Hey! It’s Cary Grant! Steering a car with his feet!
I think this is the best start to a movie ever.
This is so much fun… but these two screwballs aren’t Topper — it’s the staid bank guy. Grant and Constance Bennett play the perfect dream team: They’re rich, they’re funny, they’re drunk. They’re perfect!
And then they’re dead! DEAD! Half an hour into the movie! WHAT IS THIS!
Ghosts, that is.
OOPS SPOILERS
I like the little touches like bringing back the bell hop Topper had gotten fired (inadvertently) from his previous job. But these are the 30s…
So the main gag here is that the ghosts are invisible much of the time, so you have scenes like this, where there’s an invisible Bennett in the shower. These gags are well made! So I totally understand that the audiences at the time were amused… as I am now.
The plot, though. Oy vey. It’s basically Topper getting un-emasculated… Masculated? Hm. Because his wife is a bitch, but then she learns to be less bitchy over the movie, and it’s just a bit … eww?
The thing is, when I was a teenager, I didn’t like Pet Shop Boys. I had a friend who was totally into them, and they were on MTV all the time, so I got their music by osmosis…
It wasn’t until the mid-90s that I started listening to them and discovered they were geniuses.
But this is Pet Shop Boys, in their imperial phase, where they could do no wrong: Every single they released went to number one, and so why not make a movie?
It’s been unavailable for more than three decades, but the BFI made a 2K release recently, and that’s what I’m watching now.
So I’m wondering, of course: Can it be as awful as they all say it was?
Hm…
Rough trade alert.
English breakfast.
The thing about Pet Shop Boys is that they’ll get artists they like to do certain things (videos, set designs, costumes), and then they’ll be apparently totally hands off — or at least that’s my impression. That results in things like the Home And Dry video:
This has absolutely zero potential to be shown on any video clip show, so you really have to admire them for sticking to their guns and letting the people they’ve chosen to do their thing.
So I’m assuming that’s what happened here, too. Because… what’s happening here doesn’t really seem to line up much with what anybody would want to see in a Pet Shop Boys movie.
And it doesn’t look super cheaply made, either. I hope the record company footed the bill.
This edition comes with a nice booklet. At this point I’m really more interested in reading that booklet — because perhaps it can explain how this movie happened? What went wrong?
I notice that it took a long, long time before the director got to make another movie after this one… but then again, he didn’t make a lot of them before this movie, either.
I think they’re going for a The Bed Sitting Room vibe (the late-60s movie)… and I didn’t really like that movie, either. So perhaps it’s totally brilliant! It’s possible.
I like the tunes. The rest is mostly a miss for me.
This is kinda fun. The performances are pretty engaging (especially Ethel Waters)… but the storyline doesn’t do much for me. And the pacing seems rather ponderous, even for a sentimental movie like this.
This movie is so amiable that I feel like I should love it. I mean, I’m smiling a lot, and the music’s good. But…
Love this song. Ethel Waters.
It’s these scenes that make me zone out. The musical numbers are delightful, but the main plot (where this guy is being watched over/guided/tempted by angels and devils) just doesn’t have a lot of zing. It just kind of drags.
OK, Lena Horne in the house. Perhaps it’ll pick up now.
I hope she got hazard pay!
Didn’t love the ending, either.
Cabin in the Sky. Busby Berkeley & Vincente Minnelli. 1943. ⚃
