HELLZAPOPPIN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 151, 15 May 1942, Page 14

HELLZAPOPPIN

(Universal)

" ANY similarity between Hellzapoppin and a motion picture is purely coincidental," says the foreword,

and it is to be taken at least as seriously as anything else in this madhouse production. From all accounts the similarity to a motion picture is rather closer than was the similarity of the original Hellzapoppin to a stage production when it made the all-time record for a musical show on Broadway by running for 1,404 performances to a total of nearly 5,000,000 customers; but it is still sufficiently distant to keep a movie audience wondering what on earth can happen next. In the stage show, half the cast spent most of their time off the stage careering around the auditorium: they can’t do that in the film, but they come as near to it as possible by shouting insults and instructions from the screen to the audience ("Go home "at once, Stinkey, your mother wants you!") by arguing with the operator-in~ the projection-box, and by censoring them-

selves at intervals. Other idiocies include a lost soul who wanders in and out of the picture with a plant in a flower-pot ‘which has grown into a large tree by the end of the show; another lost soul named Lena who rushes around shouting for somebody named Oscar; running the film backwards and sometimes upside down as well; characters who travel from one movie setting to another, change costumes as they go, and unearth many curiosities, including a little sledge symbolically labelled " Rosebud." The fount and origin of all this insanity are two vaudeville comedians named John Sigvard Olsen and Harold Ogden Johnson. Having made what I hope was their fortune with their: Broadway show they have now transferred their undoubted but very curious talents to the screen and have presented what they tell us is "a picture about a picture about Hellzapoppin." Which is as good a description as any other, for any attempt at a lucid explanation of this frantic extravaganza is as hopeless as

attempting to explain the state of the world or an exhibition of Modern Artboth of which cataclysms Hellzapoppin rather strikingly resembles. One might, of course, be severely practical and say that the film is merely a colossal hotchpotch’ of all the vaudeville gags, stunts, and skits of the past 50 years, plus all the camera-tricks that have ever been thought of; or one might go all "arty" and say that this is Surrealism in its Cinematic Form. Either way, it is perhaps some consolation that Hellzapoppin is hardly more crazy than the world ia which it was produced. One fact ‘is, however, certain — that this film is unique, and it’s up to you to decide whether that is an advantage. Not that you will be able to decide at once, For the first quarter-hour you will be wondering whether you haven’t by some chance come to a lunatic asylum instead of a picture theatre, and thereafter, having abandoned the attempt to find rhyme or reason anywhere (let alone a connected plot) you will probably be too busy laughing at the lunacy to do much thinking, as Olsen and Johnson caper about in company with Mischa Auer, Hugh Herbert, Martha Raye, and other half and quarter-wits. For, in spite of the fact that some of the gags missfire, most of them go off with a bang. If it is true that a little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men, then we may expect Hellzapoppin to attract all the wiseacres in the country, who will undoubtedly be found rolling in the aisles. After that it is pérhaps hardly modest of me to mention that there were times when even I found it difficult to keep my seat,