Mar. 17, 2003 - 4:49 pm
i read about this one at work. a Best Screenplay nominee for 1981 and it sounded hilarious. search the online catalog...yes we have a copy. so i went back and grabbed it and popped it in. i love that i can do that. how many more times in my life will i have a job where i can do that? probably zero. oh well, i'm enjoying it while i can.
if you look more closely at the cover you'll notice that that's actually Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters. well, actually you can't tell much other than the fact that it's a man in the background at 140px tall, but yeah, it's Steve Martin. this is a sort of mock musical about a young sheet music salesman in the Great Depression whose life starts out not that great and gets much much worse as the film progresses. but the entire time he has these dreams where he and others do dance numbers. actually they're not just his dreams. it also happens in scenes where his character isn't even involved. like the one where Christopher Walken does a dance number at a bar and ends up stripping down to his underclothes and suspenders. Steve Martin's character ends up cheating on his wife because he's basically sex-crazed, then ends up getting the girl pregnant and forcing her to become a prostitute indirectly. then he ends up getting accused of a crime he didn't commit. it all goes way downhill, but they keep smiling and dancing.
the funniest thing about the music in this is that the music they use is really from the era that they're portraying. it's from the 1920s and 1930s, but the actors and actresses move their lips pretending to be singing it themselves. nothing like watching Steve Martin sing to a voice that is obviously not his own. and then he's got a big smile and wide eyes the whole time. great stuff.
yet another film example that forces me to stick by my recent discovery that Christopher Walken ALWAYS dances. whenever he's in anything, it has to involve dancing in at least some small way. if you can name a single movie that he's been in where he doesn't dance, i'll give you...something. what about Pulp Fiction (1994)? i don't remember him dancing in that, but that doesn't mean that it didn't happen. Annie Hall (1977)? i don't know. i'm sticking by it until i'm proven wrong.
another interesting aspect to this movie is that it has the only "forced happy ending" i can think of. this is something that i can't remember seeing in any previous film. it's like in poetry with a forced rhyme you know? where you do one line that ends in one word and the "rhyming" line ends in a word that doesn't actually rhyme, but it's very similar. so if you read it out loud, you have to pronounce the second line's final word as if it rhymed with the first. example: "Tom was always pulling notes out of thin air, he's the best student that ever attended here." so you would end up saying "hair" instead of "here," even though what you mean is "here." yeah, it's dumb and it doesn't make sense. maybe that's why most people don't do it. but with this film it really works. the whole thing is a downer and it obviously comes to a horrific conclusion, but instead they decide to do yet another dance number. i think it's a good idea because the whole movie is both incredibly serious and a huge joke at the same time. i liked it.