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jpc077
Reviews
Hellzapoppin' (1941)
Madness revisited
Like many readers I saw HELLZAPOPPIN first when I was a child (12 or 13, I think) and thought it was one of the greatest things ever. It made quite a splash in Paris (France) when it was released in 1947 and had one of the longest runs (about two years I think)in one first-run theatre, and I tried to see it as often as I could. Years passed and my enthusiasm for the movie started to dwindle, especially as I discovered the great silent comedians, particularly Keaton. I moved to the United States in the late sixties and the last time I saw the movie was in a Museum of Modern Art series on "self-referential" films in the late seventies or early eighties. It was like revisiting the town you grew up in some 30 years later... Then the film became unavailable, apparently because of a credit dispute... I recently got a rather poor DVD copy: uneven sound -- some lines inaudible (such as the comment on "Rosebud"), reels clumsily spliced together... so this was my first viewing in maybe 30 years. The movie remains a one-of-a-kind oddity with its surrealistic opening (who can forget its Sadean vision of Hell with devils spit-roasting beautiful girls?)and non-stop trickery (it really should be seen in a theater -- on TV many of the gags -- talking to the projectionist, etc -- become meaningless). Unfortunately most of the comedy is so crude that it makes The Three Stooges appear refined (shooting guns and pistols seem to be a major source of merriment, and Martha Raye's mugging and screaming quickly become tiresome.) Olsen and Johnson are non-entities as a comedy team, but they must be given credit for starting the whole thing on Broadway.
Incidentally, Jerry Lewis started work on a Broadway revival of the original HELLZAPOPPIN in the eighties. The project collapsed after weeks of rehearsal. That should have been quite a show.
JPC