CACTUS FLOWER 1969

When I think back to that time in the late '60s when Old Hollywood (all overlit studio sets, name stars, and formulaic genres) begrudgingly made way for New Hollywood (auteurism, non-linear storytelling, social relevance), it's easy for me to forget how gradual and awkward a transitional period it was. Film history books can make it seem as though on a Monday, Hollywood was churning out studio-bound product like Harlow and The Glass Bottom Boat, and by Friday, youthquake script-flippers like Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde were before the cameras. Closer to the truth is that the old guard was very slow in passing the torch to the younger generation, and the strain showed in several of the films made during this tricky period of adjustment.   

Mrs. Dickinson admires her metaphor 
"Some flowers blossom late, but they're the kind that lasts the longest"

During what could be called the movie industry's "Last Gasp" phase—a period wedged uneasily between the studio system excesses of the late-'60s and the emergence of the American New Wave of the early-'70s—Hollywood released a glut of wheezily old-fashioned films it attempted to pass off as "with it" and "now" entertainments that sought to capture the sudden cultural preoccupation with youth.

These woefully middle-class, middle-aged, and formulaically sitcom-y films strove to reflect a youthful perspective while effectively having absolutely no idea of what that actually was. 

The result was the token insertion of self-consciously "hip" templates into the usual middle-of-the-road movie formulas. For example, rock music (which, to the septuagenarian ears running the studios, meant muzak-type stabs at the contemporary sound by veterans like John Williams and Henry Mancini); language and nudity unthinkable during the Hays Code years; aggressively contemporary (and instantly dating) mod costuming and art direction; and the inclusion of at least one cast member under the age of 40.

The Cactus Flower in Bloom

In an effort to stay relevant or simply to stay fed, several stars of Hollywood's Golden Age willingly (if unwittingly) allowed themselves to be depicted as Generation Gap gargoyles in vehicles both ill-suited for and exploitative of their talents. In 1969, both Lana Turner and Jennifer Jones tarnished their images in the youth market mistakes The Big Cube and the has-to-be-seen-to-be-believed Angel, Angel, Down We Go, respectively. The following year, glamour girl Rita Hayworth appeared in a low-budget oddity titled The Naked Zoo, while screen legend Mae West made headlines in the more high-profile (but no less demoralizing) Myra Breckinridge. 

Hollywood's leading men were far from immune to the same screen humiliations, but by and large, the double standard allowing for aging men to still appear as viable romantic leads opposite their much younger co-stars (Cactus Flower, anyone?) served as a considerable, sexist, buffer. 

The creep-out factor of the whopping 25-year age difference between Matthau and Hawn
 is mitigated considerably by Matthau exuding a charm more avuncular than sexual and Hawn exuding the waifish appeal of a mod Betty Boop

What distinguished these late-to-the-party stabs at contemporary relevance was their dogged prioritization of the older perspective. No matter how contemporary the themes were, the worldview presented was middle-aged, the youth angle was mere window-dressing. 

When films took the generational divide seriously, movies like The Arrangement and The Happy Ending were the result. In these films, young people were used as plot devices initiating or solving the mid-life identity crises of the older lead character. When the approach was comedic, the dominant perspective was of the older generation reacting in smarmy, voyeuristic, and smirking ways about the New Permissiveness (a la Prudence and the Pill and The Impossible Years). 

One of the better films to emerge from this cross-generational limbo is 1969s Cactus Flower. And while its perspective is no less mired in the middle-class and the middle-aged (playwright Abe Burrows was 55 when he adapted the 1964 French farce Fleur de Cactus [by Jean-Pierre Grady & Pierre Barillet] for the Broadway stage in 1965), Cactus Flower has a sprightly charm that begs forgiveness for its glaring contrivance.

Due to the popularity of TV's Laugh-In, Goldie Hawn's participation dominated Cactus Flower's publicity campaign and stole some of the thunder of scandal-exiled Ingrid Bergman's return to Hollywood studio cameras after a 20-year absence.  

