Showing posts with label Dick Van Dyke. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dick Van Dyke. Show all posts

Saturday, December 5, 2020

CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG 1968

Last year, whenever I came across a review complaining about the 3½-hour running time of Martin Scorsese's The Irishman (2019), my first thought was that none of these folks would have survived being a kid in the 1960s. Not at a time when Hollywood's most eagerly-anticipated family movies all wore their lengthy running times like emblems of prestige: Mary Poppins (1964): 2hr 20m; The Sound of Music (1965): 2hr 55m; Doctor Dolittle (1967): 2hr 32m; Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967): 2hr 33m; and Oliver! (1968): 2hr 33m.

And certainly not at a time when double-features were the norm, and theaters, under the guise of presenting "Top Family Entertainment," offered child-abuse programming like pairing the 2hr 25m Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with the 3hr 4m Around the World in 80 Days (1956). Such was the bladder-challenging bill at San Francisco's Castro Theater in the summer of 1969 when I was 11-years-old and saw Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for the first time.

Click image to enlarge
A 1968 Christmas season release, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang opened in San Francisco as a reserved-seat roadshow attraction (complete with overture, intermission, & exit music) at a then-steep minimum $3 ticket price. When it played regular engagements in 1969, its revamped ad campaign underplayed the musical and magical car angles and instead emphasized the comedic. Specifically highlighting Dick Van Dyke's silly pose and anachronistically (the movie is set in 1910) showcasing Sally Ann Howes' legs.   

Most roadshow films went immediately into wide release after their exclusive engagements were over (Continuous Performances! Popular Prices!), but the underperforming Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was swiftly yanked from screens after its poorly-reviewed initial run (The SF Examiner called it "abysmally saccharine"), re-emerging six months later as a get-the-kids-from-underfoot summer release in August of 1969. But by then, it was too late. Over the Easter holidays, America's fickle kiddie population had fallen in love with another four-fendered friend…Herbie, the matchmaking Volkswagen Beetle of Disney's The Love Bug. A case of love at first sight that saw the modest feature earning more than ten times its $5 million budget at the boxoffice while the heavily-promoted Chitty Chitty Bang Bang remained unable to recoup its $12 million budget. 

Dick Van Dyke as Caractacus Potts
Sally Ann Howes as Truly Scrumptious 

Adrian Hall and Heather Ripley as Jeremy & Jemima Potts

Lionel Jeffries as Grandpa Potts

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is the only children's book written by James Bond creator Ian Fleming. It's also the only non-Bond film made by James Bond franchise producer Albert R. Broccoli. Fleming's slight story of a family and their magical car was made into a grand-scale movie musical (at the time, the most expensive musical ever made in England) that is commonly (and accurately) described these days as a James Bond film for children.

This is certainly true of its story, which pits a good guy devoted to gadgetry (crackpot inventor Caracticus Potts) and a woman with an outrageous name (candy heiress Truly Scrumptious) against an eccentric villain (Auric Goldfinger himself, Gert Fröbe as Baron Bomburst). But the Bond connection also applies to the production team, many of whom began work on CCBB fresh from completing the latest Bond film You Only Live Twice (1967). The screenplay for the Bond film was written by Chitty Chitty Bang Bang screenwriter Roald Dahl (with director Ken Hughes). Both Hughes and CCBB's Baroness Bomburst Anna Quayle, had just finished work on the Bond spoof Casino Royale (1967).

Desmond Llewelyn, as garage owner Mr. Coggins.
Llewellyn portrayed "Q" in a staggering 17 James Bond films. 

But in 1968, the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang most eagerly sought to emulate was Disney's blockbuster Mary Poppins (1964). And if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was so sincerely devoted to flattering Mary Poppins that it all but followed a blueprint. Same songwriters (Robert and Richard Sherman Sherman); same choreographers (Mark Breaux & Dee Dee Wood); same period (the book's contemporary setting was changed to Mary Poppins' Edwardian era); same casting (Poppins' Dick Van Dyke—mercifully, minus the English accent), and a Julie Andrews substitute (Sally Ann Howes). I've read that the producers sought to reunite Mary Poppins co-stars Julie Andrews & Dick Van Dyke. But unless the role of Truly was conceived as being significantly larger than its present incarnation, I find it difficult to believe Julie Andrews--a headlining Oscar winner at this stage--ever seriously entertained the idea of playing second lead to the actor who was her supporting co-star in her very first picture.

