1980 Week: Can’t Stop the Music & Xanadu

          Since disco was already dying by the time these two spectacularly bad dance-themed movies were released, it’s not fair to say that either picture killed disco. Nonetheless, the sleazy Can’t Stop the Music and the wholesome Xanadu certainly inflicted wounds. Starring the Village People, Can’t Stop the Music is perplexing right from the first frame, because the opening-credits sequence features Steve Guttenberg roller-skating through New York City, in a split-screen effect, as he listens to the Village People on his personal radio and as the credits reveal the motley crew assembled for the movie. Beyond Guttenberg, the cast includes athlete Bruce Jenner and sexpot Valerie Perrine. Stranger still, the picture was directed by Nancy Walker, best known for playing greasy-spoon waitress “Rosie” in ’70s commercials for Bounty paper towels.

          Can’t Stop the Music purports to tell the story of the Village People’s formation, and like everything else related to the ridiculous vocal group behind “Macho Man” and “Y.M.C.A.,” Can’t Stop the Music avoids the elephant in the room—the fact that the Village People coyly repackaged homoerotica for mainstream consumption. Can’t Stop the Music is outrageously sexualized, featuring scenes in gyms and saunas and swimming pools—there’s even the occasional glimpse of a penis, despite the film’s PG rating. The five singers in the Village People give terrible acting performances, as does Jenner, and the whole movie is cut so fast that it feels like a hallucination. Weirdest of all, perhaps, is the unrelentingly upbeat tone—Can’t Stop the Music is like an old Garland-Rooney “let’s put on a show” picture, only set in a bathhouse.

          Xanadu is just as exuberant, and occasionally just as surreal, but it lacks the subversive quality of Can’t Stop the Music. Instead, Xanadu is an infantile phantasmagoria. However, I must confess to loving the movie’s soundtrack album, featuring songs by Electric Light Orchestra and the film’s leading lady, Olivia Newton-John. (True confession: Xanadu was the first LP I bought with my own money.) Michael Beck, a long way from The Warriors (1979), plays Sonny, an L.A. artist who paints billboard-sized versions of album covers. While roller-skating around Santa Monica one afternoon, Sonny meets the beguiling Kira (Newton-John), who turns out to be one of the Muses from Greek mythology. Kira provides magical inspiration to both Sonny and aging song-and-dance man Danny McGuire (Gene Kelly) as the three contrive to build a roller-disco palace called Xanadu. That is, until Zeus decides Kira must return to Olympus.

          In the course of telling its silly story, Xanadu toggles between cinematic styles with great abandon. There’s an animated sequence, lots of special effects, endless roller-disco jams, and a bizarre mash-up number combining a WWII-style big band performance and a guitar-heavy throwdown by L.A. pop-punkers The Tubes. As with Can’t Stop the Music, the genuinely terrible Xanadu is best experienced with either abject disbelief or ironic amusement. The only unassailable aspect of the film is the leading lady’s appearance, because Newton-John was at the apex of her girl-next-door sexiness. Amazingly, Xanadu has enjoyed a long afterlife, even spawning a Broadway musical. Turns out you really can’t stop the music—no matter how hard you try.

          FYI, the collective awfulness of Can’t Stop the Music and Xanadu led to the creation of the Golden Raspberry Awards, which honor cinema’s worst achievements.

Can’t Stop the Music: FREAKY

Xanadu: FREAKY

Toomorrow (1970)

          There’s a reason wholesome Aussie thrush Olivia Newton-John seemed so comfortable on camera in her first major American movie, the blockbuster musical Grease (1978). Unbeknownst to stateside audiences, she’d been acting in English movies and TV shows for several years, following her debut performance in the obscure Australian picture Funny Things Happen Down Under (1965). The most noteworthy of Newton-John’s pre-Grease credits is Toomorrow, a bizarre hodgepodge of music and sci-fi that has a small but cultish fan base.

         Playing the movie’s female lead, Newton-John displays every aspect of her G-rated appeal, singing and go-go dancing through her performance as a girl-next-door coed who performs in a band called Toomorrow while wearing a succession of miniskirts and short-shorts. Blonde, ebullient, and smiling, she’s a vision of virginal sexiness, whether she’s delivering unfunny one-liners, playing vacuous music, or simply hanging out with the aliens who abduct Toomorrow. Yeah, aliens.

          Written and directed by Val Guest, a UK fantasy-cinema veteran whose credits include The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), Tomorrow begins in outer space. Against a backdrop of trippy incidental music, a glowing spacecraft hurtles toward Earth and fetches the human-looking John Williams (Roy Dotrice) from his English estate by way of a glowing transporter beam. Once aboard the starship, John strips off his human shell to reveal that he’s a blue-skinned, slit-eyed alien, and that he’s the “Earth observer” tasked with identifying interesting developments by the human race. According to him, there haven’t been any—but then he’s told by fellow aliens that a new rock group, Toomorrow, has invented musical vibrations deemed crucial to the survival of the alien race.