Indeed, it can be said that Cactus Flower's theatrical roots (heh-heh) are on full display in the artificiality of its simple plot (one would be forgiven for assuming it the work of Neil Simon), and that it at times comes across like an extended Love, American Style episode (whose brightly-lit sitcom look it shares). But thanks to snappy pacing and an appealing cast, it avoids the fate that later befell its similar, gender-switch twin, the labored and tepid 40 Carats (1973). Bergman, Matthau, and Hawn stepping into roles originated onstage by Lauren Bacall (stage debut), Barry Nelson, and Brenda Vaccaro are a shining example of how charismatic and resourceful actors can turn run-of-the-mill dross into comedy gold.

Walter Matthau as Julian Winston

Ingris Bergman as Stephanie Dickinson

Goldie Hawn as Toni Simmons

Jack Weston as Harvey Greenfield

Rick Lenz as Igor Sullivan

Confirmed middle-aged bachelor Julian Winston (Matthau) has managed to keep matrimonial designs out of the head of his much younger girlfriend, Toni (Hawn), by pretending to be the married father of three. When Toni's attempt at suicide (always a rousing way to get a romantic comedy off of the ground) prompts the Park Avenue dentist to propose, Winson asks his devoted nurse Mrs. Dickinson (Bergman) to pose as his wife in order to reassure Toni that she is not a homewrecker, and that the couple's impending divorce is both amicable and mutually desired.

Of course, this being a farce, nothing goes as planned, and all manner of Neil Simon-esque comic complications arise before the not-unexpected, age-appropriate, happy ending fade-out.

For all its attempts to appear current (discotheques, hippies, a "hip" soundtrack of pop tunes arranged by Quincy Jones), Cactus Flower can't disguise its origins in the "tired businessman" era of theater when breezily escapist musicals and plays were concocted for the benefit of NYC businessmen seeking to avoid the rush hour crunch of the trains to the suburbs. 

Dating back as far as 1952's The Seven Year Itch, these shows offered mindless laughs and tame titillation by way of middle-aged wish-fulfillment fantasies envisioning a world populated by bland professional men on the prowl pursued by bevies of beautiful young women who live only to be wed. That marriage is presented as the end-all and be-all symbol of happy-ending bliss has always struck me as positively perverse, given how prominently lying, deception, and serial adultery figure into the courtship rituals of the characters in these so-called sexually sophisticated comedies.

Eve Bruce as Georgia

Everything is fair game for comedy, but as a kid, I always thought romantic comedies from the repressed, sex-equals-sexist '60s were a strange breed. Movies like Under the Yum Yum Tree, The Marriage-Go-Round, Boeing, Boeing, The Guide for the Married Man, and Any Wednesday all gave the sophomoric impression of being sex-obsessed, yet unable to find humor in the topic unless it was the smirking, giggling behind the hand, innuendo-laden type.

These comedies perpetuated an image of romantic courtship as an intricacy of calculated lies and tricks couples played on one another in an effort to avoid and/or hasten a walk down the aisle. If it was a domestic comedy, then the state of matrimony is depicted as a life sentence arrangement wherein the "domesticated" male can't wait to stray, and the clinging female is depicted as an emasculating killjoy.

Vito Scotti as Arturo Sanchez

Cactus Flower is cut from much the same cloth, so I'm surprised as anyone that I like it so much (if you stop to think about the plot for too long, Julian comes off as a cruelly manipulative and selfish character undeserving of either of the ladies vying for him). Betraying its origins in French farce, Cactus Flower has so many characters having affairs out of wedlock, much of it comes off like a pro-adultery infomercial or something. 