So intent was CCBB on duplicating Mary Poppins' winning formula; it features a copy of what has always been my least-favorite Poppins number: "Fidelity Fiduciary Bank." In this instance, the "comical old coots" sing the livelier but no-less-deadly "The Roses of Success."

But Hollywood wishes do come true, and when released, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang did indeed have critics comparing it to Mary Poppins…unfavorably on all counts. In his memoirs, even star Dick Van Dyke joined the chorus, citing that he felt Hughes was the wrong director for the job and that the film ultimately failed to capture the magic of Disney's classic. Given that Ken Hughes would go on to direct the Mae West travesty Sextette (1978), perhaps Van Dyke has a point. Falling short of its fantasmagorical expectations, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang joined the ranks of Camelot (1967) and Paint Your Wagon (1969) as representative of a form of "Bigger is Better" filmmaking whose era was nearing its end. But time has been kind, and in the 50-plus years since its release, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang has emerged from the shadow of Mary Poppins enough to be hailed as a beloved children's classic judged and appreciated on its own considerable merits. A far cry from the days when my attempts to recommend the movie to schoolmates were met with chants of "Shitty Shitty Bang Bang." 

Anna Quayle and Gert Frobe as Baroness & Baron Bomburst of Vulgaria

Seeing Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for the first time on a double-bill with Around the World in 80 Days was quite the thrill and nowhere near the backache challenge for my 11-year-old self as I would find it today. Though I confess to having fallen asleep during part of Around the World in 80 Days (one moment Shirley MacLaine hadn't yet entered the movie, the next, there she was in that balloon), by and large, as long as the Jujyfruits and popcorn held out, I was a happy camper. 

The only big musical I'd seen at this point was Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967), so without prior visions of Mary Poppins dancing in my head, I thought Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was the most extraordinary movie I'd ever seen. I was utterly wowed and enchanted by it. On an enormous screen and with glorious stereophonic sound Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was a storybook fantasy adventure come to life. It seemed to have everything: action, laughs, chases, comic schtick, rousing songs, zany characters, romance, dance, spectacle, and a big wooly sheepdog named Edison. It even had a bit of a dark side.

Robert Helpmann as The Child Catcher
I was too old to find this legendary kindertrauma character scary at the time. But as an adult, I've often wished (usually when I'm in a restaurant or on a plane) such a service existed.

I remember being very taken with Potts' kooky Rube Goldberg-style inventions (the work of Frederick Rowland Emett), particularly that ingenious breakfast-making machine I still would love to own. But what stands out most memorably is the titular automobile itself. Designed by Academy Award-winning production designer Ken Adams under what must have been no small degree of pressure to live up to the laundry list of glowing superlatives ascribed to it in the title song, the magical car dubbed Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is every bit the iconically miraculous motorcar the movie needed it to be. 

Critics were tough on the film for what they asserted were disappointingly primitive special effects for a movie of this size and expense (they may have had a point, as Chitty's budget was equal to or larger than that of another 1968 release, Stanley Kubrick's 2001:A Space Odyssey whose special effects had set a new standard), but back then I didn't notice or didn't care. When Chitty turned into a boat, or the first time it took wing, just the sight of it (crude special effects and all) hit a fanciful, fantasy nerve in me. I remember getting such a goosebump charge out of it.   

Custom cars were all the rage on TV in the '60s; the George Barris-designed automobiles on Batman, The Monkees, The Munsters, & The Green Hornet were big hits with the young set. But even amongst these memorably snazzy machines, Ken Adam's whimsical design for the flying, amphibious Chitty Chitty Bang Bang stands out with class and distinction. 


