CATS 2019

T.S. Eliot: “The great thing about cats is that they possess two qualities
to an extreme degree—dignity and comicality.”

Director Tom Hooper: "Hold my beer."

Cats was the first Broadway musical I ever saw. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s insanely popular Jellicles-in-a-Junkyard musical was crafted from T.S. Eliot’s 1939 collection of pussy-centric poems: Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, and premiered in London’s West End in 1981. It opened on Broadway 17 months later in October of 1982. The Hamilton of its day, tickets for Cats were extremely hard to come by, but I managed to get one for the matinee performance on the afternoon of January 26, 1983, during what was my very first visit to New York. It was a long-saved-for, whirlwind dancer’s holiday of taking classes (given by Anne Reinking!), seeing shows (Little Shop of Horrors, Extremities, Agnes of God, and ill-fated Doug Henning musical Merlin), and being utterly thrilled that the city still looked the way it did in All That Jazz (1979), Fame (1980), and The Fan (1981). 

The Man Who Loved Cat-Dancing
25-year-old me in the throes of serious Cat-mania

I’d been studying dance for a little over two years at this point, ever since Xanadu’s muse-kiss inspired me to drop out of film school and take up classes at L.A.’s Dupree Dance Academy. The earliest time I remember hearing about Cats was when the studio’s owner, having just returned from seeing the London production, enthusiastically spread the word around the studio that Cats was the ultimate dancer’s musical. Declaring it less a voice or acting show and more a two-hour-and-20-minute dance concert, he proclaimed it a must-see experience for anyone seriously studying dance. To my ears, his speech stopped just short of making it mandatory for students interested in staying on at the Academy to make the pilgrimage to New York to see it when it finally opened. 

By description, Cats’ plotless structure sounded a lot to me like a "kitties on a picket fence" version of A Chorus Line: characters introduce themselves to the audience in song; compete against one another towards the attainment of a prized goal; the show concluding with the character who has fallen furthest from grace being given an 11th-hour shot at redemption.

But unlike A Chorus Line’s minimalist stage production, Cats promised uncommon spectacle and an immersive experience born of a $2-million near-gutting of Broadway’s Winter Garden Theater to create an oversized junkyard that spilled from the proscenium-free stage and overtook every square foot of auditorium space up to the balcony.

Cathouse Wednesday
Taken just before attending the 2pm Matinee performance of Cats

Thinking back to seeing Cats on Broadway—then just four months into what would become a record-breaking 18-year-run at the same theater—it’s nearly impossible to separate my thoughts on the show itself from the collective memories of my first visit to New York. But, putting as objective and impartial a face on it as I can, I have to say…Cats was fan-fucking-tastic!

An astounding, never-seen-anything-like-it, sung-through dance concert of captivating beauty and playful, witty charm. (The troweled-on Heaviside layer of mysticism and absurdly misguided self-seriousness was something Cats only acquired later in its legacy run. A byproduct of winning seven Tony Awards and evolving into a “Now & Forever” merchandising industry.)

Between the show’s soaring orchestrations and that breathtaking oversized set, I must have spent the entire evening with my mouth agape and my eyes as big as New York bagels. Goosebump sensations attended every then-unanticipated twist and turn of theatrical magic; my orchestra aisle seat even affording the once-in-a-lifetime experience of nearly being smacked in the face by the Jellicle balls of a frolicsome feline as he climbed over my chair.

Cats came along at a time when--thanks to MTV, aerobics, and TV shows like Fame and Solid Gold, dance was making a post-disco, pop-culture comeback. One of the reasons Cats didn't look nearly as bizarre to me in 1983 as it so clearly was, is because the design of the 'cats' in the show captured the emerging look of '80s concert rock. Enormous, mane-like hairdos, spandex, legwarmers, exaggerated makeup; all were staples of music acts of the day. Indeed, Cats was often criticized for being little more than a stage-bound MTV music video.

My effusive enthusiasm for Cats survived the ‘80s, but began to wane in the new decade, a victim of over immersion (I played my London & Broadway cast Cats albums to death); oversaturation (“Memory” overload…you couldn’t escape that song); and diminished novelty (Thundercats, Zoobilee Zoo, and kids face-painting parties really helped drive that whole anthropomorphic cat thing into the ground). By the time a neutered version of Cats was preserved on video in 1998, I just couldn’t bear to look at another dancer in mime-mode, cupping their hands into paws and whimsically brushing at their invisible whiskers.