          John resumes his human guise and woos the band by pretending to be a musical impresario. The band members, who are students at the London College of Arts, also get embroiled in a murky subplot involving campus protests. Guest vamps through several dull scenes of Toomorrow making lighthearted mischief (a wan riff on the Beatles’ signature tomfoolery), before the plot gets going. In a typical scene, drummer Benny (Benny Thomas) asks a lunchroom full of students if they mind listening to a rehearsal by calling out, “Hey, any of you cats mind a groove?” Naturally, they don’t, so the tacky lip-synching commences, since every number Toomorrow performs is a perfect studio production.

          The best tunes have some kick, although the band’s musical bag is a totally squaresville vibe that recalls vanilla pop groups like the Association, and the music is ultimately the least interesting element of the movie. More arresting are the sci-fi bits, like the scene in which the band members get tossed around a spaceship in slow motion while regressing back and forth to their childhood selves. And then there’s the sex. Guest indulges his randy side with lots of peekaboo glimpses at buxom supporting players. For instance, outrageously curvy British starlet Margaret Nolan appears as Johnson, an alien masquerading as an earth girl in order to seduce band member Vic (Vic Cooper), the band’s resident tomcat.

          How all this is supposed to add up is a mystery. The musical numbers get overshadowed by narrative nonsense, the sci-fi content is too geeky for casual viewers, and the smut feels out of character with the rest of the movie. Therefore, the amazing thing about Toomorrow is that it exists—did the producers even read Guest’s script? It’s no wonder Newton-John distanced herself from this strange flick, and it’s no wonder Toomorrow has yet to receive proper worldwide distribution. According to Wikipedia, the movie played for just one week in London during 1970, and then sat on a shelf (excepting bootleg copies) until receiving a UK-only DVD release in 2011.

Toomorrow: FREAKY

Grease (1978)

          The ’50s-themed musical Grease never piqued my curiosity back in the day, so it wasn’t until 2011 that I finally watched the thing start to finish, having seen only tiny excerpts previously. And though the following remark is useless as film criticism, the only fair assessment I can offer is that I don’t get what the fuss is about. Grease was gigantic hit in 1978, and it remains so eternally popular that sing-along screenings are regularly held at world-class venues including the Hollywood Bowl. That’s not even mentioning the considerable staying power of the stage musical upon which the film is based, which is a perennial favorite in community theater and high school productions. So while I can easily identify some of the pop-culture factors that contributed to the movie’s success—the ’50s nostalgia boom that began with American Graffiti (1973), the ascendance of leading man John Travolta, who scored a career-making hit with Saturday Night Fever (1977) the year before Grease was released—I don’t see anything in the actual content of the movie that screams “all-time classic.”
          In fact, several gigantic flaws seem more glaringly obvious to me than the movie’s limited charms. The actors playing teenagers at all-American Rydell High are too old for their roles (leading lady Olivia Newton-John was almost 30 when she shot the picture), the storyline is suffocatingly sexist (she wins Travolta’s heart by proving she can dress like a slut!), and the celebrated soundtrack is schizophrenic, because the mock-’50s tunes from the original stage show are complemented by an anachronistic country-pop ballad (“Hopelessly Devoted to You”) and an even more anachronistic disco thumper (the Barry Gibb-penned title song). Furthermore, the jokes are juvenile, the story is a pastiche of ’50s clichés like soda-fountain food fights and hot-rod drag races, the choreography is uninspired and crudely filmed, and the music production is sloppy, with most of the tracks suffering from poor mixes in which vocals are amped up way too highly.
          On the plus side, the central opposites-attract romance between a good girl who’s secretly naughty and a greaser who’s secretly decent has universal appeal, Travolta’s dancing is terrific, and the whole thing is served up with such an overdose of sugar-coated exuberance that its eagerness to please is appealing in a desperate, puppy-dog sort of way. (The insidiously catchy climactic number, “You’re the One That I Want,” epitomizes the chirpy vibe.) But when all of these disparate elements unspool one after another, Grease feels like a sloppy rough draft. Tangents including the downbeat Rizzo subplot (Stockard Channing plays a loose woman who goes all the way with a bad boy, then faces the consequences) dissipate the clarity and impact of the main romantic storyline, and extended dance numbers like “Greased Lightning” and “Born to Hand Jive” lack the ironic wit of stronger tunes like “Beauty School Drop-Out” and “Look at Me I’m Sandra Dee.” So while a few things in Grease work the way they should, close inspection reveals that they don’t, to quote one of the movie’s famous songs, “go together.”

Grease: FUNKY