Truly Dreadful Film

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Ugly hetero-maniac fantasy that unintentionally gives a revealing portrait of American middle class' fears and morality in the 1960s. The inhabitants of a little town feel threatened by Conrad Birdie, a pop rock singer (inspired in Elvis Presley) who unwittingly questions their social, cultural and sexual roles, just by being himself. When this film was released in 1963 I was 12 years old and for some reason I never saw it, but I remember that Jesse Pearson (in his personification of Birdie) caught my attention, as much as Ann-Margret, whose career was in ascent, playing Kim McAfee, the teenage girl who will receive a farewell kiss from Birdie, when he is recruited by the Army. Today when at last I saw it I realized that both are the best elements of this motion picture. However, when the musical ends, the starry-eyed and rebellious Kim has been "tamed". As she sings the final song, the 22 year old actress, who looked like a teenager during the rest of the film, suddenly seems older, more "adult", but not because Birdie passed through her life, but following the Hollywood strategy to turn her into a new Swedish sex icon. Growing up for Kim does not mean renouncing to the pleasures that Birdie offers, but to adjust to the romance with her hometown boyfriend (Bobby Rydell), including the games in car backseats. Conrad Birdie, on the other hand, disappears during long stretches of the narrative and is finally disposed of, when the silly hometown boyfriend knocks him down. But Birdie is not the typical vain and blunt rock star. He is a pleasant parodic character, and Pearson plays him with gusto, always smiling, always mocking. It is obvious that the actor is enjoying it, and making fun of the character in the best Brechtian tradition. He makes fun of what Birdie represents, and it is not only Elvis, but all those macho singers who, with a boastful "profusion of testosterone", seduce women and men alike, even if males opt to deny the erotic attraction, accusing the artist of homosexual (as it often happened with Elvis). With every pelvic movement (as emphatic or perhaps even more striking than the movement of hips during sexual intercourse) Birdie creates chaos among the white citizens of the Capraesque town of Sweet Apple, Ohio, dazed with his arrival. Birdie is fun; he preaches sincerity and expresses his philosophy of pleasure in song and dance. But there was no space for him (and for that matter, for Pearson, who quickly disappeared from films) in this reactionary state of things: and I do not mean the supposedly funny jokes on the Soviets, so typical of American humor during the Cold War, but its agenda in defense of the respectability and status quo of the moral majority, opting to exalt the romance of the heterosexual couples (one of which changes music composition for chemistry to get married), through lackluster songs and trite choreography.

Uneven, but generally enjoyable musical. Ann-Margaret is really the highlight here, just absolutely stunning and captivating on screen. She makes it more tolerable than it really should be. Honestly, I wanted the whole story to focus on her, because most of the rest of the characters weren't very interesting. Dick Van Dyke and Janet Leigh are probably the actual leads. They're plot line isn't too bad, but it's not great, either. Plus, I hated Leigh's raven-black hair here. It didn't look right at all. The less Paul Lynde (who plays Ann-Margaret's father) the better, and Jesse Pearson as Conrad Birdie could not be any less charismatic. I like most of the songs, and the musical numbers and dance sequences are fairly well staged.

What is most interesting about this film is the cast. Dick Van Dyke is in top form. As for the women, Ann Margaret and Janet Leigh are both in stunning beauty here. Paul Lynde is cast here in the hit Broadway role that helped establish him in the national spot light. Ole stone face Ed Sullivan even mugs a few camera shots in.The story is a bit of a mess but in a way this is the Grease of the 1960's. Some of the sets even look like sets used in the 1970 Disco film. One of the scenes in the apartment bedroom with Leigh and Margaret reminds me very much of a scene in Grease too. The main differences between the 2 musicals are the music and script.While Grease introduced a disco beat to musicals, Bye Bye Birdie introduces very little music that is new to anybody. Grease focus on the love story of the lead characters. Birdie wanders between 2 or three love stories and sometimes wanders totally off into nonsense.Still, I like looking at pretty women and by golly the main ones in this one definitely qualify. Van Dykes physical comedy is a bit stretched here. For some reason this movie tries to take advantage of a public that has gone Elvis crazy and is into going Beatle crazy and tries to make Conrad Birdie into another Elvis. On that count, it falls woefully short which is why the music is so ordinary.

Bye Bye Birdie (1963)A silly, colorful, overlong, upbeat, and, yes, silly musical. Some of it has worn well, like the one really famous song, "Put on a Happy Face," and some of it looks like plain old awkwardness, as with Dick Van Dyke, who was a paradigm of charm and humor in his day.It's certainly not a bad movie. Like many musicals this follows a general formula, including the songwriter on the skids. It adds a couple of fun twists, like the Flubber-like invention of a chemical that changes a person's behavior. (Flubber debuts in the original movie "The Absent Minded Professor in 1961 and if you haven't seen it, it takes silliness much farther.)The main event here is the parody of Elvis in the guise of Conrad Birdie, who drives high school girls wild (and in one scene sends the whole town into a kind of rock and roll love stupor). And of course there is one girl in particular who is drawn into his sway. Kind of. In fact, the problem with the movie throughout is a "kind of sort of" mediocrity. Even the love stupor scene, which might have expanded into something hilarious, is cut short and left to fizzle. The Ed Sullivan show segment (with the real Ed Sullivan) is fun but filmed with deadening rigidity. The one near-exception to all this is the sped up Moscow Ballet sequence, which is quite long, and which is hilarious. It includes a few references to Cold War tensions, even with one Russian onlooker banging on his head with his shoe. You don't get it? Exactly. If you don't remember (or haven't heard about) Khruschev and his shoe, it's a subtlety lost.Next to Van Dyke is a whipped up Janet Leigh--quite the opposite of the Leigh now legendary for being slashed in the show of a Hitchcock thriller, or for being tortured in an earlier Welles noir. Yes, a good pedigree, even just finishing the archetypal version of "The Manchurian Candidate" the year before. I like her more and more as I see her less pigeon-holed, and she holds up her part well as the hopeful bride-to-be. The music? The choreography? The dancing and singing? It's mostly fair to middling stuff. Enjoyable to a point (depending on your leanings) but it falls short compared to other musicals of the time. It apparently fell far short of the Broadway version it was modeled after, too, getting panned for its lame choreography by critics in 1963. So why see it? Well, for one thing, the sheer nutty, Technicolor artificiality of it all--it's like entering another world. It's not reality--not a minority in sight, no hints of the real 1960s starting to unravel. This is already a slightly nostalgic look at an Elvis kind of 1957 universe, six years after it was over. Weird.