Jump ahead to Christmas, 2019. All of Los Angles is covered, from bus shelter to highrise, with signs and billboards heralding the release of “The Most Joyous Event of the Holiday” and “The must-see film event of the year” – a $100 million, all-star, big-screen version of Cats. Had the time finally arrived where I was ready to give Cats another try in a different medium? Could an obscenely expensive movie version restore me, like a male Grizabella, to the Cats-fancier I once was?

Dame Judi Dench as Old Deuteronomy

Idris Elba as Macavity the Mystery Cat

Taylor Swift as Bombalurina

Sir Ian McKellen as Gus the Theater Cat

"CATS - 2019"  or  "Jellicle rhymes with Hellicle"

On stage, Cats didn’t really require a plot. It was essentially a cat-sized British Music Hall variety revue featuring a tribe of felines deigning to grant us humans a song-and-dance tour of their secret, nocturnal world. In fact, I’m convinced that a large part of Cats’ phenomenal success is owed to it being one of those shows that can be enjoyed with little or no attention paid to what is happening. All spectacle, song, and movement, folks the world over were able to bring their parents and grandparents to Cats, let them doze off occasionally, and no one had to worry about that pesky business of losing the narrative thread. It may have challenged your sense of reason, but at no time did Cats place any demands on your concentration.

Cats' plot-free structure recalls that other story-free musical about a tribe (of hippies), the 1968 Broadway phenomenon HAIR; so much so that Webber's show could easily have been subtitled HAIR-ball.  (OK, I’m sorry about that.)

But I bring it up because the1978 film adaptation of Hair solved its plotless problem by inventing a naïve outsider character to serve as the audience surrogate (John Savage), and have him fall in with a tribe of New York hippies whose lives we learn about through song. Cats: The Movie borrows the same device. 

Set in London in the 1930s, Cats: The Movie (which I'll be calling it hereon out) has an abandoned housecat named Victoria taken in by a tribe of alley cats calling themselves Jellicles. She arrives on a special night, the night of the Jellicle Ball. An event in which cats dance and compete (in the vaguest ways imaginable) for a chance to ascend to the Heaviside Layer where they’ll be reborn into a new life (we never really find out what the Heaviside Layer is, but I'll lay bets it's something like the "Carousel" in Logan’s Run).

Francesca Hayward as Victoria
Her role as the tribe newbie in Cats serves the same 'stranger in a strange land' narrative purpose
as John Savage's transplanted Oklahoman Claude Hooper Bukowski in the film version of HAIR

Milos Forman was successful in adapting the film version of Hair in a manner both cinematic and true to the spirit of a show many had thought too dated for contemporary relevance. Alas, in bringing Cats to the screen, director Tom Hooper (Les Misérables) stumbles right out of the gate. I’m not aware of how many viable options exist for bringing Cats to the big screen (cartoon animation, stop-motion), but surely at the bottom of such a brief list had to be the idea of making it look like a musical version of The Island of Dr. Moreau crossed with the world’s most expensive PornHub “furries” video.

Some ideas present audiences with such a hefty obstacle to overcome—like saddling The Wiz (1978) with a 33-year-old Dorothy, or casting Mame (1974) with a leading lady who can neither sing nor dance—that no matter how successful other aspects of a production may be, the film never recovers. Such is the case with the decision to make Cats: The Movie with live actors transformed by the “magic” of DFT: digital fur technology.

Robert Fairchild as Munkustrap

Laurie Davidson as Magical Mr. Mistoffeles

I'm not sure anything could prepare me for the kind of keenly-detailed, hyper-realistic anthropomorphic abominations dreamed up by the digital mad scientists behind Cats: The Movie-- furred creatures with too-tiny heads (a result of having their ears moved to the top of their skulls), human hands and feet, and cat faces with lips and human teeth. But this weird conceit might have worked had the film confined its perspective solely to the cats and their cat world and never showed us a human being. Of course, the very first thing Cats: The Movie does IS show us the hands, legs, and feet of a human being (the woman seen tossing the sack-bound Victoria into the junk heap) leaving us to thereafter ponder a world in which cats and their owners share the very same physical characteristics. The mind blows a fuse.
The appearance of the cats is so disturbing, I don't think I heard a single word of the film's first number "Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats"; my mind was turning somersaults trying to make sense of all that was being thrown at me. It was like watching the ending of Hereditary while listening to Andrew Lloyd Webber music on headphones.