THE STUFF OF FANTASY

I saw Chitty Chitty Bang Bang two more times that summer, by then paired with Heaven with a Gun, a truly awful Glenn Ford western made bearable only by its being half the running time of Around the World in 80 Days. And in all these years, my love of it as a cheerful, brightly-colored confection as sweet and loaded with empty calories as anything whipped up by the Scrumptious Sweet Company, has only increased. I say empty calories because Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a delectable film that, for all its whimsy and charm, has always engaged my spirits more than my heart. The story—essentially a kidnap/rescue adventure fantasy—is fun in a cartoon kind of way…full of activity and "business" meant to entertain and amuse. But the screenplay keeps the characters at a bit of a remove, their personalities and goals presented so cursorily that the movie never touches me or gives me waterworks in the manner of The Wizard of Oz, Mary Poppins, or Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

It's not entirely true that nothing in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang gives me waterworks. For some reason, the duet performance of "Doll on a Music Box/Truly Scrumptious" gets to me every time. It's a lovely courtship dance in a film skimpy on romance. So when Truly breaks character at the end to give Caractacus a loving smile, I always melt. 


Maybe my dry eyes are because, as children's movies go, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang's emotional stakes are kept on a low boil. Both The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins saw lonely children reclaiming their fathers thanks to the spunky intervention of Julie Andrews, and in Oliver!, a severely brutalized and exploited orphan finds a home. But Chitty Chitty Bang Bang presents us with a cast of characters whose lives may not be perfect when the film begins, but are far from unhappy. Caractacus is a widowed fantasist whose inventions come to naught, but his loving children's belief in him is unshakable. And I couldn't have been the only kid who thought Jemima & Jeremy had it pretty sweet living with minimal parental supervision out there in the country in a picturesque windmill crammed with toys and gadgets made by a fun dad. 

You Two
Caractacus Potts and his two unaccountably British children. Though Potts' father and children speak with English accents, Dick Van Dyke, still stinging from criticism of his problematic Cockney accent in Mary Poppins, only agreed to appear in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang if he could forgo the accent.


Even Jemima & Jeremy's quest to rescue the junked Chitty from the fiery furnace is a low-wattage conflict due to the notion of Chitty being a sentient machine is never fully developed (she shivers at the mention of being melted and rescues the family at moments of danger, but has no personality to speak of) not mention the kids are ready to abandon their salvage mission when it appears doing so will cause their dad undue hardship. However, one thing the film gets right is granting the frosty Truly Scrumptious character a thawing-out musical number with the children. What's ideal about the casting of Sally Ann Howes is that she's pretty in precisely the way a child can relate to...like a teacher one develops a crush on. By the end of the number, it's been firmly established that Jeremy & Jemima need a mom, and we in the audience can identify with them in their wish for Truly and their dad to fall in love.

Benny Hill as The Toymaker

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I didn't like movie musicals very much when I was young. No fewer than 13 musicals were released in 1968 (3 by Elvis alone!). To this day, I could kick myself for passing opportunities to see current favorites like Funny Girl, Finian's Rainbow, and Star! in their original release. But what I did like were cars. Toy cars, model cars, and, after seeing the 1967 theatrical re-release of The Absent-Minded Professor (1961), flying cars. Fred MacMurray's flying Flubbermobile captivated me to no end, so when Chitty Chitty Bang Bang came on the scene, the car was the primary attraction for me. Nowadays, my absolute favorite things about Chitty Chitty Bang Bang are its songs and musical sequences. The eleven songs by Robert and Richard Sherman (showcased by Irwin Kostal's brilliant orchestrations) are catchy and hummable and have aged remarkably well. Not a clunker in the bunch; the entire original score is splendid...even the dreaded "The Roses of Success" has started to grow on me.

Toot Sweets
This pitch-perfect musical pitch meeting is a visual delight. The candy factory set is an eye-popper, and I still get woozy with vertigo when I see those dancers up on that narrow ledge near the rafters.
 

Me Ol' Bamboo
CCBB's answer to Mary Poppins' "Step in Time" is this rousingly entertaining and athletic number in which clever choreography takes center stage. Production on the film was shut down for a week due to 41-year-old Dick Van Dyke sustaining a leg injury while performing one of the dance routines (sources vary as to whether it was this one, the most likely suspect, or "Toot Sweets"). 

