Movie Movie is a dum-dum title for a pair of skillful parodies that were written by Larry Gelbart and Sheldon Keller under the provisional title Double Feature. The idea is to stir up our happy memories of early talkies—especially the Warners fight pictures and musicals, with their tenement-born heroes and heroines who conquered the big city…. The lines are stylized, cryptic: the dialogue of the thirties has been compacted into its essential clichés, which the characters innocently mismatch, so that the feelings they express go askew. And the way the characters say each other's names, as if to remind the person they're talking to of who he is, has a ritual quality…. (p. 501)
Movie Movie is almost terrific, but it's also a little flat. Some of the timing is off, and the second feature sags, but the problem goes deeper than these lapses. Watching the two linked features, we know that all our guesses about what's coming are going to be right—the authors aren't going to take the potentialities in the archetypal stories and throw a curve with them. They're going to stick to little jokes—and do exactly the same thing in both features…. The humor is almost all verbal, and though the fouled-up clichés are entertaining, you begin to wish that there had been a few additional gag writers brought in, to break the pattern of facetiousness and jump off from it. Movie Movie doesn't have the Dadaist mania that sometimes exploded in the movie satires Carol Burnett did on her show…. And Movie Movie could use some of that golden hysteria of taking the situations in old movies to a logical extreme, as Charles Ludlam does with the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, putting viewers' secret wild fantasies about the stars and the plot situations right into the story. Clearly, the moviemakers wanted to avoid sophistication, satire, and camp, and one can appreciate why. Their simple comedy-parody approach holds us for the length of Dynamite Hands. But Baxter's Beauties of 1933 is so cautious that we don't feel the thirties excitement of shrill voices backstage telling the dancers to get out there faster, faster, and we don't have the elation of the final "hit," when the lovable unknowns stop the show. (p. 504)
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