NOT WITH A BANG, BUT A WHIMPER: A List of Lamentable Last Films

“This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.”   - T.S. Eliot   

It can’t be easy maintaining a film career. The practical side of the motion picture business doesn’t readily correspond with an artist's desire to work well and consistently while trying to hold onto whatever faint vestiges of integrity and self-respect are left intact after one is deemed no longer young or the pop-culture “flavor of the month.” Fans, critics, and rear-view-mirror biographers tend to speak of an actor’s career and body of work as though they are things strategically orchestrated and mapped out. Perhaps in some cases this is true, but for the most part, the cold realities of the business of fame suggests an actor’s lingering legacy is often the result of nothing more premeditated than the serendipitous meeting of talent, luck, ambition, and tenacity.

A film career of any length is bound to have its ups and downs, but if an actor is lucky, the ups outnumber (or outweigh) the bad to sufficient degree as to have little impact on time’s overall evaluation of an actor's merits. Because Hollywood films ween us on happy endings and tidy conclusions, perhaps this breeds in us an expectation (or hope) that the careers of our favorite stars culminate in films and performances worthy and emblematic of their lifetime achievements, in toto.

Occasionally it works out: as in John Wayne, dying of cancer in real-life, portraying an aging gunman dying of cancer in his last film The Shootist (1976); or Sammy Davis Jr. appearing as a revered, aging tap-dancer in Tap (1989) his final film. But all too often stars with illustrious early careers bow out in vehicles severely at odds with their cumulative talent, reputations, and dignity.
So here's a list of the less-than-celebrated last films of a few of my favorite actors. An unlucky list of 13 movies - indicative of nothing deeper than a movie fan's wish that these talented stars had been shown to better advantage in their final movie roles.
   

1. Mae West — Last Film: Sextette (1978)
The final film of screen legend Mae West turned out to be something of a good news/bad news affair. The good news being that the self-enchanted octogenarian ended her four-decade movie career in a name-above-the title star vehicle (vanity project) designed as a tribute to her image and career. The bad news, of course, is that I’m referring to Sextette: an ill-advised, fan-produced exercise in celebrity exploitation so unflattering to its leading lady, it essentially ends up being a 90-minute exercise in character assassination and idol-smashing...set to a disco beat.

Shoulda Quit While I Was Ahead: My Little Chickadee (1940) 

*****

2. Laurence Harvey  — Last Film: Welcome to Arrow Beach (1974)

Speaking in terms of equal opportunity, it’s nice to know that late-career leading men are as susceptible to the beckoning charms of the B-grade horror film as the cadre of older actresses populating that subgenre known as Grand Dame Guignol. On the heels of appearing with gal pal Joanna Pettet in a 1972 episode of TVs Night Gallery, and co-starring with longtime friend Elizabeth Taylor in Night Watch (1973); Oscar nominee Laurence Harvey (Room at the Top - 1959) went the full  slasher route in the rarely-seen cheapie Welcome to Arrow Beach. Appearing again with (VERY) good friend Joanna Pettet, Harvey underplays a military vet with a cannibalistic taste for hitchhiking hippie chicks and blowsy booze hounds. Looking gaunt from the stomach cancer that would claim his life before this film was released, Harvey also directed this bloody exploitationer which rode a short-lived 70s trend of cannibalism-themed horror movies. I remember seeing this as a teen (under the alternate title, Tender Flesh) on a double bill with the another  cannibal horror film, The Folks at Red Wolf Inn (1972). I guess we all have our low moments.  View trailer HERE

Shoulda Quit While I Was Ahead: Night Watch (1973)

                                                                         *****

3. Joan Crawford — Last Film: Trog (1970)

As a journalist once noted, the boon and bane of every Crawford fan has always been the actress’s dogged professionalism. No matter how low she'd fallen (and Trog is about as low as it gets) Crawford always emoted as though Louis B. Mayer were still breathing down her neck. Crawford’s co-star in Trog is a professional wrestler in a rubbery Halloween mask (Joe Cornelius), but by the level of her intensity and commitment, you’d think she was acting opposite Franhcot Tone. And while this trait is certainly admirable, it has the unfortunate effect of making Joan appear to be performing in a vacuum; acting her ass off independent of the tone and timbre of the scene, not really relating to her co-stars. In Trog, Joan – looking tiny and occasionally pretty well-oiled – plays an anthropologist who attempts to tame a "Kill-crazy fiend from hell!” amidst public outcry and resistance. As always, Joan is the best thing in it (on my personal Camp-o-meter, anyway), but this B-horror movie programmer is so beneath her talents it makes the schlock she made for William Castle look dignified.

