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A matinee at "The Poor Man's Follies" on the Lower East Side, one last hurrah for the art of vulgarity. "Some mature story," the seedy end of showbiz ca. 1925, the virginal Amish runaway (Britt Ekland) strolls into Minsky's Burlesque and blooms in the cheerfully sinful atmosphere. Smitten like Cyrano and sprightly like Donald O'Connor, the baggy-pants comic (Norman Wisdom) gives her a fond slapstick demonstration, foot in pail and staircase tumble and all. His partner (Jason Robards) lords over the footlights in striped suit and straw boater, and promptly scoops up the ingénue. The whirl around the trio includes the young entrepreneur (Elliott Gould) with the disapproving Old World father (Joseph Wiseman), the merry bootlegger (Forrest Tucker), the crusading prude (Denholm Elliott) and the fundamentalist patriarch (Harry Andrews), plus row after row of worn-out chorines. ("Take ten terrific girls but only nine costumes," warbles the rouged Rudy Vallee wannabe, "and you're cooking up something grand.") Ye old ribaldry filtered through Sixties zooms and handheld swivels—the farm girl discovers the force of wriggling, honky-tonk rimshots punctuate each of her undulations like bullets. (Gloria LeRoy beams down on the spectacle with Lady Liberty's torch.) A genial shambles with multiple auteurs, a Norman Lear reverie visualized by William Friedkin and retold in the editing room by Ralph Rosenblum. Meanwhile, Bert Lahr pads through with authentic music-hall timbre and gravitas, fixing a tipped-over seltzer bottle and pointing to the crumbling theater: "The audience there remembers me!" From Mamoulian's Applause, it continues on to Russell's The Boy Friend. With Jack Burns, Eddie Lawrence, Dexter Maitland, Lillian Hayman, and Richard Libertini.
--- Fernando F. Croce |