Hellzapoppin'

1941 chaotic comedy

Rating: 15/20

Plot: I'm not going to include a plot synopsis for this one.

For those of you who are into the anarchic comedies of the Marx Brothers, this one might be worth your time. I've known about this movie for a while, but I couldn't have told you anything about the comedy duo of Ole Olson and Chic Johnson. They don't quite have the charisma to carry a movie and aren't exactly naturals in front of a camera, but the movie doesn't really depend on them much at all.

The humor, in a lot of ways, is exactly what you'd expect from early-40's musical comedy based on a stage show. I always have a soft spot for that sort of outdated comedy--silent movies, the Marx Brothers, and Spike Jones and His City Slickers. This reminds me most of Spike Jones, who would take a popular song of the day, have his singers and band perform it expertly, and throw in as much chaos as his troupe of mischief makers could muster. This works similarly, taking the popular genre of a romantic comedy and transforming it into an incomprehensible mess with this comedic pandemonium--gags, non sequiturs, 4th wall bursting, and word play. It doesn't all work, of course, especially for a 21st Century audience, but it's rarely boring.

The movie doesn't actually live up to the promise of surreal comedic genius it sets up in its opening moments. There's this message at the beginning:

And then there's a series of dancers sliding into hell. That's right--this is a musical romantic comedy that starts us all off in hell. A lyric promises that "anything can happen and it probably will" as a little person demon pitchforks a guy chained to a rock, something that I'm pretty sure I've seen in a Heironymous Bosch painting. There are trampolines, a little person taxi driver delivering the somewhat-boring-by-comparison comedy duo stars, and a racehorse with a tic-tac-toe board drawn on its posterior. It all means absolutely nothing, and that is when Hellzapoppin' works best--when it's not trying to tell a story or be coherent. 

So a Mystery Science 3000-esque bit, sans robots, of course; cartoonish sound effects, including those old-timey springy noises and even effects for the melting of ice; your old stepping-on-a-rake gag, something that you can argue stopped being funny around the same time that people getting kicked in the buttocks in silent shorts from the 19-teens stopped being funny but would be wrong because the stepping-on-a-rake gag is as timeless as they come; some Carrot Top style humor where a coat of arms is exactly what you think it's going to be; an interruption in the form of a notice for Stinky Miller, if he's in the audience, to go home; a recurring gag with a guy carrying around a tree that keeps getting bigger while calling for somebody else who likely has nothing to do with anything in this movie; some nifty special effects with half-disappearing acts; a whole lot of stupid in a climactic stage show sabotage; and Shemp Howard's shenanigans as a camera operator (or projectionist, I guess) named Louie who can't do his job correctly because he's either being harassed by a woman in the projection room or unable to keep his camera on the right subjects because he's distracted by pretty women. Yeah, I'm pretty sure he's both the projectionist and camera operator here, but that might be because the people who made this didn't understand how movies were made. Anyway, there's tons of fun packed into this. 

Like some Marx movies, this is burdened with too many musical numbers. Some of them aren't bad, and most of them always have something else going on that sabotages them. There's some surprisingly good choreography during some of them. The standout musical number is when a group of black performers start playing and then dancing. They blew everybody else in this thing--and maybe in the 1940's--away with dance moves that looked like they were capable of jerking arms out of sockets or giving people concussions. It was really something else. 

Anyway, if this sounds like something you might be interested in, you probably will want to watch it. It's zany!