Cry-Baby

TCM is running a triple feture of John Waters movies tonight (November 9), and that includes one that I recorded some months back when it showed up in the Saturday afternoon musical matinee: Cry-Baby, at 10:00 PM. Seeing it on the upcoming schedule tonight at 10:00 PM, I made a point of watching it in order to be able to do a review on it here.

The movie is set in director Waters' hometown of Baltimore, in 1954, as we see when, over the opening credits, a bunch of members of the Class of 1954 at one of the high schools is receiving their polio shots, since that was a new thing back in 1954. Obviously, the needles hurt a bit, and one of the students, Wade Walker (Johnny Depp), nicknamed "Cry-Baby", sheds a single manly tear.

Getting a shot at the same time as Wade is Allison Vernon-Williams (Amy Locane), and her seeing that one solitary tear makes Allison swoon. There's only one problem, which is that the two come from completely different social strata. Cry-Baby is from a group calling itself the "Drapes", the sort of fake wanna-be tough guys who dress the part of the Marlon Brando biker gang from The Wild One, or John Travolta in Grease, the latter movie being a big influence on Cry-Baby. Allison, on the other hand, is one of the "squares", and the granddaughter of the grande dame of the local community (Polly Bergen). So naturally when Grandma hears that her granddaughter might like one of the Drapes, she's horrified.

While the squares look like the normal upper-middle-class stereotype of 1950s probity, dressing the part and going to charm schol and all that, the Drapes are totally different, and not just in dress. They also listen to the new sounds of rockabilly, the predecesor to rock and roll, and live a more bohemian life in the Turkey Point area where they all congregate. But the feeling between Allison and Cry-Baby is mutual, so he invites her to come out to Turkey Point, where some of the female Drapes give Allison a makeover and she gets to see Cry-Baby perform with his band.

This leads to disaster, however, as Allison's nominal boyfriend Baldwin (Stephen Mailer) finds out and brings his square friend to Turkey Point, where they harass the Drapes to the point that a riot breaks out. Because of the class differences, it's Cry-Baby who gets punished with a sentence to reform school until he turns 21. Cry-Baby hopes to break out, while the girl who thought she was Cry-Baby's girlfriend until Allison showed up, tries to drive a wedge between Cry-Baby and Allison.

It's easy to see why a movie like Cry-Baby became a bit of a cult movie, and why some people rate it so highly. It's a musical and a parody of both musicals and 1950s teen movies, and it has an incredibly infectious enthusiasm. It also has John Waters playing with convention and casting all sorts of people in roles you might not think of them as being suited for the roles they're given, like David Nelson, Troy Donahue, and Patty Hearst.

On the other hand, there's an air of artificiality that goes beyond just plain musical movie artificiality. While watching the movie, I couldn't help but think of things like David Lynch and the colors and camera angles he used at the beginning of Blue Velvet, or Baz Luhrmann's Strictly Ballroom. There's almost an air of kabuki theater at times in Cry-Baby, and that doesn't always work in the movie's favor as it's distracting to the atmosphere John Waters was hoping to create.

Still, for the most part, the successes outweigh the failures, so Cry-Baby is definitely a movie you should give a try.