the death of sandra dee
by Douglas Messerli
Bronte
Woodard and Allan Carr (screenplay, based on the musical by Jim Jacobs and
Warren Casey), Randal Kleiser (director) Grease
/ 1978
Having
just watched the film musical Grease again
the other afternoon, I am even more amazed at the remarkable success of the
work, at one point one of the highest grossing movies, and voted on Channel 4’s
100 greatest musicals, the “best musical” ever. For me the film doesn’t hold
up, and perhaps was never more than a kind of spirited winking at the 1950s
world for folk who weren’t yet born during that decade. Surely it has very
little to do with anything I experienced growing up during the same time.
The “legendary” dance numbers are mostly intense posturings by the affable John Travolta playing Danny Zuko; as I’ve said elsewhere, he may be a dancer (at times he even moves like one), but director Randal Kleiser hardly ever allows us to even catch glimpse of his foot work; yes, Travolta’s body shifts and swerves, girls go flying through his legs, and his hands move with Egyptian precision as if he were a cool hipster, but a good imitator and a fast camera might achieve the same tricks. Australian-born Olivia Newton-John as Sandy Olsen has an appealingly fresh face and a pleasant voice, and Jeff Conaway as Kenickie at least has the look of the period down cold.

Even the film’s several nods to Rebel without a Cause merely reveal its
emptiness, particularly in the scene paralleling the game of “chicken,” which
in the original sends one car and its driver over a seaside cliff. Here the
scene is played out in the protective culvert of the Los Angeles river, where
only a little bit of mud might send the speedster’s out of control. Even the Ben Hur reference to the evil Leo’s
attempts to drill through Danny’s car, result in little more than a flat tire,
and the race comes to end with both sides blithefully surviving.
In between, Kleiser stuffs his movie with
other iconic figures from the period, including Eve Arden, Dody Goodman, Sid
Ceasar, Joan Blondell, Ed Byrnes, Alice
Ghostley, Fannie Flagg, and Sha-Na-Na, as if that might convince us that his
picture was an honest presentation of day. Strangely, all it did for me was to
shift my sympathies from the attractive youth to the rumpled elderly. Certainly
Arden, Ceasar, Goodman and Blondell were far wackier, out of control, and were
much more fun. Kookie, of “lend me your comb” fame, always had better-looking
hair—and still does in this film.
Oh, did I forget to tell you the story? Boy meets girl and falls in love. Unfortunately, the new girl in town, an outsider from another country, discovers herself, after her splendiferously romantic summer, with the boy, attending the same Los Angeles school (much of it actually filmed in Venice High School) which he attends, and wherein he behaves completely differently, attempting to fit into the hipper hometown patterns of behavior. The poor girl feels betrayed, dismayed. But she soon discovers that there is no one way of behaving, especially in this big city of multiple realities. Even the conventionally rebellious Pink Ladies eventually accept her. By movie’s end the girl finds her own way of attracting the boy, “going bad”—as one of the potential Sandys, Marie Osmond, interpreted it—which merely consists of being sewn into a black leather body suit and shouting out “You’re the One That I Love!” Girl gets boy and everyone lives happily ever after. Rise up from the grave, Sandra Dee, all is forgiven!
Sound familiar? It should. It’s just
another version of what I have been describing as the sub-genre of L.A. movies,
“Rebels without a Home.”
Los Angeles,
December 6, 2012
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