Shoulda Quit While I Was Ahead: Berserk (1967)

*****

4. Gene Kelly — Last Film: Xanadu (1980)

A curious inclusion given how much I love this film and how, considering what he had to work with, I actually think Gene Kelly acquits himself rather nicely.
But I have to admit I've always found my enjoyment of Kelly in this musical to be running neck and neck with a sense of missed opportunities and a disappointment in how poorly he’s served by this charming but rather weak vehicle as a whole. Xanadu is nothing if not respectful of the influential actor/singer/dancer/director/choreographer who helped shape the face of the modern movie musical; it’s just that he’s let down by an insipid script, sabotaged by editing and camerawork which fails to understand the rhythms of dance (or rollerskating...they cut off his feet!), and is left to play third-fiddle to two low-wattage leads who fail to possess even a fraction of his screen charisma. So while Xanadu is not exactly a career embarrassment (I'd say that honor goes to his direction of Hello, Dolly! & The Guide for the Married Man), it ranks as a poor representation and send-off for the genius that was Gene Kelly.

Shoulda Quit  While I Was Ahead: The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967)

*****

5. Gloria Swanson — Last Film: Airport ’75 (1974)     

In this loopy sequel (of sorts) to 1970’s Airport, silent screen star Gloria Swanson appears as herself and makes up for all those mute years by never shutting up. Swanson’s not onscreen a great deal ‒ although it feels like it since, in a film overrun with nuns (Helen Reddy, for one), Swanson makes the curious choice of dressing exactly like a nun who’s been to a couturier ‒ but when she is onscreen you can bet she’s talking about herself. Ostensibly under the guise of dictating her memoirs to her self-medicating secretary (Planet of the Apes’ Linda Harrison or Augusta Summerland, who knows a thing or two about keeping quiet), Swanson, who is said to have written her own dialog, captures perfectly what it’s like to be in the company of an actor: they are always their own favorite topic of discussion.

Overlooking the suspense-killing casting of having Swanson playing herself in a fictional narrative (what are they gonna do, have her get sucked out a window?), her role feels like a far-in-advance infomercial for her 1980 memoir Swanson on Swanson. A title describing the entire thrust of Swanson's self-enamored characterization here.

Shoulda Quit While I Was Ahead: Sunset Blvd. (1950)

*****

6. Dean Martin / Frank Sinatra — Last Film: Cannonball Run II (1984)

Although I tend to consider myself a child of the '60s & '70s, and therefore lay no claim to the cinema atrocities committed in the 80s; the next time I go on a jeremiad about the craptastic bros-before-hos movie oeuvre of Adam Sandler and Kevin James, someone needs to remind me that Burt Reynolds – an actor from my generation – pretty much originated the lazy buddy comedy genre. That's when you find someone to pay for you and your pals to get together and have a good time, hand somebody a camera, film it, slap a title on it, and then call it a movie.

I never saw the original The Cannonball Run (1981) but the appeal of having the '60s Rat Pack reunited onscreen in this movie (Sinatra, Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. & Shirley MacLaine all appear) got the better me, and so I watched it one night on cable TV. With this movie (and I use the term loosely) I discovered that nostalgia is no match for a film that clearly holds its audience in low regard. The level of contempt this movie has for the intelligence of its audience is palpable and pungent. Dean Martin dares you to call him on the obvious fact that he really doesn’t give a shit, and Frank Sinatra looks exactly like someone dutifully following through on a favor/obligation. Dreadful. An unspeakably depressing last film for two of my favorites.    
Shoulda Quit While I Was Ahead: Airport (1970) / The First Deadly Sin (1980)