Nevertheless, the film wins me over. Maybe it has something to do with the humor (appealingly corny, old-fashioned, and leaning into on-liner delivery patterns) and the "harmless" characters who don't quite come off as human (nothing ever seems as offensive or offputting as it could because droopy Mattahau reminds me of Yogi Bear, and wide-eyed Hawn looks like Tweetie Bird). What I do know is that I find Cactus Flower to be amiable, sweet-natured, laugh-out-loud funny, and an absolute delight… almost in spite of itself.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Say what you want about old Hollywood, but when it was at the top of its game, no one was better at turning out this type of frothy, intricate farce. Cactus Flower has the undistinguished yet delectable visual gloss of a Doris Day movie; a sardonically funny screenplay by Some Like it Hot's I. A. L. Diamond (adapted from Abe Burrows' play); snappy, keep-the-action-moving direction by Gene Saks; and, most advantageously, a cast of newcomers and veterans who skillfully know their way around a punchline.

Julian introduces Toni to his fake wife and her fake lover

The premise of Cactus Flower is silly in the extreme, but it's unlikely anyone could devise a narrative journey I wouldn't want to be taken on by Goldie Hawn, Walter Matthau, Jack Weston, and Ingrid Bergman. I don't know if it's as obvious on a single viewing, but these four are champs. Weston nails every one of his comic lines, frequently making just his silent reactions hilarious. Hawn is vulnerable in the dramatic scenes (which she steals) and appealing in the comic. Bergman is great with a sardonic line and proves a wonderful foil for Matthau's slouchy charm.  

And Matthau...I don't know that I would like this film as much without him. As I've stated, I think the Julian character is written rather creepily, but thanks to Matthau's likeability and endlessly flexible face (and that magic brow of his), the actor triumphs over the material.

Many directors swear by the art of casting, claiming that the right cast can salvage a weak screenplay. The screenplay for Cactus Flower isn't exactly weak (familiar, perhaps), but the cast is so first-rate that it elevates the material to heights it doesn't always rightfully earn.

My partner posed the provocative notion that back when Hawn was in her 50s, it would have been gimmicky fun to see her in a remake (rethink?) of Cactus Flower with her in the Mattahu role and some upcoming male comedic actor in his 20s take her role. With the switch of one letter, he could even retain her character's name: Tony.   

Trade magazine ad congratulating Goldie Hawn for
her Best Supporting Actress Oscar win

PERFORMANCES

As Goldie Hawn's nomination and win for Cactus Flower is the only Oscar recognition the film received, it's a fact worth mentioning, but as an indication of merit... I'm not so sure. 

Hawn is absolutely wonderful in the role, but in contemplating her win over Susannah York in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Dyan Cannon in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, and Catherine Burns in Last Summer, it helps to keep things in perspective. We're talking the Academy Awards here: an organization whose voters can't help factoring in sentiment, likability, inoffensiveness, publicity, and popularity before it gets around to evaluating performance mertit. 

Hawn was the blonde "It" girl of the moment, and I think the public's affection for the bubble-head she portrayed on TV's outrageously popular Laugh-In factored heavily in her win. And apparently, the voting bloc of the Golden Globes felt the same, for Hawn also took that award home. I don't mean to sell Hawn short, for in this, her first major film role (in 1968, she appeared in Disney's creaky musical, The One and Only Genuine Original Family Band ), Hawn radiates genuine star quality and holds her own against veterans Matthau and Bergman in a way that must have been downright astounding to Laugh-In fans. 

With her enormous eyes and Betty Boop voice, it is difficult not to watch Hawn every second. She's so excitingly kinetic a presence she single-handedly blows the cobwebs off of Cactus Flower's sometimes stale bedroom humor. She does a marvelous job with a deceptively difficult role. She has to make Toni sweet and waiflike enough to care about, but strong and resilient enough so that Julian doesn't come off as a total selfish jerk.