Chu-Chi Face
My partner never saw the film, but when I played this song for fun in my dance class, the silly lyrics and comical vocal performances of Gert Frobe & Anna Quayle made it one of his instant favorites. When we finally watched it together, he was so surprised by its ironic staging (cloying terms of endearment are exchanged amidst the Baron's many unsuccessful attempts to kill the Baroness). I don't think the number ever made much of an impression on me as a kid, but because it never ceases to make my sweetheart laugh, this sequence has become my most-replayed favorite.

Though Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was one of the more eagerly-anticipated releases of 1968, when award season rolled around, only the music of the Sherman brothers (their first non-Disney score) garnered any attention...no wins, but attention. Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for that irresistible earworm of a title song, and a second Globe nomination for Best Original Score. 

Emmy Award-winning TV star Dick Van Dyke had the opportunity to display his versatility as an actor, dancer, and singer in several iconic movies. He made his film debut opposite Janet Leigh in Bye Bye Birdie (1963), his likable persona transferring easily to the big screen. 


THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I'd allowed a lot of time to pass between viewings of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, this recent revisit stirring up dust clouds of nostalgia of such density as to fairly obscure my awareness of what I might have once characterized as the film's flaws. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang hasn't changed, but in the last few years, my appreciation of the value of good, old-fashioned schmaltz, cornball comedy, and sweet-natured sentimentality has. One doesn't have to try very hard to draw contemporary parallels to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang's child-caging Vulgarians and the tyrannical, childishly petulant, tantrum-throwing Baron Bomburst. And indeed, it's for that very reason that Chitty Chitty Bang Bang's liveliness, tuneful good cheer, and elemental, storybook sweetness (and silliness) proved to be just the right "happy endings" spoonful of sugar medicine I needed to make the waning days of 2020 a little easier to deal with. (There go those Mary Poppins comparisons, again!)




BONUS MATERIAL:


Two of my favorite stars from Ken Russell's The Boy Friend (1971) appear briefly in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: British cinema icon Barbara Windsor (top photo) and dancer Antonia Ellis (bottom photo, far right)

Ballet star Robert Helpmann (The Child Catcher) with Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes (1948)


Actress/dancer Paula Kelly (Sweet Charity) dances to an instrumental rendition of the Oscar-nominated title song "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" at the 41st Academy Awards. It lost to "The Windmills of Your Mind" from The Thomas Crown Affair.


Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2020

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

BYE, BYE, BIRDIE 1963

Sure, Bye Bye Birdie is a bright, lively, tuneful, only intermittently funny satire of teenage pop culture in the '60s. But as far as I’m concerned, Bye Bye Birdie has two huge assets (I know what you’re thinking…and you should be ashamed of yourself!) which make it one of my all-time favorite movie musicals. Those assets: the unstoppable star-quality of Ann-Margret, and the snappy musical staging and choreography by Onna White. 
Ann-Margret as Kim McAfee
Bobby Rydell as Hugo Peabody
Dick Van Dyke & Janet Leigh / Albert Peterson & Rose DeLeon
Mary LaRoche & Paul Lynde / Doris and Harry McAfee
Jesse Pearson as Conrad Birdie
Adapted from the 1960 Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, Bye Bye Birdie pokes gentle fun at America’s burgeoning youth culture by spoofing the real-life pandemonium surrounding hip-swiveling pop star Elvis Presley being drafted into the army in 1958. Standing in for Elvis in the musical is the fictitious rocker Conrad Birdie (Jesse Pearson): a beer-swilling, ill-mannered, libidinous hillbilly who wreaks havoc on prototypical Midwestern small town, Sweet Apple, Ohio when he arrives to bestow a symbolic coast-to-coast televised goodbye kiss on an adoring female fan before being shipped overseas.
Cue the generation-gap complications and small-town vs. show-biz culture clash hijinks. None of which, I might add, should anyone having even the most cursory familiarity with '60s-era sitcoms should have trouble staying one step ahead of. Bye Bye Birdie, when it’s either singing or dancing, is the most engaging and sprightliest of musicals, full of fun and as eager to please as a puppy. In its quieter moments—scratch that, there are no quieter moments—in its non-musical moments, Bye Bye Birdie's amusing, if not particularly funny, screenplay feels a tad labored and more than a little creaky.
Rooted in a kind of broad, over-emphatic acting style of most sixties sitcoms (a style that struck me as riotous when I was nine, a good deal less so now) and over-reliant on moldy, near-vaudevillian comedic shtick of the sort that considers silly names (Hugo Peabody) and wacky plot contrivances (that deadly speed-up pill subplot) the height of comedic brilliance; Bye Bye Birdie stays afloat chiefly through its simple desire to entertain and because of the buoyant charm of its talented and energetic cast.
The Sweet Apple chapter of The Conrad Birdie Fan Club 
(fronted by Ann-Margret and Trudi Ames) pledge undying allegiance.

