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By PAUL BRENNER
Obscured in the pop culture
haze that obscures practically everything nowadays
is Al Capp's crazy-like-a-fox comic strip L'il
Abner. Now long ago and faraway, at one time
Capp's comic was a cultural phenomenon, running
for forty-three years and published, at the height
of its popularity, in over nine hundred
newspapers. Capp's colorful, gaudy strip
concerning the hillbilly denizens of Dogpatch,
particularly voluptuous and knock-out gorgeous
sex-starved mountain honeys and beefy, muscular,
and sexually naïve young hillbilly boys, was
biting satire and pointed social commentary,
hidden by corn.
With the madhouse success of the comic strip,
Hollywood, smelling gevelt, was soon heading
through the swamps to Dogpatch. The first try was
in 1940, but the only distinguishing mark in that
gimpy Hollywood adaptation was the participation
of Buster Keaton, trying to rebuild a career in
the guise of Lonesome Polecat. It wasn't until the
1950s, that an adaptation was tried again, this
time in an eye candy Broadway musical extravaganza
featuring witty lyrics by Johnny Mercer and a
middling musical score by Gene de Paul. It was
this version of L'il Abner that made its way to
Hollywood by way of Paramount and Vista Vision in
1959, with most of the bright and lively Broadway
cast intact and written and directed by Bob Hope
refugees Norman Panama and Melvin Frank. Paramount
Home Entertainment has now released the Panama and
Frank "L'il Abner" in a DVD release that explodes
with primary colors, like an LSD trip with legs
and breasts.
The cast -- Leslie Parish, Peter Palmer, Stubby
Kaye, Howard St. John, Julie Newmar and Stella
Stevens (among others) -- emits energy, youth, and
Broadway oomph. It is just too bad that the film
didn't follow the Broadway show more closely. Two
of the tunes from the show -- "If I Had My
Druthers" and "Matrimonial Stomp" -- are parsed
down to nothing, while two great songs from the
Broadway production -- "Oh, Happy Day" and
"Progress Is the Root Of All Evil" -- are cut out
entirely. And, although the film captures loudly
and definitively Capp's comic strip style, it is
Al Capp-lite, muting most of the comic strip's
satirical underpinnings.
Still the cast is nothing if not game and a joy to
behold. Stella Stevens is wondrous as sexy vamp
Appassionata Von Climax. Julie Newmar is the
jaw-dropping sex bomb Stupifyin' Jones -- "A
deadly weapon, guaranteed to stupefy any male in
his tracks" (and to illustrate the point Jerry
Lewis (in a cameo) emerges from a crowd of
Dogpatchers as Itchy McRabbit and demonstrates in
Lewisian terms being stupefied by Newmar). But the
white carnation goes to Stubby Kaye in his
greatest role as Marryin' Sam and his show
stopping number "Jubilation T. Cornpone" delivers
all the entertainment you could desire this side
of a gospel rival meeting.
But the direction and staging are just this side
of crazy. Melvin Frank keeps his performers in
tableau as an actor moves up and down stage. And
when the songs in the film end in musical
crescendos, Frank has the cast freeze in position
(usually with their arms raised to the rafters) a
half-second longer than necessary as if waiting
for the applause of the absent audience to end.
Still how can you resist of film with lines like
the one given to Robert Strauss as Romeo Scragg,
playing the next-of-kin to the ravishing and
voluptuous Daisy Mae (Leslie Parrish) when Romeo
is called upon to admit his close blood tie:
"That's the trouble. I'd like to get her but I
don't think I can." Just think a musical comedy
with incest just an upbeat away. |