Ingrid Bergman is not known for her comedy chops, but she and Matthaur have excellent comic chemistry. I'd read that Dick Van Dyke was one of Cactus Flower's early casting considerations, and while I don't know if Lauren Bacall was ever asked to recreate her stage performance onscreen, Lee Grant was briefly in the running to be cast as the late-blooming leading lady. 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Goldie Hawn's character is a clerk in a Greenwich Village record store. The scenes set amongst the shelves of albums (featuring artists like Lou Rawls, The Beatles, Buck Owens, and Petula Clark), 8-track tapes, and walls of psychedelic blacklight posters feel as distant and of another time as any episode of Downton Abbey. They make me feel nostalgic...and old. 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Because there's so little about Cactus Flower that reflects the year it was made, it plays better now than it did in 1969. In the year of Woodstock, the Stonewall Riots, Charles Manson, and the Vietnam War, America could certainly use a few laughs, but Cactus Flower's mid-life comedy must have seemed a tad out of touch. 

Today, it's a film that fits snugly into the vague, pop-culture mashup that is the entire decade of the 1960s (on a double-bill, Cactus Flower would not look out-of-date opposite a Doris Day movie like 1963's Move Over, Darling), and feels charmingly corny and just a tiny bit camp (what with references to "love beads" and those lounging hippies outside of Stereo Heaven). But the dialogue makes me laugh, the performances are great fun to watch, and if I don't dwell too long on the whole lying-your-way-to-love subtext, I have a wonderful time watching it. 

This is the rom-com done right.

Clip from "Cactus Flower" (1969)

THE AUTOGRAPH FILES

"Ken, see how old and mean you get if you hang around long enough."

The autographed photo is from 1995, when I worked as Matthau's personal trainer (a situation that amused the legendary sloucher no end). I liked him a great deal and found him to be every bit as funny (he told the best dirty jokes!) and sweet as he appears on screen. With all the great anecdotes he shared about working in Hollywood, I'm the one who should have been paying for our sessions. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2025

CAN'T STOP THE MUSIC 1980

For this essay ushering out the month of October and welcoming in November, I present for your edification, a movie that qualifies as both a Halloween horror and an overstuffed Thanksgiving turkey. Said turkey being Allan Carr’s notorious Can’t Stop the Music, a longtime guilty-pleasure favorite that, unlike most camp films in my “favorites” canon, grows increasingly less fun to watch as time goes by. 

A highly fictionalized account (and I stress fictionalized) of the creation of the gay-themed disco singing group Village People, Can’t Stop the Music, released in the summer of 1980, hit theaters at the worst possible time and under the worst possible circumstances. If Xanadu—that other 1980 summer musical release that tanked at the boxoffice—suffered from too much '80s faddism by way of roller skates, spandex, and leg warmers, Can’t Stop the Music looked and sounded exactly like a disco relic that had been gathering dust on the shelf since 1978.

A 1979 Trade ad from Boxoffice Magazine with the film's original title.
Note the dodged-a-bullet cast members, Chita Rivera and Pat Ast.
Presumably in the Altovise Davis and Marilyn Sokol roles

So significantly had the music and cultural landscape shifted from the time of its August 1979 production start date to its June 1980 release, Can’t Stop the Music opened at theaters as a literal, antiquated period piece. Thankfully, someone saw the writing on the wall early enough to jettison the film’s original title: Discoland: Where the Music Never Ends, but not early enough to tone down its already anachronistic glitter & amyl nitrate fueled “shake your booty!” overzealousness.

Valerie Perrine as Samantha Simpson

Steve Guttenberg as Jack Morell

Village People as the closeted version of the Village People

Caitlyn Jenner as Ron White

Tammy Grimes as Sydne Channing (are they kidding with that name?)

Bad timing also reared its head in that the release of Can’t Stop the Music—a self-professed family musical with a closeted, “don’t ask, don’t tell” gay sensibility—coincided with an emerging cultural conservatism (aka, The Reagan Era) that was anti-gay, anti-sex, and anti-drugs  (the naive "Just Say No!" campaign started in the '80s). Can't Stop the Music came out, so to speak, during the early days of the AIDS epidemic. The attendant groundswell of public anxiety at the time prudishly and homophobically associated it with the '70s sexual revolution and the drugs & sex lifestyle that disco culture glamorized and marketed.