*****

7. Elizabeth Taylor  — Last Film: The Flintstones  (1994)    

Beyond the garden-variety complaint that Hollywood never seems to know how to properly showcase stars once they cease to be young, I’ve no objection to an actress of Elizabeth Taylor’s magnitude and reputation being cast as Fred Flintstone’s harridan of a mother-in-law (one Pearl Slaghoople) in a live-action version of the enduring 60s primetime TV cartoon show (inspired by the live-action The Honeymooners). Indeed, given Taylor’s sense of humor about herself, lack of pretension, and past success in playing shrews and shrill, fishwife types, it’s actually a pretty cool idea.
My problem lies with how dismal a comedy The Flintstones turned out to be. Taylor's role is little more than an extended walk-on, but in it, she's saddled with some strenuously unfunny material that she doesn't handle particularly well. There's so little to The Flintstones beyond the wittily prehistoric costumes, sets, and special effects (it's all concept, no content), that one is left with too much time to contemplate why the only laughs the film earns derive from how accurately the production team has captured some device or creature recognizable from the cartoon. Taylor (sporting that awful Jose Eber feathered helmet hairdo she adopted at the time) has definitely been better, was capable of better, and I only wish she had been given better.
Shoulda Quit While I Was Ahead: The Mirror Crack’d (1980)

*****

8. Peter Sellers — Last Film: The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu (1980)

It’s anybody’s guess how this flat, misguided comedy ever got beyond the planning stages, but avarice likely played a role in this unsuitable-for-release trainwreck ever seeing the light of day (it was released weeks after Sellers’ death). Fandom fuels a desire to see the last professional efforts of any favored celebrity, but it’s hard to imagine any Peter Sellers fan deriving much joy from this slogging crime comedy. A film which also served as the last screen role for Mary Poppins’ David Tomlinson and features Helen Mirren impersonating Queen Mary, the grandmother of Queen Elizabeth II, whom Mirren would win an Oscar portraying 26-years later. Sellers was a comic genius who made a career out of disappearing behind impersonation, but by the '80s his extended yellowface Fu Manchu shtick was strictly cringe material. Matters aren’t helped much by Sellers (ill at the time) playing dual roles: bored & tired.

Shoulda Quit While I Was Ahead: Being There (1979)

*****

9. Tallulah Bankhead —  Last Film: Die! Die! My Darling!  (1965) 

This one’s a bit of an academic call. A call resting both on the awareness of Tallulah Bankhead being an esteemed stage actress whose motion picture appearances were rare (thus branding this Z-grade exercise in Hag Horror as a film far beneath her talents); and the full understanding that no one in their right mind would care to deprive the world of Bankhead’s mesmerizingly over-the-top performance in said Psycho-Biddy gothic. Bankhead is too fine an actor for a title like Die! Die! My Darling! to stand as the representative coda to her brief film career, but as a longstanding connoisseur of camp, I can’t deny that I’m forever grateful to her for having undertaken it.

Shoulda Quit While I Was Ahead: A Royal Scandal (1945)

*****

10. Bette Davis — Last Film: Wicked Stepmother (1989) 

It’s kind of a good thing this chaotic comedy about a homewrecking witch (Davis) is so aggressively unfunny, for the sight of the frail, reed-thin, surgically tightened, post-stroke, eerily animatronic Bette Davis croaking out her lines while chain-smoking like a madwoman is a bonafide laugh-killer. A problem-plagued production that had the ailing, dissatisfied Davis deserting the film shortly after shooting began (resulting in her onscreen time amounting to slightly less than 15-minutes), Wicked Stepmother may have brought Davis a hefty paycheck and yet another opportunity to work – something obviously very important to her – but beyond the curiosity value of seeing one of Hollywood's greats in her last film roe, the whole affair has a ghoulish feel to it.
The only joke in the film that works is a brief sight gag revealing the late wife of Davis' new husband (Lionel Stander) was Joan Crawford.