A fantasy full of hellscape imagery, Cats: The Movie is one of the ugliest films I've ever seen.
And I've seen a naked, tattooed Rod Steiger in The Illustrated Man

Despite my history with Cats, I didn’t come to the film as some kind of purist hoping for a to-the-letter replication of the stage production. Indeed, after having seen the trailer, my expectations for Cats: The Movie were exceedingly low. But I reasoned that surely, given  ALL that money spent and ALL that high-caliber talent assembled, at the very least I would come away with a memory of the music (which I’ve always liked), the dancing (which is plentiful in the film, when the merry-go-round on crack camerawork and ADD editing allow you to actually see it), and a “goosebump moment” or two. 

Well, despite my best efforts to suspend disbelief and allow myself to surrender to Tom Hooper’s vision; two significant elements sabotaged me at every turn: 1) the grossly unappealing, hard-to-look-at digital design of the cats themselves, and  2) the lazy inattention to a consistent size-scale for the cats. In one scene those Jellicles are as tall as doorknobs, the next, scarcely larger than a stemware glass.

Jason Derulo as Rum Tum Tugger

I don’t play video games and I rarely watch superhero films, so the CGI-heavy look of Cats: The Movie—which, in the wide-angle dance sequences create a Colorforms® effect that makes the cats look as though they’re hovering above and in front of their surroundings—never really set right with me. The close-ups are even worse, for the film's digital cat technology is never more blood-curdling than when it's doing its job well. I found myself averting my eyes at the sight of a whiskered Sir Ian McKellen lapping milk out of a saucer, and, mood-killer though it be, I had to watch Grizabella's big number--beautifully sung, by the way---through the fingers covering my eyes...seriously, who the hell thought it was a good idea to have snot cascading like Niagara out of Jennifer Hudson’s human-nose-on-a-cat’s-face throughout her entire frigging song?

Jennifer Hudson as Grizabella the Glamour Cat
Cats are said to have 3 names. If she were my cat, I'd name her Mavis McMucus

Ultimately, watching the film became something of a spine-tingler; every time I found myself relaxing, something would come along to gross me out (James Corden coughing up a furball, for example) or make me curse whatever drugs these people were on to even conceive of such lunacy.
One has to dig up a copy of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, especially one containing the illustrations of Edward Gorey or Nicolas Bentley, to get a sense of the charming wit and self-aware silliness of Eliot’s original cat poems written for his godchildren. You see fleeting glimpses of it in the corners of Cats: The Movie—for example, during “The Ad-dressing of Cats” (which Judi Dench knocks out of the park) there’s a lovely moment after Deuteronomy declares “A cat is not a dog!” and the cats surrounding her exchange glances like children lovingly humoring an elder parent who might be losing it. But those few and far-between hints of playfulness are largely obscured by eyesore production values and a ponderous solemnity that feels tonally at odds with the movie’s in-your-face bizarreness. 

Rumpleteazer (Naoimh Morgan) & Mungojerrie (Danny Collins)
Prepare to be discomfited if you find yourself thinking one of the cats looks hot.
Mungojerrie's got bod.

But I really shouldn’t complain about the film's self-serious tone when Cats: The Movie’s idea of silly fun are those twin atrocities: Jennyanydots and Bustopher Jones. As written, both characters are delightful (Jennyanydots perhaps less so because she's clearly cracked), but as cast, they are simply ghastly. The thunderingly unfunny Rebel Wilson gives us endless pratfalls, David Cronenberg-levels of body horror (her skin comes off!), and Kafkaesque mice and cockroaches with human faces (the latter we get to see her devour moments after they’ve been introduced to us). If it sounds hellish, trust me, it's nothing compared to the visual experience.
With barely time to catch one’s breath, we’re confronted with the equally dire James Corden in an eye-assault number loaded with more pratfalls, spitting, and hits to the groin. All in support of the comic premise that the mere sight of an overweight cat eating is inherently hilarious. Both numbers are such irredeemably crass clusterfucks, they make John Waters movies look like Pixar productions. 