The film version of Bye Bye Birdie was significantly (and, as per the voiced consensus of Dick Van Dyke, Janet Leigh, Paul Lynde, and Maureen Stapleton, controversially) retooled from the stage production. Primarily a middle-aged romance (Albert & Rosie) against a satirically rendered teen-culture backdrop, the Broadway production was nominated for eight Tonys, winning four: Best Musical, Best Director, Best Choreography, and Best Actor (Van Dyke). By the time it reached the screen, what was essentially a Dick Van Dyke showcase was fashioned by director George Sidney into a $6 million valentine to vivacious protégé Ann-Margret.
This was Ann-Margret's third film (she made her debut in Pocketful of Miracles, and assumed the Vivian Blaine role in the 1962 remake of State Fair), but thanks to Sidney's loving attention and her heretofore peripheral character being thrust to the film's center, Bye Bye Birdie is the movie most people credit with making her a star.

What began life as an anti-rock & roll musical fashioned to reflect the middle-age mentality of adult Broadway audiences reeling from rock & roll upstarts like Elvis stealing the Sinatra crown, arrived on the screen as a youth-centric glorification of teenybopper culture that effectively allocated once-prominent adult plotlines and relationships to the sidelines to make way for the fresh vitality of its young cast members (aka Ann-Margret). With Dick Van Dyke and Paul Lynde the only carry-overs from the Broadway show, numerous songs jettisoned and plotlines abandoned or reworked; Bye Bye Birdie became the ironic embodiment of all that the Broadway play had spoofed. Bye Bye Birdie, hello to the first multimillion-dollar teenage musical!
Paul Lynde's comedic number, "Kids" was a showstopper that brought down the house on Broadway. When speaking of his much-abbreviated screen role, Lynde was fond of saying of the film, "They should have retitled it, 'Hello, Ann-Margret'!" 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
One look at Bye Bye Birdie and it’s easy to see why it has become one of the most imitated and referenced movie musicals since The Wizard of Oz. Each number in the bouncy Charles Strouse / Lee Adams score is given almost cartoonishly vibrant life in increasingly clever and dazzlingly cinematic ways. So many large-scale musicals fall into the trap of thinking that mere size and expense is enough to make a film fun and energetic; Bye Bye Birdie is that rare example of a musical whose scale perfectly fits its subject, and whose accumulated talents (dancers, singers, cinematography, color, choreography, staging, and minor special effects) all remain on the same creative page. Every number throughout is infused with a lighthearted wit and silliness that remains true to the escapist tone of the entire enterprise. The effective musical film is almost a lost art, but Bye Bye Birdie is a glowing example of the genre done right. Small wonder that musicals like Grease and Hairspray, and entertainments as diverse as music videos, TV’s Mad Men, and Disney’s High School Musical franchise, have all owed a debt to Bye Bye Birdie.
The combined talents of director George Sidney (Pal Joey, Annie Get Your Gun) and choreographer Onna White (The Music Man, Oliver!) result in a movie whose clever, eye-popping musical sequences are a great deal of silly fun and still have the power to delight and captivate after all these years.
"The Telephone Hour (Going Steady)" predates the look of MTV music videos; "Put on a Happy Face" makes imaginative use of cute, if primitive special effects; and "A Lot of Livin' to Do" is a powerhouse production number of unparalleled energy and witty choreography.

Oscar and Tony Award-winner Maureen Stapleton makes her musical debut in
Bye Bye Birdie as  Mae Peterson, Albert's dominating mother.

