remembered film, The Snake Pit has suffered a curious Case of the Disappearing Male Leads. Mark Stevens, Leo Genn, Glenn Langan - what's up with that? Of them all, only Leif Erickson has a certain éclat, if you're willing to stretch things a tad. You look at the women in the cast and it's notables right down to the bits - Olivia and Celeste, of course, but then Beulah Bondi, Natalie Schafer, Lee Patrick, Isabel Jewell; veterans Minna Gombell and Minerva Urecal; and even silents-survivor Mae Marsh.

Sometimes I wish I could have been a studio-era scriptwriter. I imagine myself beneath a whirling fan, the long white curtains at the open office window moving in a languid southern California breeze while a parade of extras dressed as centurions and saloon gals drift by outside, and I tap away at my black enamelled Underwood, coming up with lines like "My head hurts! There's something the matter with my head!"

Trailer Trash: Tout Chantant! Tout Dansant!

Deneuve! Dorléac! Darrieux! Chakiris! Kelly! Piccoli! Les Demoiselles de Rochefort is like a slightly too-rich slice of French pastry. Visually, it's Valley of the Dolls on (more) speed; the singing is shall-we-say variable; and the dancing is just all over the place, from the Deneuve-Dorléac sisters gleeful and entrancing amateurism to the exhausting energy of Mr. West Side Story. The trailer is actually a fairly good précis, although it does shortchange the divine Danielle.

Trailer Trash: In The Midnight Hour

We'll be staying up late for this week's movie, since it's one that truly is best appreciated at a midnight screening. I mostly remember The Forbidden Zone as a gateway drug, in that it was the first time I heard Josephine Baker sing, albeit lipsynched by a crazy lady in a classroom full of freaks. That and the truly demented performance by the great Susan Tyrrell. And the simple fact of the presence of Hervé Villechaize. And... oh, just see for yourself.

Trailer Trash: A Truly Different Adventure

Well, after last week's rather fevered offering, I thought it might be nice to screen something a little more torpid - and nothing guarantees torpid like the auteur touch of the late, great Doris Wishman.

What with MJ having dragged her posse over here with her, I just know the late show is going to be completely out of control. Even so, let's make them feel at home: welcome, bitches!

Trailer Trash: Beyond the Valley of the Ultra-Cheapies

Herewith a new feature at the Café: the occasional look at Coming Attractions for films that, were I running a repertory cinema (remember those? Do you think there's any chance they'll come back?), would be in permanent rotation.

Today, the incomparable Miss Tura Satana shows us how it's done, Z-movie style.