Rebel Wilson as Jennyanydots

James Corden as Bustopher Jones

Grizabella's story arc, which represents Cats' underlying message (bet you're surprised to know there is one!): that everybody just wants to be accepted for who they are, each of us is unique and we should celebrate our differences, all while recognizing our shared humanity (or, unashamed felinity) and common dignity—is emphasized further in Cats: The Movie by the invention of Victoria and her forgettable Oscar-bait new song. It's a nice message for what is essentially a story for children. Even I (after subjecting myself to Cats: The Movie a second time to write this essay) felt my pugnaciously set jaw unclench when the unceasingly overwrought Grizabella finally smiles, and when Victoria finds her new family. 

And another theater and dance major finds her new gay bestie.
From the start, I just took it for granted that Mr. Mistoffeles was a sensitive gay cat, and everybody applauding the mastery of his magical powers at the end was a metaphor for his coming out of the closet. The film, however, kept thrusting the implausible pairing of Victoria and Mistoffeles at us, when all I wanted was for her to end up with the hunkier Munkustrap 

So that I might end things on an upbeat note here, let me just say that there were a few things about Cats: The Movie that I liked, very much indeed.
I'm a verified cornball, so I found it a thrill to hear Andrew Lloyd’s Webber’s gorgeous score again after so many years, doubly thrilling to find I still knew all the words. Despite their familiarity, certain songs and musical passages  (especially during the Jellicle Ball, when Hooper could be trusted to let the music take over and not break the rhythm with cutaways) sustained their ability to move me and give me waterworks (calling to mind the line from Noel Coward’s Private Lives: “Extraordinary how potent cheap music is”).

The dancing in the Jellicle Ball sequence is superb and marvelously staged; Jason Derulo, though ill-served by that terrible song, makes for a welcome, James Brownish Rum Tum Tugger; and Taylor Swift has fun playing Nancy to Idris Elba's Bill Sykes. But the one number to give me that much sought-after "goosebump moment" was "Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat." It’s terrific. And for once music, the dancing, and CGI all come together to create a moment of only-possible-in-the-movies magic.

It has always been my favorite song from the show anyway, its earworm rhymes and peppy rhythms reminding me of a children's chant, but for my taste, it’s the only musical sequence to strike a tone of playfulness and fantasy that is thoroughly exhilarating. Helping out in no small part is the fact that it's a tap number, so a measurable element of weight factors into it (the magic of dance has always been the dancer's triumph over gravity. The overuse of special effects and CGI in movies always places dancers in a zero-gravity limbo rendering it unimpressive). 

Steven McRae as Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat

Secondly, it helps to an immeasurable degree that Skimble has pants on. Outfitted with tap shoes, suspender britches, and conductor’s whistle; when his cap is on, The Railway Cat looks less like an anthropomorphic nightmare and more like a shirtless, abundantly hirsute ginger fellow with a handlebar mustache, tattoo sleeves...and a tail.

The1962 Judy Garland-Robert Goulet animated musical Gay Purr-ee

So while I didn’t enjoy Cats: The Musical very much and think the show would have been better served as an animated feature, as both a movie fan and musical theater geek, I also hold the opinion that a lousy screen adaptation of a Broadway musical is still better than no screen adaptation at all. And as was my experience with the much-pilloried 1977 movie version of A Little Night Music, maybe folks who’ve never seen Cats onstage will feel differently about the film than I did.

I don't know if Tom Hooper made the Must-See Film Event of the Year, but I'll tell you this, Tom Hooper’s Cats turned out to be precisely the movie 2020 deserves.

A suitably repurposed ad for the 1969 thriller Eye of the Cat

BONUS MATERIAL

If you're like me, after seeing Cats: The Movie you'll be ready to kill the first person who ever dares utter the word "Jellicle" in your presence. But for the record, according to Andrew Lloyd Webber, Jellicle cat is "dear little cat" (as Pollicle Dog is "poor little dog") as misheard by T.S. Eliot when he was a child.

