'LI'L ABNER'.......THE COUNTRY'S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS......

Li'l Abner (1959) might best be viewed as if it were exhumed from a 58 year old time capsule.....so you don't have to politically correct yourself and wince at its unbridled, downright cheerful 1950's objectifying of women. (Daisy Mae, the voluptuous leading character is usually greeted with "And how is your well-proportioned little self doing today?" BQ doubts anyone today would try that on the current Wonder Woman)  Come on, it's simply too silly to take offense......and keep in mind, the men in this movie are largely depicted as clueless numbskulls.....equal opportunity.

          On the other hand, you can marvel at how contemporary "Lil Abner"  remains......since the entire movie functions, like the celebrated Al Capp comic strip it's based on, as a jabbing political satire......

         At the height of its popularity, Capp's nationally syndicated strip was the "Saturday Night Live" of its day, regularly poking gentle, but nevertheless pointed fun at politicians and celebrities. And Capp exercised  utter control over his large cast of characters (none of them could leave for movie careers), since they all sprung from his imagination and inkwell.  (In what you could consider an ironic twist of fate, Capp, the nation's dis-truster-in-chief of the Establishment, turned on the 60's counterculture and anti-Vietnam war movement, viciously lampooning them. )

          In the comic strip, Capp's population of primitively innocent,  deep-in-the-backwoods hillbillies invariably become targets of double-talking Washington DC bigwigs, which also served as the plot of the successful Broadway musical. Naturally the puffed up blowhards who so busily mismanage the government underestimate the wily resilience of the residents of Dogpatch, who aren't anywhere near as dumb as they behave....

        While most movie studios tinkered extensively with their adaptations of stage musicals (opening them up from the stylized proscenium arch to the real wide world), Paramount didn't have to go to such trouble......after all, the source material was a comic strip and the characters were broadly drawn cartoons. So "Li'l Abner" arrived on film exactly the way it looked on stage......with its cast prancing around massive,, brilliantly painted autumnal backwoods backdrops.  During some of the musical numbers, you can even spot the soundstage lights hanging over the edge of the blatantly artificial Dogpatch sky.....

        But the artifice fits the film perfectly......the seasoned cast, almost all of them brought over from the stage show, rip into their performances like it was opening night with all the critics in attendance.  Led by treasured comic tenor Stubby Kaye (who, as he did in 'Guys and Dolls', regularly, galvanizes the proceedings with showstopping numbers) , the actors have the time of their lives doing flesh-and-blood versions of outrageously funny cartoon characters.  It's an actor's dream come true.....in that.there's no limit to overdoing it. No wonder Jerry Lewis shows up for a brief cameo.....but he's still out-mugged by everybody else.

          Ah yes, the plot. The government scalawags, having decided that atomic bomb testing in Nevada might cause the Vegas crap tables to glow in the dark, decree that Dogpatch, the most 'useless, unnecessary place on earth' can best serve the country by being nuked to smithereens. Stubby Kaye and the Dogpatchers consider it an bestowed honor, still patriotically trusting our government (remember, this is pre-Vietnam, pre-Watergate)......and fervently launch into the show's signature song, "The Country's In The Very Best Of Hands"   Listen to the lyrics.....and you can hear a blistering indictment of political chicanery that could be sung today and ring true without a single word changed.

           Our sweetly naive hillbillies almost get swindled and duped by the evil, greedy General Bullmoose, who's like a template for a Trump cabinet appointee......he employs a chorus line of sycophants who routinely chant, "What's good for General Bullmoose...is good for the U.S.A.!" Bullmoose tempts Li'l Abner with the favors of his va-va-voom live-in secretary, Apassionata Von Climax, (Abner asks her, "Does that mean you get bed and board, ma'am? She replies, "Extremely.")

         And that brings us to what we first mentioned in this post....the women of "Li'l Abner", all of them created as inflated caricatures of the era's pin-up sex symbols. There's Stupefyin' Jones, who apparently is either robotic or created in a test tube, (we couldn't figure out which)  Moonbeam McSwine, a pig forever tucked under her arm, the previously mentioned Miss Von Climax and Li'l Abner's own beloved Daisy Mae, who's worried she' over the hill, still unmarried at age 18. You'll have to decide for yourself how much of this came from Al Capp's sardonic satire of the popular culture of the the day........we tried to forget that in his later years, Capp's reputation became severely tarnished by various women's accusations of Trumpian groping.

          Capp himself had nothing directly to do with the movie musical.....so BQ just enjoy it for what it is.....a cotton-candy colored bouncy confection in the best tradition of Broadway,  with dozens of funny actors singing catchy songs and hurling themselves into strenously brilliant dances (based on the choreography of Michael Kidd)    We'll give it four full jugs of the movie's muscle-building Yokumberry tonic. (****) Yeeee-hah......