Shoulda Quit While I Was Ahead: The Whales of August (1987)

*****

11. Charles Boyer — Last Film: A Matter of Time  (1976)

Charles Boyer is an interesting case. He dodged having to be shackled with Ross Hunter’s Lost Horizon (1973) as his last film by following up that misstep with the stylish Alan Resnais film Stavisky…; a fine and suitably distinguished movie to end his career. Unfortunately, Boyer dodged the Ross Hunter bullet only to jump into the firing line of Vincente Minnelli’s calamitous A Matter of Time (1976). A film which not only reunited Boyer with the director of two of his earlier films (The Cobweb and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse), but reunited him with his Arch of Triumph and Gaslight co-star, Ingrid Bergman.

Hopes couldn’t have been higher when it was announced Vincente Minnelli (making his first film since 1970s On a Clear Day You Can See Forever) was going to direct daughter Liza (in need of a hit after Lucky Lady) in a lavish costume drama. Without going into the ugly details behind a problem-plagued production, suffice it to say A Matter of Time didn’t do anybody’s resumés any favors. Boyer, as the husband of dotty Contessa Bergman, is really rather good. It’s the film that’s such a mess.

Shoulda Quit While I Was Ahead: Stavisky…(1974)

*****

12. Lucille Ball — Last Film: Mame (1974)  

Mame was released with a ton of hoopla and cheery smiles all around, but once the smoke cleared (and a few years had passed) what were we left with? A star who claimed making the film “was about as much fun as watching your house burn down”; a costar (Bea Arthur) who went on record stating, “It was a tremendous embarrassment. I’m so sorry I did it,” and that the leading lady was “terribly miscast”; a discontented composer (Jerry Herman); and a marriage dissolved (according to Arthur, her husband – Gene Saks, Mame’s director – used emotional blackmail to get her to do the movie: “As my wife you owe it to me to play this part.”).

Mame was to be TV legend Lucille Ball’s return to the silver screen, but reviews and reception to the film were so harsh, this $12-million misstep was her swan song. Oops! Maybe it’s not polite to bring up singing in this context.

Shoulda Quit While I Was Ahead: The Long Long Trailer (1953)

*****

13. Barbara Stanwyck — Last Film: The Night Walker (1964) 

After playing a bordello madam (Walk on the Wild Side) and appearing in an Elvis Presley movie (Roustabout), I guess Barbara Stanwyck decided to make her career degradation complete by working for William Castle. The Night Walker is a somewhat listless, surprisingly gimmick-free William Castle melodrama that, while not doing much for Stanwyck, at least reunited her with former hubby and co-star Robert Taylor.

As always, Stanwyck and her trademark intensity are fascinating to watch and the only worthwhile elements in a film that really would have been just fine as an episode of one of those suspense anthology TV programs (although the really creepy music by Vic Mizzy is effective as hell).
Happily, with the movies treating her so shabbily, it's nice to know television provided Stanwyck with some of her finest latter-career moments (I'm crazy about her performance in The Thorn Birds).

Shoulda Quit While I Was Ahead: Walk on the Wild Side (1962)

"I am big! It's the pictures that got small."

Norma Desmond - Sunset Blvd.

Copyright © Ken Anderson

SUMMER MOVIES AND THE BLOCKBUSTER MENTALITY

The Summer Movie Season:  Sit-Out or Be-In?*: 
A child of the 60s looks at the phenomenon of the summer blockbuster
*For the uninitiated, a “Be-in” was a 60s counterculture social event (a “happening”) similar to a “Love-in.”

Like many people my age (never mind), I have a tendency to look back on specific aspects of the past through decidedly rose-colored glasses. Motion pictures in particular are vulnerable to this alchemy, as I fell in love with movies during the late-60s and 70s: a time of groundbreaking innovation in film.

The growing pains of American cinema that typified the New Hollywood years, in many ways mirror my own. Both the era and the films it produced are inextricably linked in my mind to my adolescence and my nascent understanding of the world. So much so that if often felt that Hollywood and I were both growing up at the same time. 

While such a subjective, emotional response to movies is at the core of every film buff, the negative by-product of such a polarized form of passion is that it makes one’s assessment of past films dangerously prone to a nostalgic sentimentality. Nothing wrong with deserved praise meted out to the films of the past, just so long as that rear-view adulation doesn't prevent the fair and objective evaluation of contemporary films.

