Hellzapoppin'
                    
Director: H.C. Potter
Year:  1941
Rating: 8.0
I am not sure how much of the insanely paced no joke is too bad to be included genius of Hellzapoppin' can be credited to the comic team of Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson, but I would expect most of it. This is a work of frantic surrealistic mayhem that Dali would have orgasmed to. They also had the assistance of writer Nat Perrin who had been involved in some of the Marx Brothers films including that anarchistic masterpiece Duck Soup that seems to have partly inspired the comic soul of this film. Olsen and Johnson had been huge stars in vaudeville and Broadway going all the way back to 1918 and had an enormous hit on Broadway with Hellzapoppin' that ran for 3 years.




The show like the film was apparently a mad dash of sight gags, puns, lunacy, singing and dancing, audience participation all at 1000 miles per hour. The film does its best to keep up. I expect director H.C. Potter who was behind such staid films as The Farmer’s Daughter, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle and Mr. Blanding Builds his Dream House simply said “action” and then stood by and watched.





There is no plot to this film that really matters – it is a clothesline of sorts to hang all the jokes on – it begins with a musical number that takes place in Hell and then commences to shatter the dimension between film and audience (the fourth wall) and film and film. It is sort of like trying to figure out where God came from – where does it all begin. A film within a film within an insane asylum? They not only communicate with the movie audience but also with the projectionist who just happens to be played by Shemp Howard who was one of the Three Stooges and brother to Moe and Curly.




Shemp keeps screwing up the film because he is trying to seduce a large behemoth of a blonde while running the film. At times he runs the film backwards. Meanwhile somewhere in all of this are some musical numbers – a couple from Martha Raye nicknamed “Big Mouth” in real life and also the classic Lindy dance number by the black dance troupe Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers who also had a number in The Day at the Races.





Chic Johnson died in 1962 and Ole Olsen followed him a year later – literally followed him as they were buried next to one another.