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The butt of the joke is Tinseltown, the catty critic's reverie has it pegged. "Is that right? That don't sound right." The bombshell made, not born, the great infiltrator of the Dream Factory, Rex Reed in white suits and Raquel Welch in Forties ensembles as two sides of the same wrecking ball. "My purpose in coming to Hollywood is the destruction of the American male in all its particulars," it begins at the acting school ran by the horse's ass in the fifty-gallon stetson (John Huston). Cinema Lovemaking, defenses of Tarzan and the Amazons and Jesus Christ Moviestar, all part of the curriculum. Via vintage clips the screen's ghosts comment on the new age (cf. Anger's Scorpio Rising), Marlene in drag and Tyrone as Jesse James, Stan and Ollie and Shirley Temple out of the Fox vault, and there's Mae West in the embalmed flesh as The Queen of the Casting Couch to give the orgy her blessing. "Get your résumés out, boys." A free-for-all presentation of Gore Vidal's caricatures by Michael Sarne, abysmal and astonishing, a long piss on "this Disneyland of perversion" is what the revolution's come to. Funhouse mirrors in the surgery room, "Chattanooga Choo Choo" for that old-time glamour, Errol Flynn's rape-eyes during the posture lesson. "Guess I'm full of holes," drawls the dim hunk (Roger Herren), one of them gets plugged by the star-spangled heroine in an exultantly smutty montage. Lichtenstein on a soundstage, the Cocteauesque transmutation of postmodernism is a soft-shoe down the Walk of Fame. "You were great in Cinemascope and Technicolor, but you can't cut it in black and white." Gabel's The Lost Moment receives a buff's nod, though Wood's Glen or Glenda goes unmentioned. With Farrah Fawcett, Roger C. Carmel, Calvin Lockhart, George Furth, John Carradine, William Hopper, Jim Backus, Kathleen Freeman, Andy Devine, Grady Sutton, and Tom Selleck.
--- Fernando F. Croce |