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It is noted that Baltimore was once the nation's capital, there John Waters locates the realm of criminal aestheticism for an obliteration out of Genet and Warhol. The tribulations of one Dawn Davenport ("I'm a thief and a shitkicker and... I'd like to be famous") from high school to Death Row, a cyclonic part properly devoured by Divine. The cracked Yuletide portrait (cf. Sirk's All That Heaven Allows) and the gift of cha-cha heels, Mom is crushed under the toppled Christmas tree while the juvenile takes galumphing flight. (She's promptly ravished on a soiled mattress by a slob played by the diva sans drag, "go fuck yourself" is his byword.) Waitress and go-go dancer, hooker and mugger, wife to a cheating hairdresser (Michael Potter) and mother of the Bad Seed (Mink Stole). "Sort of show business" at last, top model for the perfidious snobs (David Lochary and Mary Vivian Pearce) and their theory of unlawful beauty. "Who wants to die for art?" The melted visage of fame just needs the right cosmetics, Waters is there with mismatched lipstick and smeared rouge and hideous wallpaper. Straight normalcy makes for "a sick and boring life," crows the aunt (Edith Massey) who ends up hook-handed in an oversized birdcage, it's a question of wearing scars proudly. Joan Crawford and Elizabeth Taylor are Divine's main modalities, a dash of Magnani for good measure (chewed-off umbilical cord caps the sendup of Rossellini's Il Miracolo), the heaving bulk in mesh jumpsuits will not be denied. Broken glass and ketchup in the living room and liquid eyeliner up the arm, trampolines and playpens and bullets at the nightclub, all part of "a wild, fast-moving stage show with a finale to top all finales." The perfect travesty of melodrama ends perfectly, between grotesquerie and ecstasy with its heroine like Tor Johnson possessed by Falconetti. With Cookie Mueller, Susan Lowe, Susan Walsh, George Figgs, and Elizabeth Coffey.
--- Fernando F. Croce |