A typical rant of mine is to bemoan the annual summer blockbuster season. I complain about the dearth of watchable films released during the summer months and bellyache about how those without a taste for sequels, comic books (pardon me, graphic novels), or Michael Bay blowing things up, must content themselves with Netflix or cable until September.
(MORE ...read my complete article HERE on Moviepilot ).

Xanadu. This particular Olivia Neutron-Bomb was detonated 8-8-80 

The winter and fall months were once reserved for high-profile holiday releases, films hoping for Oscar attention, and the so-called “prestige-film” (self-serious movies - often with literary, historical  or cultural significance - that may or may not have had big boxoffice potential, but were calculated primarily to bolster a studio’s image as a maker of important, “quality” films).  Summer was once the season studios chose to release their difficult-to-categorize films. Films that took chances or failed to fit specific marketing genres.

A great many of my all-time favorite movies that have gone on to become classics were summer releases. Something I can't imagine myself saying about today's crop of overproduced CGI cartoons...even if I were a target-demographic adolescent.

Click on the titles below to read more extensive commentaries on each film.

The Day of the Locust /  May 1975

Petulia  / June 1968

Rosemary's Baby / June 1968

Bonnie & Clyde / August 1967

Klute  / June 1971

Nashville / June 1975

Night Moves / June 1975

Of course, I’m not an absolute, head-in-the-clouds idealist. I’m well aware that if a work of corporate calculation like the entire Marvel Comics movie franchise can literally rake in billions for what is essentially a money-making industry….that’s the direction things are going to continue to go. But as any child of the 60s can tell you, what’s good for The Establishment and Big Business isn't exactly good for humanity.

The Summer Blockbuster Season has a lot in common with the lyrics to the Adam Freeland song, “We Want Your Soul”

Go back to bed America, your government is in control again.
Here. Watch this. Shut up.
You are free to do as we tell you.
You are free to do as we tell you.

...indeed, free to buy more merchandise disguised as film.

Copyright © Ken Anderson

XANADU 1980

8/8/80. These cryptic numbers jumped out at me from posters, billboards, and newspaper ads all over Los Angeles during the summer of 1980. Was it apocalypse? Armageddon? Well, yes and no. The numbers represented August 8th,1980: the theatrical release date of the roller disco movie musical, Xanadu.  

The tale of a legwarmer wearin', sundress rockin', rollerskatin', glow-in-the-dark muse (the heavenly Olivia Newton-John) who comes to earth to inspire a disillusioned artist (the uncomfortable-appearing Michael Beck) and retired bandleader (the ever-charming Gene Kelly) realize their dream of opening a roller rink/disco/nightclub; Xanadu is like nothing I've seen before or since. It's a law unto itself.  

The cast of Xanadu recreates the reaction of the nation's film critics in the summer of 1980

Widely panned on its release, the detonated bomb that was Xanadu had a catastrophic effect on the screen careers of its promising young stars, temporarily decimated the musical legitimacy of its composers, and single-handedly lay waste the roller-disco fad; all in one fell swoop. Yet, like a phoenix rising from the ashes (or a zombie that refuses to die even after you've fired a bullet into its brain), Xanadu has gone on to become a genuine camp/cult classic and is perhaps the most beloved bad film since Valley of the Dolls (which, by the law of averages, really should have been turned into a stage musical by now).

Olivia Newton-John is Kira

Gene Kelly is Danny McGuire

Michael Beck is Sonny Malone

Given the lengths to which the film's participants and Universal Studios have gone to distance themselves from it over the years, many would be surprised to learn that back in 1980, Xanadu was released with the kind of massive advertising blitzkrieg usually only afforded sci-fi & action films. Ostensively poised as the next Grease (a film I absolutely loathed that surprised everybody by becoming the largest grossing film of 1978), Xanadu was almost obnoxiously ubiquitous.  

Not that I'm complaining, mind you.

On the contrary, the glut of TV specials, radio promos, magazine articles, comic books, merchandising tie-ins, and cross-promotions mirrored my own excitement when I learned that my favorite rock group of all time (The Electric Light Orchestra—the preferred band of all the stoners at my high school) would actually be collaborating with Little Miss "Have You Never Been Mellow", Olivia Newton-John (arguably the most white-bread singer on the charts next to Debbie Boone).

