Hellzapoppin’ is the Citizen Kane of anarcho-comedy. The movie adaptation of Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson’s long-running and apparently endlessly inventive Broadway show, it’s widely considered one of the funniest movies ever made, competing with Duck Soup for top honors among madcap films. And yet amazingly it was unavailable until quite recently, tied up by hostility between Olsen’s and Johnson’s heirs. Fwiw, a pretty good print is available for download via Youtube and ok.ru. Maybe because it had been so hard to view there is very little commentary about it. Compared with the Marx Brothers’ work, film historians have barely touched it. The jokes and gags also move so fast and thick that folks with an analytical bent are demoralized before they begin to work. If the gags in Duck Soup run at 50 miles an hour, Hellzapoppins‘s run at 90.
It’s often mentioned in histories of film comedy and vaudeville, I suspect by a lot of people who have only heard about it. A constant theme is that the movie is a pale adaptation of what was an insanely funny dadaist Broadway production. Here’s part of Wikipedia’s description of a typical show (the script was constantly changed):
“A comedy hodgepodge full of sight gags and slapstick, the show was continually rewritten throughout its run to remain topical; it opened with newsreel clips of Adolph Hitler speaking in a Yiddish accent, Benito Mussolini in blackface, and Franklin D. Roosevelt speaking gibberish, before the real-life Olsen and Johnson burst through the image (actually, a transparent sheet in front of the screen). A circus atmosphere prevailed, with dwarfs, clowns, trained pigeons and audience participation adding to the merriment. Chorus girls left the stage to dance with audience members or sit in their laps. Laundry-filled clotheslines were strung across the theater over the audiences’ heads, and some seats were wired with electric buzzers that were triggered during the performance.”
The stage shows have entered the oblivion of legend, but I don’t think you can consider the movie a pale anything. The stage show apparently took all the paradoxes of pretending on stage as its theme. The movie does the same for movies. Olsen and Johnson’s goal — the Holy Grail of dadaist comedy — is to fill all available time with parodistic humor. What’s more, it has to be successful in every joke, every gag. And no particular kind of gag is to be repeated — until you’re sure that you won’t see it again, and then it’s repeated. Physical and verbal slapstick, visual gags, visual + verbal puns, ironic de-illusioning of all kinds, totally incongruous levels of action happening at the same time — non sequiturs at all times and coming at such a rapid pace that it feels like a laughing binge on ‘shrooms.
The movie-dada has one beautiful thematic center: the film’s sabotage of the studio insisting that there be a narrative. The special effects jokes about the why “there’s always got to be a story” are maybe the funniest in the whole shebang. Busby Berkeley is often credited with the cinematic magic of annihilating spatial borders between the realistic story-world and the limitless, constantly transformed spaces of the spectacles. Hellzapoppin‘ does the same thing but in much faster, zanier, irreverent ways. There’s no separation between the diegetic real world and the dream world — the real is really the dream world. It’s the dream quality of the vaudeville variety review working at warp speed.
In a Hollywood from Alice in Wonderland, characters move seamlessly from one world to another — the movie making (director, scriptwriter, producers, actors), the movie-within-the-movie that can’t get made but actually did because we see it projected on the screen, the movie projector in the projection booth, characters from other movies, the material film itself, on and on. You can see the spirit of Mel Brooks and the young Woody Allen in the making, but with all due respect they never made anything as uncompromising as Hellzapoppin’ — or as funny. René Clair and LoonyTunes got married and had a baby. Jacques Tati once implied in an interview that the film was the consummation of the development of film comedy.
And with all that, the movie-within-the-movie that never gets finished but we see anyway is pretty well made. Hellzapoppin’ was officially directed by H.C. Potter, a very uneven journeyman, with a better reputation for his New York stage work than Hollywood films. For some reason, he was inspired to greatness by the Olsen & Johnson project. (I wish film people would get on the ball and explore the making of the film.) And the songs in this loony story — all but one by the great songwriting team of Don Raye and Gene de Paul — are excellent, even while the action around them is going nuts. This is one of my favorites, “What kind of Love Is This?” The “story” behind the scene is that Prince Pepi (played by Mischa Auer), a typical fake Russian prince who turns out to be a real Russian prince but has to hide it because people only love the fake ones, starts to sleaze-court Betty (Martha Raye), a man-hungry singer whom Pepi has mistakenly taken to be a rich heiress. (Why she’s carrying a block of ice is impossible to relate: the career of that block of ice is side-splitting hilarious.)
At the moment, the movie is best known for its dazzling performance of the Lindy Hop by Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, backed by the stellar combo of Slim Gaillard, Slam Stewart, Rex Stewart, and C.C. Johnson.
There’s so much wonderful comic invention going on in Hellzapoppin‘ that I’ll probably be writing a lot more about it. I’m making it a category in its own right, the only film I feel needs one.