On Friday, May 15, 2020, Andrew Lloyd Webber provided a livestream commentary for the YouTube airing of the 1998 straight-to-video production of Cats featuring the British touring company. Benefitting The Actors Fund and dedicated to the recent death of his cat Mika, the commentary was notable to me for: the constant (hilarious) digs and potshots Webber made at Tom Hooper's film; getting choked-up watching the finale number; and the brief visit by Oddy (pictured), another member of Webber's cat family.

 Tom Hooper can take solace in the fact that finding the proper scale for
humanoid cats has always been a problem. In this 1986 anti-smoking PSA, 
Andrew Lloyd Webber's felines are as small as mice.

I Tawt I Taw a Putty Tat!
Cats is bookended by the image of a cat's face on the right side of the frame peeking out through the clouds over London. At the start of the film the cat is seen winking. At the conclusion, it just stares out in dumbfounded shock. Like the audience.

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2020

THE APPLE 1980

The BIG Science Fiction Romantic Rock Opera of the '80s

                                                                           Movie poster tagline

It comes as a bit of a surprise to me when I realize that after so many years heralding the relative merits of often inarguably awful movies (and we're talking MAJOR bombs, mind you); this piece on Cannon Films’ dystopian glam-rock musical The Apple will be my first hate-watch movie post.

What do I mean by hate-watch? Well, when it comes to bad movies, whether unabashed camp-fests like Girls Town, Kitten With a Whip, and The Oscar, or pedigreed stinkers like Audrey Hepburn's Bloodline or Barbra Streisand's A Star is Born, there’s not a single terrible film I’ve disparaged and poked fun at on these pages for which I don’t also harbor genuine feelings of affection. Even if that affection is merely gratitude for all the hours of enjoyment they've given me at their expense.

Call it an affinity, call it a connection…, but if I'm going to watch a movie for the sole purpose of laughing at its ineptitude and wrongheadedness, I have to have at least a tiny soft spot for it in my heart. Otherwise, the experience feels only mean-spirited and snarky.
I call it hate-watching when I'm masochistically drawn to watch a movie that, for whatever reason, I already know I don't like all that much. What I expect to get out of such an experience is hard to parse out, but I'm gonna guess that self-flagellation, schadenfreude, and misanthropy play into it.
All of the above and more are to be found in schlockmeister director Menahem Golan's notorious 1980 musical misfire, The Apple.

"First you sell it, THEN you make it. That's marketing!"
The line of dialogue above is from The Apple, a movie set in the world of music. But it could just as easily stand as the business model for Cannon Films under the auspices of the producing/directing team of Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. A company that never met a misleading ad it didn't like. There's a very good chance this trade ad began appearing (cobbed from the wishful-thinking likeness of John Travolta's 1978 Time Magazine cover) long before a screenplay was written or a dime of funding secured for this $8-10 million miscalculation

The Apple, if known at all, is widely considered one of the worst musicals ever made. A credential it exhaustively earns and defends in every sequin-encrusted, spandex-encased frame. But movies dismissed by the masses invariably end up as prime candidates for cult adoration, and The Apple is no exception (although it took some 24 years to bring that about). Today, The Apple is enthusiastically embraced for the very things that, in 1980, brought the World Premiere audience at the Montreal Film Festival to its feet in a chorus of boos. The Apple swiftly disappeared when the film's limited American release yielded a groundswell of less demonstrative but no less unfavorable critical response. So few people saw it that over time, The Apple's must-be-seen-to-be-believed awfulness became the stuff of myth.

Despite my fondness for cinema dogs and movie turkeys (fittingly, The Apple's L.A. release was a week before Thanksgiving), I failed to catch The Apple during its initial theatrical release. Not because I accidentally missed it... for some reason, I just had no interest in seeing it. Which is grossly out of character for me. A guy who dotes on disco, is mad for musicals, and who ordinarily can't get enough of craptacular cinema. 