This was before the days of pop stars changing their images with each new album release, so the prospect of the new-and-improved, 1979 model ONJ of "Totally Hot" (the terrific album that prompted a music critic to cite: "The tight pants Olivia wore at the end of Grease must have gone to her head") cutting loose in an original movie musical scored by a band known for its deliriously theatrical bombast, had me thinking that Xanadu had the potential to be another cinematic mind-blower like Ken Russell's film of The Who's Tommy. To say I was stoked to see Xanadu is a monumental understatement. I was so excited I practically gave myself a nosebleed.

Starry Eyed
One of the things I liked most about Xanadu was its sweetly optimistic vision of the 80s as a multi-generational, cross-cultural utopia where differences are accepted and originality encouraged. Lady Gaga would be proud.

I saw Xanadu on opening night at Mann's Chinese Theater with an audience that apparently hadn't read the reviews telling them that they weren't supposed to be having a good time. The theater was packed and the air was full of the excitement of attending an event. Every musical number was met with thunderous applause, catcalls and whistles greeted various names during the closing credit crawl, and (probably for the first and last time) only the intentional humor got laughs. 

As for me, I had passed through the looking glass somewhere around the time Gene Kelly, age 67, danced on an oversized pinball machine, displaying a beatific smile and the same effortless grace of that young man who made his screen debut in For Me & My Gal (1942).

I don't know what hit me (perhaps I was kissed by a muse myself), but I left the theater that night a different person from the one I was when I went in.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

It's ironic that the dominant design motif in a movie as unwieldy as Xanadu is the sleekly economic elegance of Streamline Moderne. Real and studio-enhanced examples of Streamline Moderne architecture appear throughout Xanadu, as befitting the film's blending of music and design styles from the 40s and 80s.

Both critics and audiences were at a loss to figure out what Sonny Malone's dream of being a serious artist had to do with the opening of a roller-disco nightclub. The script drops the ball in making this clear, but close inspection of the film reveals that Sonny's artistic dreams come imaginatively true in his designs for Xanadu.

The model of the Hollywood Bowl "Muse" fountain in Sonny's apartment...

...becomes a fountain for real-life muse, Kira, to dance in front of in the realized Xanadu of Sonny's dream

One of Sonny's earlier discarded sketches (top) is realized as a modernist Greek column (behind Beck in the photo above) in his final design for Xanadu.

The Streamline Moderne appliances in Sonny's apartment (top) find whimsical expression in Xanadu's metallic chairs (center) and the oversized waffle-iron stage that Ms. Newton-John is perched on above.

PERFORMANCES
Save for Gene Kelly's, there are no performances to speak of in Xanadu, so I'd rather not waste space by bashing the leads. There are plenty of sites online for that. What I would like to address is the matter of onscreen chemistry (or the lack of it) which provides Xanadu with many of its unintentional laughs and much of its homoerotic subtext. First off, not since Can't Stop the Music has a film worked so strenuously to establish the heterosexuality of its hero.

Perhaps the filmmakers thought Kira's neutered sexuality (until the smoking-hot finale where she sings something like 28 songs in succession) and Sonny's penchant for tight jeans and skimpy shorts, made Xanadu even gayer than it already was (not possible really, but let's go with that); so within the film's first half-hour, we have every third line of dialog reminding us that Sonny is a babe-magnet who's irresistible to women. Friends offer to fix him up, women flirt outrageously, and for the really slow-witted, an annoying co-worker (just the sort who would be the first to be killed off were this a horror film...which it kinda is) just comes out and flatly makes a comment to that fact. Later, when Sonny meets up with a buddy whose van he painted, the friend is given insipid post-dubbed dialogue relating to the sexual allure of mini-van murals --Hey, and the chicks love it!"-- calculated to dispel all viewer suspicion that muscular guys in short shorts roller skating along the Venice boardwalk are anything but skirt-chasing, sexually hyperactive heteros. 

