Gwen Verdon gets flirty in Damn Yankees.
Related Content
More About
Broadway: The Golden Age
Opens Fri., Sept. 24, at Varsity
Anyone whose familiarity with Charles Nelson Reilly extends only to his seminal work as a celebrity panelist on Match Game will feel a little excluded during Rick McKay's valentine to the good old days of the Great White Way. Despite—or, perhaps, because of—his intense affection for the American theater of the 1940s through the late '60s, McKay isn't really out to educate so much as he is to celebrate: His Herculean effort, which features years of personal interviews with seemingly every major and (cue Reilly) not so major New York actor of the time, is an epic insider's feast for theater people.
It's pretty standard stuff at first. In an introductory voice-over, McKay informs us that he was just a kid from the suburbs of Beach Grove, Ind., who grew up watching old movies and listening to show tunes and . . . you get it—he's a fan. For a while, it seems all he's going to do is allow ladies like Ann Miller to bemoan the days when you could buy a hamburger for 10 cents. However, the film soon picks up a cumulative force from McKay's unabashed willingness to listen; his wistful subjects are all thrilled to reminisce, and their collective voices start to ring with the proud, excited clamor of veterans sharing war stories.
The result may be no more than a series of talking heads, but what talking heads: Shirley MacLaine tells the story of her fateful chance to take over for Carol Haney in The Pajama Game; Gwen Verdon says that Bob Fosse told her to play sexpot Lola in Damn Yankees as "a little flirty fat girl." Among other tributes, there are moving remembrances of the now almost forgotten lead of The Glass Menagerie, Laurette Taylor (who, in the film's choicest bit of archival footage, shows up in a luminous 1938 screen test for David Selznick).
Golden Age isn't a triumph of documentary film, but as a cozy, gossipy, star-struck record of a time and place, it should be essential viewing for anyone with a similar passion. (NR) STEVE WIECKING
Bush's Brain
Opens Fri., Sept. 24, at Harvard Exit
Based on the takedown book of the same name, published last year, this short documentary would seem to have the richest kind of villain as its subject: Dubya's string-puller, Karl Rove. He's like Iago crossed with Machiavelli, Lee Atwater genetically spliced with a pit bull, and the high-school-nerd-turned-über-political-boss. So why is the movie so dismal? Because history, in this case, is being written by the losers—the bitter Texas pols trounced by Rove's candidates and dirty tricks; the outraged liberal journalists (including Molly Ivins); the erstwhile GOP rivals whom Rove ground into the dusty earth during his '70s rise through the ranks of the Young Republicans (a group that sounds about as collegial as Hitler's Brownshirts). Everybody argues that he bagged such scalps as Ann Richards and Jim Hightower because of smear tactics and underhanded tactics; no one actually considers the fact that they were weak candidates—like Gore, like Kerry—out of touch with mainstream voters of either party.
The books' co-authors, James C. Moore and Wayne Slater, get the most screen time among the endlessly dull procession of talking heads. If you're a student of bare-knuckle Austin statehouse politics during the '80s, they may interest you; otherwise the stuff makes C-SPAN seem like MTV. Speaking of which, Rove pops up periodically in some speeches captured on C-SPAN, but Brain isn't smart enough to make greater use of them. It never gives us a sense of the man in his own words, and any telling biographical detail is completely lacking. (I only gathered from the press kit that Rove never actually finished college, but is he married? Does he have kids? I have no idea.)
While a terse, testy, defensive fax the authors received from Rove in rebuttal to their book is frequently quoted, only his detractors are given the latitude to speak. The results are completely one-sided and unilluminating. If Rove is "a threat to the republic," as the film maintains, it does a terrible job of plumbing that threat. I'd rather hear from his admirers than his detractors as to what makes him such a tremendously successful political operative. Even if the Democrats shouldn't emulate his methods (and it's too late for this presidential election, I fear), they owe it to future candidates to understand their most important enemy. (NR) BRIAN MILLER
A Dirty Shame
Opens Fri., Sept. 24, at Egyptian
John Waters misses Divine. In a way, you could say he's never really gotten over the loss of his hefty drag muse; he's certainly never found a leading lady more in sync with his singularly filthy aesthetic (although Kathleen Turner deliciously lowered herself in Serial Mom). Waters' latest nasty romp, sorry to report, misses the former Glenn Milstead, too.
Tracey Ullman plays Sylvia Stickles, a pinched, unpleasant minimart employee who gets a bump on the head and wakes up with enigmatic Ray-Ray Perkins (Johnny Knoxville) going down on her. The next thing she knows, she's been reborn as a voracious sexual visionary and is begging husband Vaughn (Chris Isaak)—and everyone else in Waters' bent, beloved Baltimore—to service her insatiable needs as a "cunnilingus bottom." Daughter Caprice (Selma Blair), a delirious stripper with pontoonlike knockers, is overjoyed by the change; conservative zealot mother Big Ethel (Suzanne Shepherd) is decidedly not. ("You let strangers put their germ-filled mouths on your uterus?!")