Catherine Mary Stewart as Bibi Phillips

George Gilmour as Alphie

Vladek Sheybal as Mr. Boogalow

Grace Kennedy as Pandi

Allan Love as Dandi

Ray Shell as Shake

The Apple is a pseudo-Biblical Faust allegory set in a hyper-futuristic vision of America in 1994 that frequently betrays its true setting: Berlin, 1979. Taking significant liberties with the Book of Genesis, the film presents us with an unreasonable facsimile of Adam and Eve hailing from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan (a colorless folksinging duo with the Teletubby names of Alphie & Bibi) tempted by fame and lured into the Mephistophelian clutches of one Mr. Boogalow, the head of an entertainment megacorporation known by the acronym BIM (Boogalow’s International Music).

But much like Disney or The Kardashians, BIM has very little actual interest in entertainment itself, its primary interest being global mind control and the deployment of its far-reaching pop culture tentacles for world domination. Mr. Boogalow's fiendish plan--as far as I could make out, anyway---has something to do with weakening people's will through the forced exposure to tacky, Vegas-style glitter-rock-cum-disco revues performed by substandard talent. Enter Alphie & Bibi. 

The Bland Leading The Bland
Flavorless heterosexual folk music in a Eurovision-style face-off against spicy, gay disco  

Boogalow schemes to hornswoggle the naive, soporific duo into a restrictive recording contract, replacing his current BIM Stars Dandi (Allan Love) and Pandi (Grace Kennedy). After the high-minded Alphie has a premonition of disaster (the film’s premiere, no doubt), he refuses to sign with Boogalow but is unsuccessful in persuading the soft-headed...I mean, soft-hearted Bibi to do the same. So, while Alphie beats as hasty a retreat as his extraordinarily tight pants will allow, Bibi signs away her soul for stardom, a crimped hair makeover, and a pair of perilously high, pointy-toed thigh boots.  

I've Seen the Future, and it's Starburst Filter Lenses
The Apple frequently looks as though it were shot by a film school student given
an assortment pack of camera filter lenses they're dead-set on making use of 

Leap ahead an indeterminate amount of years (or is it days?): a despondent Alphie is learning that sanctimonious soft-rock doesn’t sell; Bibi has become a literal howling success (“Speeeeed!”); and America/Berlin has fallen under the despotic, fascist way of BIM and Mr. Boogalow. Beset by state-mandated dancing, compulsory mylar sticker-wearing, and the micromanaging of individual behavior, the country has been transformed into a soul-killing, dystopian glitterscape oddly reminiscent of some six months I spent back in the mid-‘90s working for fitness guru Richard Simmons.

The National BIM Hour of Exercise

The power of love ultimately proves more potent than the power of bad music, and it isn’t long before Bibi starts questioning her fashion choices and Alphie embarks on a quest to rescue his lady love from the evils of multiethnic nonbinary pansexuality. It's at this point, for reasons known only to the drug suppliers of The Apple's creative team, that Alphie and Bibi’s musical odyssey takes an abruptly ecclesiastical turn, complete with superannuated hippies, rapid-growth offspring, and a celestial visitation that made me think Janis Joplin was way ahead of her time when she asked God to buy her that Mercedes Benz.

BIM pop stars Dandi & Pandi (she's the one dressed like Ami Stewart)
Seriously, what's with these names?

Adding further to The Apple's compendium of crazy is a litany of undistinguished pop songs; a Deus ex machina character named Mr. Topps who pops up out of nowhere; future BAFTA-winning actress Miriam Margolyes as a chicken soup-wielding Jewish stereotype; and costumes and sets that evoke memories of the Dolly Parton quote, “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.”

Yes, every descriptive detail pertaining to The Apple confirms its reputation as a Grade-A, four-star disasterpiece.

BIM Headquarters
Alphie forgets to check his package at the door

Following the success of Tommy (1975), Grease (1978), and 1977’s Saturday Night Fever (not a musical, but its #1 soundtrack album revolutionized the movie marketing tie-in), studios everywhere rushed pop/rock musicals into production. The megabudget flops of The Wiz (1978) and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978) signaled a potential shift in public tastes, but by then, the soundtrack-driven musical juggernaut was already too far underway.

