sovay | I hope your wife puts starch in your shorts

The nicest thing I can say about the jaw-plummetingly un-hip pseudo-rock musical The Cool Ones (1967)—besides the fact that it is, in the way of truly bad art, a one-of-a-kind experience—is that Roddy McDowall took the only sensible approach to a script his agent had evidently signed him to in a drunken blackout and approached his material teeth-first; he plays an immature record tycoon with a Napoleon complex ("I am Tony Krum and nobody yells at me unless I say so!") and expresses the sentiments of the entire audience with a number called "Where Did I Go Wrong?" Nobody in this movie looks good in their apparent fashions of the time, but at least when his ruffled shirt and ascot and Lincoln convertible are all the same brilliant purple, he blends; the combined effect of the black leather pants with the Tyrolean hat in green corduroy, however, is not actually mitigated by having a Christmas-tree paisley vest in between. The movie seems convinced it is making an incisive statement on teen counterculture when it is in fact haphazardly edited—jump-cutting and cross-fading as if someone in the cutting room had heard of Richard Lester once—and as establishment as they come. Maybe even more so: but for a TV cameo by the Surfaris and a somewhat more extended appearance by the Leaves, no viewer could reasonably be expected to link the synthetic, Vegas-out-of-Broadway pop culture of this movie to anything actually being enjoyed by the rebellious youth of 1967. One song is performed in a gondola on the way up a mountain ("Hey, down there, look up here / We're going to get high up here / High in the sky up there / Just watch the show") and you can hear the suits nudging one another with their daring. There is a moment in the finale when the legendary Mrs. Miller is Florence Foster Jenkinsing her way through an extra-vibrato, key-optional rendition of Styne and Cahn's "It's Magic" and McDowall stuffs his face in the stage curtain to hide the fact that he's corpsing. It was the one authentic expression of emotion we could detect all movie. Everything else is apparently being enacted by plastic dolls periodically clicking chests or faces with each other. I feel bad for Gene Nelson whom I liked so much in Crime Wave (1954), but he is not one of Nature's directors. You realize someone gave the actors instructions only because they couldn't have turned out so artificial if left to themselves. The romance has the chemistry and probably consistency of flour paste. The dialogue's idea of hip lingo is "Like, uh, I haven't met some of these ditty bops. Who's her?" I tracked down the original recording of "It's Magic" just to hear what it sounded like when it wasn't wrecking Roddy McDowall and it led me to this rather lovely photo of Doris Day before she was Hollywoodized into hyper-virginity; otherwise, Mrs. Lincoln, it's a good thing I see my therapist tomorrow. It would be like shooting fish in a barrel that had already been shot to review this movie for real, but I had to say something. Watch The Apple (1980) if you want a good bad rock musical. This was just so ineffably crummy.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

...it looks like Batman!

You know, McDowall's Tony would have made a perfectly convincing Batman villain at that:

(Between the fashion sense and the megalomania, I would have cheerfully heard him cover the "Dressing Song" from The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953), but that did not happen.)