It also hit theaters in the wake of the earlier release of two controversial 1980 films with gay themes: Gordon Willis' Windows, about a homicidal lesbian; and William Friedkin's Cruising, a movie about a gay serial killer. Given the paucity of positive portrayals of gays in films, activist groups were wise to protest two films released within months of each other depicting homosexuals as homicidal maniacs. The heterosexual filmmakers behind these epics took a wide-eyed "Who me?" position, playing ignorant to observations that such a concentrated association of Gay=Death could only feed into the rising tide of homophobia and anti-gay violence across the country. 
Into this atmosphere of what appeared to be media-sanctioned homophobia came Can't Stop the Music, a gay film that came across as being duplicitously coy about that very fact.

Reflecting perhaps the tastes of the film's casting couch...er, agent, the eye-candy supporting cast of himbos, twinks, and Muscle Marys is predominantly white. Which is pretty much in keeping with the way the gay community tended to depict itself in the '80s.

Had Can’t Stop the Music been made with even a shred of the strength of its flimsy convictions, I’m sure its leering “cocaine and Crisco” homogenized ode to homosexual hedonism would have come under attack as well. But at least then the film's "out and proud" dialogue: "I don't judge people. I accept them"  - and anthems like Liberation would have made a little sense.
But as it stood, Can't Stop the Music failed to take any kind of stand whatsoever, for producer Allan Carr knew that much more money could be made from within the closet than outside of it.

Good, Clean, Wholesome, Hetero Fun!

With scenes like the above in a PG-rated "family" musical, Alan Carr relied on coding to attract "knowing" gay audiences, while simultaneously banking on mainstream viewers remaining reliably clueless of the film's so-obvious-even-a-blind-man-can-see-it gay subtext. And why not? Keeping it in the closet for capitalism certainly worked for the Village People themselves. In the 2012 documentary The Secret Disco Revolution members of the group contributed such eye-rolling statements as: "Our songs were never gay, we were just a party band!" and the absolutely mental "There was not one double-entendre in our music. 'In the Navy' was just about enlisting." Right...and Dinah Washington's "Long John Blues" is just about dental hygiene.

At a time when it really would have made a powerful statement to have an unashamedly out, “We’re here, we’re queer” mainstream movie in the theaters (along the lines of The Ritz or The Rocky Horror Picture Show), Allan Carr, one of the most high-profile and powerful gay men in Hollywood (especially after Grease), instead gave the world a movie so self-negating, so deeply in the closet and in denial about itself, Liberace could have been its technical advisor.

We know, James...we know

Although it didn't hit me as strongly in 1980 as it does now, Can’t Stop the Music, to an almost contemptible degree, suffers from a distasteful undercurrent of homophobic self-loathing and ideological selling-out. In an effort to keep its many corporate sponsors happy (Dr. Pepper, Baskin-Robbins, Famous Amos Cookies, American Dairy Association) and to court the mainstream boxoffice that made Grease into such a mega-hit, Can’t Stop the Music systematically and schizophrenically undercuts every bit of the film’s laid-on-with-a-trowel gay subtext with an unpersuasive overlay of bland heterosexuality. Honestly, in spite of Can’t Stop the Music being about a gay-themed singing group formed in New York’s Greenwich Village featuring numerous coy allusions (acres of male flesh on display, a multitude of homoerotic double and triple entendres) - I don’t think the word “gay” is uttered even once in the whole film.

