Ann-Margret is 85!

Today marks the 85th birthday of actress Ann-Margret, who was born in Sweden but became an American citizen before the age of 10. TCM is honoring the occasion with four of her movies:

8:00 PM Bye Bye Birdie
10:00 PM The Cincinnati Kid
midnight Once a Thief
2:00 AM Made in Paris

I haven't seen Made in Paris, so I'm planning to record that. However, I had Bye Bye Birdie on my DVR, so I watched that in order to write up a post on it for tonight's airing. Bye Bye Birdie is, of course, based on a musical, and before that, derived from an idea that a Brodway writer had when popular singer Elvis Presley was drafted into the Army.

Jesse Pearson plays Conrad Birdie, a singer popular with the teenaged girls because of his sex appeal who gets drafted into the army, causing an uproar amongst the girls of America. Songwriter Albert Pearson (Dick Van Dyke), hearing about the story, hopes he can write up a song quickly for Conrad to sing before Birdie goes off to the Army. Meanwhile, Albert has a complicated personal life. He's got a girlfriend Rosie (Janet Leigh) who should be his fiancée by now. But Albert's mother Mae (Maureen Stapleton) helped found the family music publishing business and consistently guilts the devoted Albert into not leaving. Rosie unsurprisingly wants Albert to choose between her and his mother, and it seems he's choosing his mother.

Meanwhile, The Ed Sullivan Show (with Sullivan playing himself) has the idea of putting Birdie on the show before he enlists, and even have Birdie kiss one of his legion of fans. Rosie has the membership rolls of the Conrad Birdie fan club somehow, and randomly picks a girl from the small town of Sweet Apple, Ohio. That girl is Kim MacAfee (Ann-Margret), who has a happy life with her kid brother, her parents (Paul Lynde and Mary LaRoche), and a boyfriend in Hugo Peabody (Bobby Rydell). Kim gets the call from New York, and she's naturally thrilled about having been chosen to represent the town of Sweet Apple to America, and get a kiss from Birdie.

Not everyone is thrilled, however. Hugo is ticked, fearing that he's going to lose Kim to Birdie. Dad also doesn't like it so much. He's still responsible for Kim, of course, and doesn't care for Birdie's music or the way in which Birdie drives everybody wild. But he warms to the idea when Albert suggests that perhaps Mr. MacAfee could get on TV too. Meanwhile, the subplot involving the long-simmering relationship between Albert and Rosie keeps rearing its head although one would think in a musical like this that Rosie and Albert are going to have a happy ending.

And then there's a twist. TV production is a complicated thing, and in the case of the Ed Sullivan Show part of that includes making certain everything times out properly considering that it's live TV. There's time planned for Birdie and Kim, although that gets cut into by Mr. MacAfee's desire to speak as well as MacAfee trying to promote the mayor, too. Worse is that the Russian Ballet which is also scheduled to appear that night decides it's going to do a number that would take up almost all the time allotted to the Birdie segment.

Bye Bye Birdie is the sort of movie that fans of musicals are going to like. If you're not that much of a fan of the artificiality of musicals, and I include myself in that genre, then it may not be quite as appealing. For the most part, everybody does well, although the material is such that at times it felt much too forced for me. Still, as I said, I can understand why some people are going to love Bye Bye Birdie.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Another movie that I recorded some months back is coming up on TCM today: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, at 5:15 PM. So I made a point of watching it to do a post on it here.

Caractacus Potts (Dick Van Dyke) is a widower inventer in circa-1910 England who has a past as a racecar driver. But his car suffered a fiery accident and is now junk, so he's been reduced to various inventions, none of which work, while trying to raise his two children Jemima (Heather Ripley) and Jeremy (Adrian Hall) and living with a grandfather (Lionel Jeffries) who in the present day would probably be considered to have dementia.

One of Potts' inventions that has failed is a type of candy that unfortunately has holes in it, from the sugar being boiled to the wrong temperature, as Truly (Sally Ann Howes) tells him. She's a woman rich enough to have a car of her own and drive it, she having picked up the kids from the junk dealer since they were supposed to be in school. In any case, it's clear that Truly and Caractacus start off on the wrong foot.

On the bright side, it turns out that the candy does have some use to it. All those holes mean tht it can be used as a flute, making it a novelty candy. Potts goes to see the local candy manufacturer, Lord Scrumptious (James Robertson Justice) about selling the rights to manufacture the candy to him, which would bring in some royalties to the Potts family. It's here that we learn that Truly is in fact Truly Scrumptious, daughter of Lord Scrumptious, which would explain why she knows about candy.

Potts gets the money to buy back his racecar from the junkyard, tinkering with it and actually getting it to run, so he takes it down to the beach for a picnic with his two kids. Truly has shown up there as well, and the kids like her, not having a mother of their own. They invite her to picnic with them, and eventually Dad starts telling the kids a story about the ship that's just offshore.

The story is that the ship is a pirate ship sent by the head of Vulgaria, Baron Bomburst (Gert Fröbe). He's learned about Potts' car which is a magical car that has the power to float and fly, and he'd like that car for himself. So he sends of spies to get the car. They're bumbling, so they accidentally capture Grandpa instead, forcing Caractacus, Truly, and the kids to fly over in the car, named "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang", to Vulgaria to rescue Grandpa.

Meanwhile, the Baron's wife (Anna Quayle), hates children, so she's outlawed them and all of the children are in hiding, which is why the villagers are horrified when Jemima and Jeremy show up. A toymaker (Benny Hill) hides them, and eventually helps Potts and Truly rescue all of the kids.

When Ben Mankiewicz presented this one back in July, he quoted a critic from, I think, Time magazine who wrote that Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was "a movie for the ages... the ages between 5 and 12" and went on to savage the movie. I'd have to say that it's easy to see why a critic would write something like that. The movie runs way too long for a story like this, at 147 minutes. Albert Broccoli, who had been producing the James Bond movies, brought in the Sherman brothers from Disney to write songs for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and if you don't care much for Disney music, you're going to hate the musical numbers here. Unfortunately, I'm one of those people who doesn't care much for the Sherman brothers songs, which repeatedly bring the movie to a screeching halt.

Worse, what's supposed to be the fun part of the story, when Dad starts telling the kids about Vulgaria and the movie turns to fantasy, doesn't come until over an hour into the proceedings. I understand the need for a set-up to introduce Dad and Truly, but there's also a long scene at a carnival that could have been excised, along with one or more of the musical numbers.

Still, if you've got young kids, they may enjoy Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. And then irritate you for weeks with the songs.