|
Hell above, as it were, what's left of the Jazz Age can't wait to embark. "We're going somewhere, we're going nowhere, we're going anywhere!" Hubby (Reginald Denny) tiptoes loudly while the missus (Kay Johnson) warbles at the piano, chasing toy balloons is his metaphor of choice for the childishness of men. "But when you catch one, you'll find that it just goes up in smoke." The mistress (Lillian Roth) is so marvelously unashamed of her carnality that she's adorned with pointy pheasant plumes, the chum (Roland Young) partakes in the conjugal farce before organizing a literal masquerade, an airborne bacchanalia aboard a zeppelin. (Curved girders make for an appropriately Futurist proscenium, a danced burlesque of Metropolis kicks things off.) When respectability gets her nowhere, the jilted wife crashes the event and confronts her rival in horned mask and sequined half-dress. "You made him sick of virtue. I'll make him sick of indecency." The absolute cream of Cecil B. DeMille's bizarrerie, from Klimt headdresses to chorines garbed like clocks, Dalí's "hallucinatory celluloid" and no mistake. The ponderous boudoir is merely a launching pad, the couple on the rocks are reborn as strangers up in the air in anticipation of Hitchcock's marriage voyage (Rich and Strange). "If all the wives are in heaven, I suppose that's why most husbands choose the other place." The ode to electricity doesn't extend to the lighting bolt that unmoors the vessel, the asinine swells are tangled in their own luxury as their palace snaps in half. The upshot is a Manhattan night sky peppered with parachutes like Len Lye abstractions. "Jolly party, wasn't it?" Allen's towering infernos are born here, so are Anger's pleasure domes. With Elsa Peterson, Eddie Prinz, Julanne Johnston, and Theodore Kosloff. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |