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"There you have it, ladies and gentlemen, Beatlemania." Sidney's Bye Bye Birdie is the model, from it Robert Zemeckis derives a helter-skelter memory of youth. The cyclone at hand is the Fab Four's epochal 1964 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, for a batch of New Jersey teenagers it's a journey of screaming crowds and magic tickets and lickety-split mischief. The besotted McCartneyite (Wendie Jo Sperber) keeps a radio glued to her ear, leaps out of moving cars, and meets her match in the ambulatory trivia-dispenser (Eddie Deezen). (The centerpiece of his shrine is a clump of grassy dirt stepped on by one of his idols.) The shutterbug (Theresa Saldana) negotiates her entrance into Carnegie Hall by posing as an escort, the undertaker's son (Marc McClure) meanwhile works up courage by spiking his Coke with hooch. Finding herself in the visitors' hallowed hotel room, the timorous bride (Nancy Allen) fondles the brass guitar like a lascivious Excalibur and faints at the sight of Liverpudlian ankles. Bringing up the rear is the two-person boycott, the earnest folk-music enthusiast (Susan Kendall Newman) and the bellicose gel-head (Bobby Di Cicco) who has had enough of "those limey fairies." The great American whirl (cf. Tashlin's Artists and Models), "hysteria, hyperventilation, fainting fits, seizures, spasmodic convulsions, attempted suicides—all perfectly normal." Characters are crammed into phone booths and elevators, a grizzled barber with buzzing clipper and eyepatch receives the mop-topped mascot, the troubadours breeze through on their way to the televised orgy. (Pop culture is the faith of the land, the heavens themselves halt the saboteur on the CBS tower.) "How do you know which one's Ringo?" Quite the ticklish debut, the maiden voyage in Zemeckis' sarcastic time machine. With Christian Juttner, Will Jordan, Read Morgan, Claude Earl Jones, Dick Miller, and Murray the K.
--- Fernando F. Croce |