Red Garters (1954).....spent the entire running time shaking our heads in disbelief.....how in the holy hell did this one roll off the Paramount Pictures assembly line? In the midst of friggin 1954, smack in the middle of America's age of complacent conformity.
C'mon, seriously? A musical spoof of westerns? And rendered not outdoors, but amid simple, stark, stylized theatrical sets.....as if we're watching a 91 minute comedy skit on live TV.....
What an incredibly bold move for at 50's film. Audiences didn't know what to make of it, avoiding the film in droves. One look at the singing cowboy meandering through a soundstage backdrop of a yellow floor and wall with a few cardboard replicas of buildings.....no wonder what few people showed up headed for the exits.
We guess they didn't understand that the deliberate artifice on display was part of the joke.......
The musical itself was overloaded with energetic songs and dances.....but the songs were unmemorable and the dancing was nothing but the usual one-two-three kick stuff that everyone saw in a hundred other musicials.
That was a damn shame for the film's lead star Rosemary Clooney (yes, George's auntie), She commands the screen, sings up a storm and functions as the only character who's even remotely similar to an actual human being.
Everybody else, Jack Carson, Gene Barry, Guy Mitchell, and the cringe-inducing Cass Daly (drenched in red dye as a woo-woo-woo Injun) hams it up like they're on the Sid Caesar Comedy Hour.
You can however, have a brief bit of fun watching a young Buddy Ebson (the future Beverly Hillbilly Jed Clampett) in his days as an expert, rubber-limbed dancer.
3-D was supposed to have been applied here, which might have even enhanced the bizarre fake stagecraft of the sets and backdrops, but that didn't happen, so the film went out as is.......looking like a community theater amateur night wingding.
But let's do hear it for the prolific, legendary costumer Edith Head, who colorfully dressed the entire cast to outshine (or at the very least equal) that bright yellow wall behind them.
Five years later, Paramount would try mounting a film the same way with their 1959 version of the hit Broadway musical 'Li'l Abner'.
But the fake stylized prop sets fit 'Abner' perfectly. It was, after all, based on a comic strip with deliberately buffoonish, cartoonish characters. And besides that, the songs were way catchier and the lines way funnier.
Let's do credit the 'Red Garters' team for attempting an all-out spoof almost a decade before over-the-top spoofery became a Hollywood staple. Nice try.....and the cast work their spurs and petticoats into ground to put it across.
Strictly for film musical completists and anyone seeking out the most bizarre, studio-produced oddities they can feast their eyes on.
We doubt either group will be disappointed. 2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2)
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