Can Can (1960)......this movie's primary claim to fame was being the only big-budget Hollywood musical that entertained a visit from the notorious Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev.....the Commie Boss of Bosses.
We Americans viewed Russian leaders as pretty much what they were...... real life Bond villains, forever up to no good. And Nikki K. was the practically type-cast for the role...... a few years after this movie came out, he more than lived up to the part by arming Cuba with nuclear missiles and almost touching off an H-bomb mano-e-mano with our new young President, John F. Kennedy.
But enough of that trivial backstory.......we're here to discuss what's really important.....
......mainly Khrushchev's utter disdain and disgust at long legged chorus girls, Shirley MacLaine and Frank Sinatra.
Who knew this bloviating, would-be Blofeld was such an astute film critic? (And of a movie he didn't even get to watch in its entirety.....)
Yes, we're with the old, tubby totalitarian in this opinion.
The movie stinks.
The idea here was to capture some of the Gallic magic and charm of Vincente Minelli's Academy Award winning Parisian musical 'Gigi' which enchanted everyone in 1958.
Well, nobody associates Sinatra and Shirley MacLaine with Gallic magic and charm, but nevertheless, they get shoehorned into the movie, alongside those smooth, suave 'Gigi' veterans Louis Jourdan and Maurice Chevalier.
Also thrown into this ungainly mess are a pile of Cole Porter songs, some of them from the heavily re-worked Broadway show and others just imported from other Porter shows........
None of this fits together and the movie lumbers along like a tired vaudeville show where the performers haven't heard the breaking news that vaudeville died years ago.
A few bright spots pop up here and there.......the presence of Juliet Prowse, a spectacular dancer and stunning beauty......(and later romanced by Sinatra and co-starring with Elvis Presley in "G,I. Blues", his first post-Army musical.
And we couldn't help chuckling at the now wildly inappropriate 'Apache Dance' number with five or six guys smacking around Shirley MacLaine and hurling her about like a crash-test dummy. The woke crowd would go into cardiac arrest at the sight of this.
As far as the title dance.......it's a bevy of girls rustling yards of costume material while shrieking as if they know in advance about the gendarmes bursting in to arrest them.
We'd say skip it altogether......tedious, ridiculously miscast and staged like everyone had one eye peeled on the lunch wagon.
Khrushchev and this movie deserved each other. 1 star (*)
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