1980 alone saw the release of Fame, The Blues Brothers, Can’t Stop the Music, Xanadu, Coal Miner's Daughter, The Jazz Singer, and Popeye. Hit hardest were Can’t Stop the Music and Xanadu, two high-profile musicals that went into production at the height of disco mania and hoped to capture its white-hot, up-to-the-minute urgency. Of course, by the time they hit the screens, both movies looked hopelessly dated and old-fashioned. The Apple (which would have had its work cut out for it no matter the cultural climate) was initially slated for Easter release, giving it the jump on most of the year's other youth-oriented musicals. Alas, The Apple arrived at the very tail-end of the year. By that time, movie musical oversaturation and public impatience with disco, legwarmers, shiny fabrics, and glitter had all reached the point of no return.

Harbinger of Doom: The Apple opened in Los Angeles on November 21st, 1980 at the Paramount Theater on Hollywood Blvd. The same theater where Can't Stop the Music flopped so resoundingly just six months earlier. This newspaper ad promotes the opening day soundtrack giveaway that is said to have resulted in less-than-thrilled patrons hurling the LPs at the screen like Frisbees.

Although I wasn’t all that crazy about its dull poster art and no-name cast, I didn’t want to see The Apple because of my familiarity with Cannon Films. Even before its purchase by Golan-Globus, I associated the studio exclusively with Charles Bronson and schlocky low-budget action movies. Alas, later, when I'd read the flood of terrible reviews The Apple received, it crossed my mind that perhaps I'd missed out on a once-in-a-lifetime "I was there!" moment. The kind of experience cherished by folks who saw the original theatrical releases of legendary fiascoes like The Swarm or Lost Horizon. But mostly, I just felt as though I'd dodged a bullet.

I finally got around to seeing The Apple some 25 years after its release, not long after it had resurfaced on the midnight movie circuit and emerged as a surprise cult hit.

But the circumstances surrounding my watching The Apple for the first time were not the most advantageous for a film this off-the-rails: I was in bed with a particularly nasty bout of the flu when my partner surprised me with a DVD copy of The Apple to cheer me up.

Maybe it was my very real flu-induced fever colliding with the movie’s fever-dream weirdness, but The Apple not only failed to cheer me up, it genuinely made me sick. 

1. Things started out badly when I gave myself a headache from trying to make out if the endlessly-repeated chant in the opening number is “BIM’s on the way,” “BIM’s the only way,” “BIM all the way.” or whatever the fuck.

2. The jewels glued to Shake’s front teeth looked less like glitter rock bling than grossly neglectful dental health, so that kinda turned my stomach.

3. My fluey stomach synced with the film's clumsy choreography and started turning sympathy flips.

4. The script was so rushed, chaotic, and nonsensical that it created the disorienting impression that I had dozed off at intervals, missing pertinent plot points. (I hadn't.)

5. This is a musical that clocks in at only 90 minutes. So why did it feel as long as Barry Lyndon?

6. Did my feeling so lousy at the time ultimately influence my first impression of The Apple? Yes. Was The Apple still pretty lousy without any help from me? Oh, most definitely. 

What's it all about, Alphie?
I hope you like George Gilmour's expression here 'cause it's the only one he's got 

By rights, my flu-viewing experience should have ended my having anything more to do with The Apple. And it was. That is until Christmas 2019 saw the release of a film that threatened to unseat The Apple as The Worst Musical Ever Made: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats. 

The critical drubbing those CGI kitties received got me thinking of how it had been 15 years since I last saw The Apple, igniting the nagging question of whether...given how badly I felt...I had really seen the film at all. So, with the added inducement of a recent Blu-ray release, I decided to give The Apple one more try.

I have to admit, it was a considerably better experience. 

The passing of 40 years has been kinder to The Apple than perhaps it deserves. Of course, it’s just as silly as ever, but much of what I once found annoying has been softened through the distancing filter of time. 

I still think the music is pretty terrible, but the songs “BIM,” “Showbizness,” and especially “Speed” actually make me smile (OK, laugh out loud). They may be tacky, but they are also a lot of fun. In fact, the first half of The Apple is actually rather enjoyable. Unfortunately, the second half is bogged down by one too many lugubrious ballads and that weird evangelical turn the story takes.