Olympic Gold Medalist Caitlyn Jenner, making her film debut, here achieves the
impossible by actually managing to look sillier than the Village People

To paraphrase one of my favorite Judge Judy-isms, Can’t Stop the Music is a movie that doesn't know whether it’s afoot or horseback. It courts gay dollars with its setting, its music, its "Auntie Mame syndrome" supporting cast of flamboyant elderly actresses, and its virtual non-stop parade of beefcake. Yet it doesn't want the polarizing effect (at the box-office) of actually being what it is...a big-budget, big ol' gay musical. Instead, it operates in a sex-neutral (Guttenberg’s character swears off sex until he becomes a success…how convenient), heterosexual-insistent (just WHO are those nondescript, lost-looking women clinging to the Village People during the “Magic Night” number?) limbo that makes no sense. As I mentioned earlier, at one point in the film, the Village People sing a song titled “Liberation,” but in the "Ain't nobody here but us straights!" context of the movie, what the hell kind of liberation are these guys even singing about?

Male starlet Victor Davis strikes a pose to show Guttenberg & Jenner
just how "not gay" Can't Stop the Music is.

In trying to be the all-things-to-all-people crowd-pleaser its sizable budget demanded, Can’t Stop the Music wound up not being much of anything to anybody.

Seventies bisexual porn "star" George Payne jogs by (twice!) in the
excruciating Guttenberg-on-roller-skates opening sequence

A must-read for behind-the-scenes details on the making of this rainbow-colored fiasco is Robert Hofler's 2010 Allan Carr biography Party Animals. Wherein we learn that Carr's desire to bring back the glamour of old Hollywood extended to reviving the casting couch. In an attempt to put a male spin on the old MGM "Goldwyn Girls" tradition of featuring beautiful girls as extras and bit players throughout the film, Allan Carr made ample use of a coterie of male dancers, models, hustlers, starlets, and party boys ("Cash or career?" was purportedly Carr's standard come on when meeting a handsome young man). We also learn that director Nancy Walker and Valerie Perrine hated one another, that sizable chunks of the film were actually directed by choreographer Arlene Phillips and cinematographer Bill Butler (Grease, Jaws), and that Allan Carr harbored a near-Hitchcockian obsession with his heterosexual protegee, Steve Guttenberg. 

I took this picture in the summer of 1980, not long after this billboard for Can't Stop the Music was unveiled on Hollywood's Sunset Strip during a red carpet ceremony on what LA's mayor declared to be "Can't Stop the Music Day." The Village People were granted the key to the city (or maybe it was to a bathhouse, I'm not exactly sure)

That summer, my excitement regarding the forthcoming release of Xanadu so eclipsed all else, I tend to forget that 1980 was something of a banner year for musicals. There was Alan Parker’s Fame and Saturday Night Live alums Belushi & Aykroyd brought their characters The Blues Brothers to the screen. The heavily-hyped Can’t Stop the Music wasn’t very high on my list of must-see summer films mostly due to my general antipathy towards Grease (I know it’s considered a classic and all, but I just find it clunky) and my lack of fondness for the Village People (their anthem-like songs always sounded like Romper Room marching music to me, and, having grown up in San Francisco, their costumes suggested nothing more daring than your average ride on the Market St. F streetcar).
However, being the devoted disco maven I was (and remain), just the idea of a multi-million-dollar disco musical was too tantalizing a prospect to dismiss. Which brings me to the reason I was most excited to see Can’t Stop the Music: choreographer Arlene Phillips.

Arlene Phillips (Annie, The Fan) first came to my attention through her work in a series of fantastic TV commercials for Dr. Pepper. The top photos are from the 1975 Sugar-Free Dr. Pepper commercial, "Penthouse" (see storyboard here), which bears a strong resemblance to Can't Stop the Music's "Milkshake" number. Even down to sharing the same set designer, Stephen Hendrickson.