PERFORMANCES
In her 1982 book 5001 Nights at the Movies, fave film critic Pauline Kael wrote the following about Ann-Margret in Bye Bye Birdie...and I couldn't have said it any better: “Ann-Margret, playing a brassy 16-year-old with a hyperactive rear end, takes over the picture; slick, enameled, and appalling as she is, she’s an undeniable presence.” 
OK, I might have left out “appalling.”
Real-life teen idol Bobby Rydell makes his film debut as Ann-Margret's love interest
Beyond that, Kael pretty much nails Ann-Margret’s appeal for me in this film and why any director would have been a fool not to have kept the camera trained on her every second. She's a dynamo! Members of the film’s cast may have felt slighted, and fans of the stage show may cry foul, but in my book, if Bye Bye Birdie is remembered at all today, it’s due in large part to Ann-Margret. The material is just too ordinary as it is. She is camp, a little over the top, and perhaps artificial as hell, but she is blessed with that indefinable something that makes it near-impossible for you to watch anyone else when she's on the screen. She’s a star.
In the Broadway show, Bye Bye Birdie paid tribute to iconic, stone-faced TV host Ed Sullivan  in the song, "Hymn for a Sunday Evening." Director George Sidney snagged the genuine article for the film (that's him on the left, for all of you youngsters).

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
There aren't many lines across which the life experiences of gays and straights of my generation intersect, but one thing that many males (and a good many females) my age have in common—regardless of sexual orientation—is the memory of their first time seeing Ann-Margret singing the film’s title song. Whether we saw it on the big screen in full color or in black and white on our TV sets, like the Moon Landing, few of us ever forgot or recovered from that image. Wow!
At the start of the film, Ann-Margret's performance of "Bye Bye Birdie" is girlish and plaintive. When she reprises the song at the end of the film, her performance has become assured, teasing, and not a little sexually aggressive.

The fifties had Marilyn Monroe standing over that subway grate, but we children of the sixties had Ann-Margret on that treadmill. A sequence so obviously tame, perhaps it's a testament to our nation's level of sexual repression at the time that Ann-Margret, in those few short minutes at the start and end of the film, made men, women, children, straights, gays, lesbians, and adolescents of all stripes fall in love/lust with her.
The first time I saw Bye Bye Birdie was in black & white on late-night TV. I remember being just thunderstruck (I'm positive my jaw dropped open). I'd never seen anything like her! Advancing and retreating against that endless void, wind machine a-blowing...Ann-Margret was nothing less than a celluloid Venus emergent.
The dancer assuming the puppy hands pose with Bobby Rydell here is Lorene Yarnell, 
who found fame in the '70s as half of the popular mime duo, Shields and Yarnell.
The blonde staring agog at Jesse Pearson is '70s TV personality and Match Game stalwart, Elaine Joyce. Pearson himself would go on to write and direct porn films in the '70s until his untimely passing in 1979 at the age of 49. 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
As I've stated, Bye Bye Birdie is one of my favorite movie musicals, but primarily due to its songs, musical sequences, and the rapturous presence of Ann-Margret. I have no complaint with anyone in the cast except to say that they're sorely ill-served by the weak script and they're all goners when it comes to having to share any scenes with Miss You-Know-Who. Predictably, I'm finding that the older I get the more certain aspects of the film seem to strike me as charmingly camp or comically dated. Some of these things are fun: the middle-class suburban milieu, the fashions, all those rotary phones. Other things less so: the all-white cast, that Shriner's Ballet when it starts to get out of hand (the 2009 Broadway revival removed the number entirely claiming, in the words of its star Gina Gershon, "It seemed a little too gang rape-y").
Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye
When I saw Bye Bye Birdie on the big screen for the first time in the 80s, the film's biggest laugh came from the intentional misunderstanding of this sweet, totally innocent lyric. 

So whether enjoyed as camp, escapism, or an idealized journey to a past that never existed, Bye Bye Birdie is, at 50-years, still the most fun-filled musical around. And best of all, it has Ann-Margret!
This great caricature is the work of Pete Emslie

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2013