Revisiting Rewatchables, week 39: ”Hellzapoppin’”
Ordinary movies have a more or less straight plot arch, for instance the famous “Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl” or “From rags to riches”. “Hellzapoppin’” is not such a film. There is nothing straight about the plot arch, it is more like a pretzel within a pretzel. “Hellzapoppin’” is quite simply sui generis.
It starts sweetly enough. A bevy of chorus girls walk down a big stair, singing “I Once Had a Vision of Heaven” (a lovely tune), when they’re suddenly catapulted into hell, where numerous devils wait for them. Enter a taxi out of which chicken and sundry other livestock emerge followed by the main protagonists, Chic Johnson and Ole Olson. They start quarrelling with the taxi driver and the taxi cab is blown up. They want to rewatch the scene and start talking to the projectionist in the theatre. Exit fourth wall. More mayhem ensues and suddenly we realize we are on a film set and the director calls “Cut!” As it turns out, we are watching the filming of the Broadway show “Hellzapoppin’” but the director isn’t happy with the script. He says that it needs a love story and starts to explain to Chic and Ole what he had in mind. He shows them a picture of the set for this love story, and suddenly the picture turns into a film and Chic and Ole watch themselves. And that is when the “real” plot begins, which has at its heart a couple of young lovers who have to overcome various misunderstandings while putting on a show that is to be the making of the young man. Except that Chic and Ole decide to sabotage the show (because of another misunderstanding), and the way they throw a spanner in the works is the highlight of the film.
At the end of the movie, we’re back on the film set where the director shoots the screenwriter, but the latter isn’t bothered because he always wears a bullet proof vest in the studio.
Bonkers, mad, lunatic would be an apt description of the plot, but also daring and inventive thanks to ingenious special effects. This is the most meta of movies I know. The fourth wall isn’t so much broken as smashed to smithereens: Chic and Ole talk to the projectionist of the film and address the audience; characters address the audience in a cinema that shows the film within a film, as when in the middle of a love song an appeal to Stinky Miller appears to go home.
When Stinky doesn’t obey, the actors stop singing and another appeal appears and we see the silhouette of a boy leaving the cinema.
Chic and Ole are transported into other movies and meet themselves etc. It’s utterly convoluted and doesn’t make much sense, but then neither do “Loony Tunes”, and cartoons are the closest equivalent to “Hellzapoppin’”. In fact, the one cartoon that equals “Hellzapoppin’” as a meta-movie is “Duck Amuck”, with Daffy Duck, but that came years later.
“Hellzapoppin’” offers song and dance. There is a Busby Berkeley-light water ballet; the opening number “Hellzapoppin’” is fun, and Martha Raye has a blast with “Catch the Birdie”. There is also the already mentioned “I Once Had a Vision of Heaven” and the final “Conga Beso” among others.
What really stands out is the number by Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers who perform to music by an ad hoc jazz orchestra (Slim Gaillard, piano, guitar; Slam Stewart, bass; Rex Stewart, trumpet; Elmer Fane, clarinet; Jap Jones, trombone and CP Jonstone, drums). The athleticism is breath-taking.
What makes “Hellzapoppin’” special apart from being meta, are the gags. Mostly they are a mixture of physical comedy and mere silliness. Some of the jokes fall flat, but the majority of them are still very funny, for instance Martha Raye and Mischa Auer dancing in a classical ballet while Chic and Ole sabotage the performance, using increasingly absurd means. There is also a running gag of an elderly man looking for a Mrs. Jones who is supposed to receive a plant. That plant keeps growing during the film and ends up a tree.
However, even though the film is a lot of fun, there are points that are less than perfect, apart from the odd jokes that fail to be funny. One cannot help notice the casual racism on display in this film. Not only is the cast very white, there is also a musical number celebrating the steamship “Robert E. Lee”, where confederate soldiers dance with Southern Belles. It is one of the numbers sabotaged by Chic and Ole, but they didn’t sabotage it because of the content.
The film is not completely white, but the black musicians and dancers that appear in the Lindy Hop sequence are portrayed as servants who are having a lark and flee when they realize they have been observed.
This bothered me as I was watching the film again. It was the way things were back then, but it is not palatable today. Norma Miller, one of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, talks about the laws and rules of segregation back then:
[…] this was the laws of the cities that we played in and we played a lot of Southern cities, yeah, and it was embarrassing, it was dehumanizing, yes and I used to – it – that's what annoyed me. I wanted to hit somebody every time. It was such a dumb thing to do.
Listen to her in this interview:
And watch the marvellous Lindy Hop scene.
Whitey's Lindyhoppers in Hellzapoppin'
“Hellzapoppin’” is a riot and one of a kind. And despite is faults, it is essential.