Gay, straight, or bi, the one thing we DO know about Jack is that he's a Pepper!
CSTM came under fire for its comically blatant product placement

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

While my enjoyment of Can’t Stop the Music’s non-musical sequences has diminished significantly over the years, my affection for Arlene Phillips’ deliciously awful/wonderful musical numbers has increased, tenfold. I absolutely love them. Her cheesy “Las Vegas showroom by way of aerobics class” choreography fairly oozes with late-'70s sleaze, and her “What WAS she thinking?” staging has the staggering, jaw-dropping lunacy of Busby Berkeley at his most ingeniously demented. That these musical numbers are also monumentally tacky, done with a great deal of wit, and, like the film itself, possess an almost surreal lack of self-awareness, only adds to their appeal.  Each time I have a chance to revisit the industrial glitter factory of “I Love You to Death” or that wholesomely raunchy paean to homoerotic health & fitness “YMCA,” my heart soars and a smile comes to my face. 

Given how so many of Arlene Phillips' dance tableaus resemble photoshoots from Eyes of Laura Mars, it comes as little surprise that the late Thenoni V. Aldredge, the designer of all those slit-skirt ensembles for Faye Dunaway, also contributed costume designs (with Jane Greenwood) to the musical numbers in Can't Stop the Music.

Seriously, if it sounds as though I'm putting these dance sequences down, nothing could be further from the truth. They're a delight and a lot of fun. Most of them appeal distinctly to all my aesthetics, which more than one person has assured me run to the cheesy and grandiose. They're, clever, cinematic, over-the-top, and for me, more than worth the price of admission on their own.

PERFORMANCES

Where to begin? What can be said about performances in a film where the amateurism of the neophytes and professionals is evenly matched? I like Valerie Perrine a great deal and she seems like an awfully sweet woman, but her (and there’s no other word for it) fag-hag role here requires a personality, not an actress. Ms. Perrine splits the difference by being neither. She comes across as the genial housemother for a gay fraternity.

No, that's not Tim Curry's Dr. Frank-N-Furter from The Rocky Horror Picture Show making a cameo appearance. That's actress Marilyn Sokol attempting to channel Bette Midler's bawdy Divine Miss M "Bathhouse Betty" persona. To grating effect.

And then there's Steve Guttenberg. Prior to this, I'd always considered Todd Susman's underground newspaper journalist in 1971s Star Spangled Girl to be the most annoying performance committed to film. Guttenberg wins by a landslide.

Striving for boyish exuberance, he gives a performance of such overarching hyperactivity that a mere absence of restraint can't be the only answer (it's like he's on crack). He's a character who never speaks when he can shout, and is perpetually in motion. With eyes popping, cords in his neck bulging, forming his words as if to make himself understood by lip-readers on Mars...Guttenberg constantly appears on the brink of popping a blood vessel.

This film has the oddest grab-bag of celebrity cameos. Jack Weston, recruited perhaps for his gay-cred as the star of the gay bathhouse farce The Ritz pops up as disco proprietor Benny Murray

There being so many of them, the Village People have little time (and even less ability) to establish themselves with any personal individuality. Thus their costumes are left to do all the acting., often coming off as visiting tourists in their own movie. 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

I've seen Can't Stop the Music so often that when I watch it these days, it's usually with my remote close at hand, finger poised over the FFWD button, moving swiftly from one delightfully garish musical number to the next. They are totally awful, but I swear, I love them to pieces.

YMCA
Taking four days to shoot and featuring 250 dancers, athletes, and sundry bleached-blond hunklets, the full-tilt camp YMCA song - a salute to the gymnasium number in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes - is said to have been Allan Carr's most hands-on sequence. Which I don't doubt for a minute. There allegedly exists an R-rated cut of the shower scene, commissioned by Carr for his private collection.

I Love You to Death
This number most resembles Arlene Phillips' work with her dance troupe Hot Gossip. A staple of the '70s UK TV program The Kenny Everett Show, you can see a slew of Hot Gossip videos here on YouTube.

