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.
