By the mid-’70s,
old-fashioned movie musicals were mostly relegated to the slag heap of cinema
history—the same year this misguided project was released, for instance, MGM
issued the first of its That’s
Entertainment documentaries celebrating the good old days of
singing-and-dancing extravaganzas. Given this context, the interesting question
to ask about Mame is not why it
failed so spectacularly with audiences and critics, but why the folks at Warner
Bros. expected any other outcome. The type of fizzy Depression-era story told
in Mame was a cliché better suited to
satire (as in 1978’s Movie Movie)
than straight treatment; the overwrought production numbers in Mame evoke the bloated
CinemaScope/VistaVision movies of the ’50s; and aging star Lucille Ball had
just finished an epic two-decade run as TV’s reigning comedienne, meaning there
was zero evidence that people wanted to see her in a movie, much less a
musical. Add in the fact that the movie’s tunes are pure cornpone schlock, and
the recipe for disaster is complete. Throughout its unrelentingly boring 132
minutes, Mame bludgeons viewers with
bland music, contrived storytelling, stiff acting, and tired one-liners. Other
affronts to good taste include flamboyant costumes straight out of a drag-queen
revue and ridiculous close-ups of Ball photographed with the world’s thickest
haze filter.
It’s amazing that something this inert derived from beloved source
material. The story of Mame begins
with Patrick Deenis’ semiautobiographical 1955 novel Auntie Mame, a fanciful account of the eccentric aunt who raised
Dennis after his father died. The book inspired a popular 1958 comedy film
starring Rosalind Russell, which in turn led to the creation of the 1966 stage
musical Mame, with Angela Lansbury.
Inexplicably, Lansbury was replaced with Ball, who couldn’t sing half as well
as Lansbury. Worse, director Gene Saks—a holdover from the stage production—clearly
lacked the chops to control a production (and a star) this big. Artificial,
dull, and flat, Mame just sits there
on screen, droning one from one laborious scene to the next. Ball is wrong on
nearly every level, bungling jokes and steps and tunes while troupers including
Bea Arthur and Robert Preston try to enliven supporting roles. Meanwhile, Saks and
co. borrow camera and editing tricks from Robert Wise—who dominated ’60s
musicals with The Sound of Music and West Side Story—without matching Wise’s gift
for brisk storytelling. If anyone ever decides to make a documentary titled That’s Not Entertainment!, scenes from Meme should definitely be included.
Mame:
LAME
2 comments:
You must remember that Angela Lansbury at this time had almost ZERO star power at the box office. In spite of her long career and stage success, she only appeared in 5 features between 1966 and 1979. And the closest thing to a hit was BEDKNOBS & BROOMSTICKS. Although it's aged well, at the time it was one of Disney's least popular films in years.
Meanwhile, Lucy was coming off 2 decades of TV mega-success that had made people forget about her MGM movie career in the 1940s. She was anxious for a vehicle to bring her back to the big screen and she still thought of herself as a musical star in spite of the cigarettey vocal cords by that point. The film got tons of publicity in the movie mags of the day as it was being made.
So it all makes sense. Bea Arthur steals the film entirely in my opinion and reportedly once said that composer jerry Herman was going to name the play after HER character but "Vera" was harder to rhyme than "Mame."
When I saw that you had published your review of "Mame," I quickly clicked it on, hopeful that you would make me LOL. And you didn't fail me! This must be one of the most misguided movies ever produced. I always liked Lucy but never loved her, but I always did and still do love the stage musical, which features Jerry Herman's finest score. So why hire, for a musical comedy, someone whose time has passed, someone who cannot sing or dance, and someone whose comic timing is, to put it politely, a distant memory? Lansbury was responsible for the success of the Broadway show, and with a film history that includes three Oscar nominations. What were the producers of "Mame" thinking?
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