Her Milkshake Brings All The Boys To the Yard
The Busby Berkely-esque "Milkshake" number really does a body good. Choreographed for the camera in a series of rhythmic cutaways, close-ups, and inserts, it's pure movie musical bliss. The most fun 3 1/2 minutes of the entire film. 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Can’t Stop the Music is kind of a strange movie to include in a collection of films I love, because, in many ways, I find the film to be rather cowardly and reprehensible. Part of me wants to simply enjoy the movie on a Showgirls level…just escapist, mindless, campy fun. But as a gay man, I find myself unable to get past the fact that Can’t Stop the Music is (to me) such a colossal sellout. A bunch of wealthy gay men make a movie full of gay people, gay references, and gay music. But because there are dollars to be made and hetero sensibilities to be appeased, the film spends all its time trying to avoid making an assertive declaration of what is hidden in plain sight. What could have been a mainstream celebration of the Queer influence and contribution to the arts ends up just another pop culture misfire.

Paul Sand, the David Schwimmer of the '70s, as record exec Steve Waits

I watch this movie, and sometimes all I can see is, at worst, gay self-loathing. At best, the kind of fence-straddling, middle-market project that remains willfully clueless of the far-reaching cultural ramifications of perpetuating gay "invisibility" under the guise of a broader audience appeal.

And as an ostensibly “family-oriented” entertainment that thinks it’s being racy by slipping in coy and winking gay references at every opportunity, Can’t Stop the Music is a homophobe’s dream (nightmare) of the subversive cult of a “gay agenda” being secretly foisted upon unsuspecting straights. Look!...a red bandana! Look!...naked men playing innocent grab-ass in the shower! Listen!...subtle-as-a-sledgehammer triple-entendres like, “Anybody who can swallow two Sno-Balls and a Ding Dong shouldn't have any trouble with pride.”    Kill me now.

Joining Jenner and Perrine in this shot are Broadway star Tammy Grimes and actress-dancer (and Mrs. Sammy Davis, Jr.) Altovise Davis. Grimes sang a song in the musical 45 Minutes from Broadway called "So Long, Mary" which, when you stop to think of it, would have been a great subtitle for this movie.

All gripes aside, I still rate Can’t Stop the Music among my enduring favorite musicals because, as I look over my career as a dancer, Arlene Phillips ranks among the choreographers who were the most influential and inspiring to me. A list headed by Bob Fosse, Michael Bennett, and David Winters (growing up, I was a big fan of the teen variety show Hullabaloo).

Can't Stop the Music is so problematic it's difficult to imagine it would have been much of a hit even at the height of the disco craze. But there exists the possibility that it could have grown into an affectionately-remembered cult hit had it at least acknowledged the community that Village People grew out of (and initially intended to celebrate).

In the terrific Christopher Guest Hollywood satire For Your Consideration..., there's is a scene in which the makers of the film "Home for Purim" - a movie about the distinctly Jewish holiday, are told to "Tone down the Jewishness" in order to appeal to a broader market. Clearly poking fun at Hollywood's legendary lack of backbone, I laugh, but how satiric is it, really? One can easily imagine a similar gay-centric scene being played out in production meetings for Can't Stop the Music. This perspective severely undercuts my ability to wholly abandon myself to the film's campy sense of fun. And as it now stands, Can't Stop the Music has become for me a little like one of those tasteless jokes you initially laugh at, only to regret it later.


Can't Stop the Music Addendum:
11/11/13  Yay! After posting this essay critiquing Can't Stop the Music on its closeted, mainstream agenda and total lack of a single (acknowledged) gay person in the film, my eagle-eyed sweetheart spotted what may be the film's sole gay couple!

Although their presence is used as a kind of "We're not in Kansas anymore" sight-gag for Caitlyn Jenner's straight-laced character to react to as she walks the streets of Greenwich Village, there is nevertheless a prominently featured gay couple shown with their arms across each other's shoulders in a PG movie. I love it! 

Clip from "Can't Stop the Music" (1980)

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2013