The musical number "Coming," staged as Pandi's choreographed date-rape of a drugged Alphie,
is not only hilariously crass but takes bad taste to Springtime for Hitler levels

None of the performances gave me a headache the way they did the first time around, although from the start, I thought Grace Kennedy was a little too good for this film (her discomfort in that "Coming" number is palpable) and would have made a fantastic Lucy in the Sky in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band---a case of going from the frying pan into the fire, I know. And I discovered it's really not possible to dislike Catherine Mary Stewart, coming across as she does like a spunky, well-intentioned understudy shoved at the last moment into the star role.

What emerged clearer on second viewing is just how good Vladek Sheybal is. Playing a character saddled with a name no two individuals in the film ever pronounce the same way twice, Sheybal is the only actor to hit the right over-the-top tone without the effort showing. He reminded me of Karen Black when she began appearing in all those low-rent horror movies. She "got" and understood the weird...she didn't need to strike attitudes.

Vladek Sheybal appeared in the films Casino Royale From Russia With Love,
and Ken Russell's Women in Love and The Boy Friend

I enjoyed The Apple more on the second viewing, but finding out that I don't loathe the film isn't the same as saying that I actually like it. I'm afraid I still don't.
And just why that is, boils down to this: I wouldn't like a John Waters movie in which Donny and Marie triumphed over Divine and Mink Stole. Nor would I like an Auntie Mame in which the Aryans from Darian scare away the free-thinking bohemians.

Playing Alphie's cliche-a-minute Jewish landlady, Miriam Margolyes' character doesn't
have a name, but her performance is so full of ham she should be labeled not kosher

I like my cult movies subversive. Mainstream films always have people who look like Bibi and Alphie triumphing over the forces of evil (i.e., anyone who doesn't look like Bibi and Alphie). What's great about underground films is their anarchic attack on the status quo; they are movies that celebrate the misfits.

They advocate for the outsiders, for the socially shunned, and for the ones society has branded "different" or "strange." In these films, the conformity power balance is upended, and the underdogs of the world...those who don't fit into heteronormative boxes and non-inclusive social structures...are celebrated for their being true to themselves and for their uniqueness.

In The Apple, Alphie's rejection of Boogalow's world feels as much rooted in homophobia and diversity fear as in professional distrust. When I watch Rocky Horror, I relate to Dr. Frank N. Furter and his "unconventional conventionists," not Brad and Janet (who, even as the vapid hero and heroine, are still written with more complexity than Alphie and Bibi).

The Age of Aquarius
Menahem Golan takes a page out of An American Hippie in Israel (1972)

The Apple, for all its visual outrageousness and rock & roll posturing, has always struck me as being staunchly middle-of-the-road and conformist in its worldview. The narrative is anti-fascist, anti-corporate, and anti-capitalist, to be sure. But it never sat well with me how the film subtextually aligns all the interesting, queer, and iconoclastic people in The Apple with negatives (degeneracy, depravity, evil, fascism), while the hetero, white, white-bread hero and heroine are the only symbols of innocence and good.
Much in the way Can't Stop the Music has never been an all-time cult fave for me because of the self-repudiation inherent in its closeted take on The Village People, The Apple is anti-rock and roll (which everybody knows is the great liberator of all souls!) and celebrates conventional blandness too much for my taste.   

Apparently, Hell is a lot like Chippendales on a Friday Night

BONUS MATERIAL

Before they were Dandi & Pandi, Allan Love (he got the "L" out before the film) and Grace Kennedy had professional recording careers. Love, who was most recently in the restaurant business, can be seen in a 1978 musical video HERE. Kennedy, who had her own BBC variety show for several years, pays homage to that other 1980 musical flop Can't Stop the Music HERE. 

Before he was Alphie, Scottish singer George Gilmour (center) fronted the band The Bo-Weavles.

Ray Shell went on to have an extensive career in theater. Seen here (in considerably less makeup than Shake) he originated the role of Rusty in the 1984 London production of Starlight Express. He's also a producer, director, and author (among others, a book on director Spike Lee).

The Apple's lyricist George S. Clinton (l.) and composer Kobi Recht (r.) appear throughout the film as different characters. Co-lyricist Iris Recht appears as the receptionist in the "Showbizness" number.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2020