Real Men Roller Skate

What throws a monkey-wrench into all this over-emphatic machismo is the fact that Beck and Newton-John exhibit zero screen chemistry, while Beck's scenes with Gene Kelly fairly crackle with magnetism and unintentional sexual innuendo. While everybody was making sure that every female in the cast was hailing Sonny Malone as some kind of roller-skating Super Fly, someone failed to notice that they gave Gene Kelly too many lines that make him sound like a genial sugar-daddy on the make. As Beck and Kelly develop an across-the-generations friendship, Kelly has one line after another where he's comparing business partnerships to marriage or sex. And wouldn't you know it, Michael Beck and Gene Kelly have an easier, more natural screen rapport than Beck has with his fluorescently glowing love interest.

Sonny and Danny, moments before yet another ill-timed interruption from Kira

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

It's no accident that Xanadu's soundtrack album took on a life independent of the failure of the film. The music by John Farrar and Jeff Lynne is some of the best ever composed for a musical. "All Over The World" is a lasting favorite (it always makes me feel happy inside) and the much-anticipated (by me) teaming of ONJ and ELO on the song "Xanadu" makes for one of the best pop singles to come out of the 80s. The unique musical qualities of each artist seem to bring out the best in both. ELO's soaring, overreaching orchestrations have always cried out for a voice as ethereally sensual as Olivia's, and Lynne manages to get her to shed some of the saccharine from her voice to deliver a solidly virtuoso pop performance. Nobody could maneuver the rhythmical twist and turns of this elaborately arranged piece the way Olivia Newton-John does. I think it's the best vocal performance of her career.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

August 8, 1980, is a date that has more significance for me than the release of a lovably awful musical that nevertheless captured my heart and imagination back when I was a young student filmmaker hoping to break into the movie business.

8/8/80 represents the day I decided I was going to become a dancer.

A revelatory decision made all the more astounding when taking into account that, after studying film for nearly 4 years and being exposed to some of the greatest cinematic works ever created, the motion picture that inspired me to change the course of my life at age 22 was none other than that much-maligned muse of a musical, Xanadu. (This should give hope to producers of flops the world over.)  Maybe it was the music, the choreography, the visual style, or maybe the film's theme about the importance of following your dreams...who knows? It makes me ask myself: is the emotional experience of seeing a "good" film more valid than the emotional experience drawn from seeing a "bad" one, and should it matter so long as they make us feel something? Whatever the reasons, I left the theater that night convinced that there couldn't be a life more blissful or fulfilling than a life spent dancing.

The dancers beckoned, and I said YES!

Briefly summarized, I wound up quitting film school and threw myself into several intense years of dance training. Never looking back, nor regretting the decision, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I have been a professional dancer for over 25 years now and I'm happy to say that it has far exceeded my expectations of what I thought it could bring to my life. I never before believed that dreams could come true like they did in the movies. And like it or not... Xanadu is the film I have to thank for it all. Although I must confess that I wasn't as happy about that fact as I am now. Until about the year 2000, it really wasn't "cool" to say you liked Xanadu. Whenever anyone would ask me about the Xanadu license plates on my car, I would lie and say it was in reference to Citizen Kane. Such disloyalty!

I'm in my 50's now and still dancing. And I only hope that should I be lucky enough to make it to my 67th year, my heart contains even a glimmer of the joy that Gene Kelly's smile radiated in that pinball sequence that still knocks me for a loop after all these years. It's funny.. who'd ever guess that one of the worst films ever made would lead me to my very best life? Worst film ever made? Don't you believe it.

You Have To Believe We Are Magic

*Footnote: To coin the title of another Olivia Newton-John hit, in an odd "Twist of Fate," I was invited to appear and tell my story in the retrospective documentary "Going Back to Xanadu" included as a special feature on the 2008 Xanadu DVD release. Talk about full circle. Me on the DVD of the movie that changed my life, talking about how it changed my life! You can't tell me that a muse didn't have a hand in all this...Magic indeed!

I participated with Don Fields of the Xanadu Preservation Society in the "Xanadu" 40th Anniversary podcast via "Stuck in the '80s."

Xanadu's Impact on My Life

Hollywood Bowl Muse Statues

The Pan Pacific Auditorium

Further Proof of Xanadu's Lasting Impact on My Life

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2013