Don't Play Us Cheap

Rhetta Hughes and Joe Keyes Jr.

Melvin Van Peebles' Don't Play Us Cheap, from 1973 , is his most overlooked and underrated flick. Part of this is due to the film's unusual origins and part due to its release or lack thereof. Peebles originally published the story as a French language novel entitled La fête à Harlem. The project, in each of its iterations, centers on a Harlem apartment where Miss Maybell (Esther Rolle) is hosting a Saturday night bring a bottle party with dancing, appetizers, and a grand feast. The guests sing and raise a rumpus, rejoicing in each other's company. Two interlopers are welcomed, but they turn out to be imps, ordered by Satan to disrupt the festivities. However, the sheer good-heartedness of the partygoers upend their plans.

Peebles had adapted the novel into a stage musical which briefly played San Francisco in 1970. Peebles filmed the production soon after, but was unable to find a distributor. He next mounted the play on Broadway, with largely the same cast that is in the film, where it had a fairly successful run. The film had a token, if you will excuse the expression, release and then languished in obscurity for decades. The ramshackle nature of the film and its weirdness probably scared off the major film studios, but it is Peebles' funky nerve that makes it resound today. Peebles doesn't open up the material, but turns it inside out. We view the apartment not just from a proscenium view, but from multiple points of view, including that of the denizens of the underworld. Numerous cinematic and theatrical techniques are used to reinforce the mood of bonhomie: a black and white segment, theatrical tableaux, shots through window frames, everything including the kitchen sink. I do think Peebles does indulge his love of superimpositions too much, but Peebles is trying to conjure the antic hilarity of his characters and I feel he largely succeeds.

Part of the reason is Peebles was able to attract a talented ensemble who were all impressive vocalists. Rhetta Hughes had been a backup vocalist with such luminaries as "Bobby Blue" Bland and Bob Dylan. Avon Long, who gives the film's most outstanding performance, had sung at the Cotton Club and played Sportin' Life in a Broadway revival of Porgy and Bess. Since, as you can probably tell from my description, the plot is slight, the film functions more as a musical revue with roots, fully exposed, in vaudeville and minstrelsy. Peebles' songs draw as much from show tunes as they do from soul. What is fully modern is the extremely funky costumes which remind me of the illustrations Pedro Bell provided for Funkadelic albums of this period. Don't Play Us Cheap  is as much a product of post-Sly Afro-American street culture as Miles Davis' On the Corner and as much a stylistic ragamuffin as that album.      

Giants and Toys

Hitomi Nozoe

Yasuzô Masumura's Giants and Toys is a 1958 Japanese satire of consumer capitalism. The film's plot machinations are centered around three generations of men who work as flacks for the publicity department of a Tokyo based sweets company. Their company, World Confectionary, has hit a sales slump and the P.R. whizzes must concoct a new It girl to center their next campaign around. They happen upon Kyōko (Hitomi Nozoe), an innocent gamin from a poverty stricken family. Kyōko has the raffish charm of a tomboy, we even see her playing stick ball at one point, that translates well through the lens of a beatnik photographer played by the marvelous Yûnosuke Itô. Kyōko becomes a media sensation, but loses her innocent charm in the process. The advertising men who engineered her rise all suffer from their devotion to their career at the expense of their personal lives.

Jonathan Rosenbaum has noted that Giants and Toys is evocative of Frank Tashlin's work which is an understatement, if anything. Masumura's color, wide-screen compositions resemble the cartoonish elasticity of Tashlin's work. Furthermore, the screenplay for Giants and Toys intersects with those of The Girl Can't Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? on so many themes that one can't help but think that this is a case of imitation standing in for flattery: the films all share critiques of the modern capitalistic work ethic, satirize advertising and modern media (especially television), and utilize pop music. Giants and Toys even steals a bit of milk jug japery that Tashlin employed to draw attention to the bust size of Jayne Mansfield. The shadow of American culture is acknowledged by the characters in Giants and Toys. The lack of nationalist self-esteem is striking from a culture that bristled with chauvinism before its defeat in World War 2. "America is Japan," one character remarks ruefully.

Giants and Toys also shares the major flaw of Tashlin's work: its cartoonish visual dexterity is stressed to the detriment of the dimensionality of his characters. Very few of the characters in Giants and Toys exist beyond their one dimensional functioning within the plot. I cared very little for those caught up in corporate espionage and subterfuge in the film. Still, the visuals are occasionally dazzling. Giants and Toys is currently streaming on Kanopy.

Ziegfeld Follies

Lucille Ball and feline friends

Producer Arthur Freed wanted Ziegfeld Follies to reflect the wide-ranging revue that impresario Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. brought to Broadway in the early years of the 20th century. He succeeded in that the film is as scattershot as the original Follies undoubtably were. The film is a portent of the variety shows that were a staple of the early days of television. Comedy sketches alternate with lavish musical numbers with no attempt to craft a narrative. William Powell, who starred in MGM's The Great Ziegfeld, a Best Picture Oscar winner and huge hit for the studio, impersonates the showman again in a brief prologue. The producer has earned his reward in heaven and gives his benediction to the MGM players who he lauds for invoking the spirit of the old burlesque days. This translates to MGM using the film to plug their rising and established stars. The only true Ziegfeld performer in this film is Fanny Brice, who appears in a skit directed by Roy del Ruth that features Hume Cronyn and William Frawley. It is middling Brice, but I'm very glad it exists. 

The majority of the film was directed by Vincente Minelli with assists from Charles Walters, Robert Lewis, Lemuel Ayers, George Sidney and whoever was free on the MGM lot. The Minelli numbers are the film's highlights, especially the sequences with Fred Astaire and a boffo number with Judy Garland which originally was going to feature Greer Garson; but disaster was averted on that one. Minelli was in between Yolanda and the Thief and The Pirate and shoots here with full confidence, the former department store dresser (like Warhol) indulging his love of expressive color and bricolage. The pas de deux between Astaire and Gene Kelly gets most of the ink, but I think the standout number is the "dramatic pantomime" Limehouse Blues which features Astaire and Lucille Bremer. The casting of the two as Chinese emigres in London's Chinatown may cause one pause, as do a number of racist and sexist emanations from the film, but the result is sublimity, up there with the finest moments in Meet Me in St. Louis or Some Came Running.

The rest, while not quite dross, is decidedly a mixed bag. I've never found Red Skelton funny and his skit did not convert me. Keenan Wynn fares a little better. There is a number from La Traviata that's OK, if a little incongruous. MGM would hit paydirt a bit later by signing Mario Lanza. I always like seeing and hearing Lena Horne. In comparison, Kathryn Grayson seems anodyne. I like then new faces Bremer and Virginia O'Brien, but they both would soon get the axe from the studio. The appeal of Esther Williams continues to escape me, but Cyd Charisse has a nice dance cameo. Ziegfeld Follies grossed well, but could not meet its exorbitant production costs. Many snafus dogged the production, including a malfunctioning bubble machine.