Bye Bye Birdie – 54 Movies in my 54th Year #54 (Wild Card Movies)

For my second-to-last birthday I decided to embark on a new movie watching challenge (similar to ones I’ve done before here and here). The year’s challenge was to do four streams of films, and watch one of each stream in each month. On top of that, we had six “wild card” slots through out the year, to bring it up to 54th movies for my 54th year (I was 53 when I put all this together). You can read more about the plan here. This is post #54.

However, although I completed the goal of watching the films before my birthday, I am behind on doing the write-ups. Consequently, I’m now 54, and I still have two more posts to write-up.

Spoilers Ahead

Bye Bye Birdie (1963)

Directed by: George Sidney

Viewing Stream: Wild Card
I started off with these “Wildcard” films being just random picks, but before I knew it they all ended up being musicals.  Then somewhere along the way I realized that I was choosing musicals that were made in different decades (the 30s, 40s, 50s, 70s, and 80s).  So that meant with this final pick of the stream, and indeed of the whole challenge, I was going to go for a musical from the 60s. And after a quick search of the internet, we landed on Bye Bye Birdie.

What it is about: When rock ‘n’ roll superstar Conrad Birdie is drafted into the army, a world of fans go into mourning. Rosie DeLeon, a member of Birdie’s promotion team, come up with the idea of having the star kiss a lucky fan on The Ed Sullivan Show and sing a song written by her songwriter boyfriend Albert Peterson. Teenager Kim MacAfee is chosen to kiss Birdie, over the objections of Kim’s boyfriend Hugo. The conflicting interests of Rosie, Albert, Albert’s mother, Kim, Hugo, Kim’s parents, and a troupe of Russian ballet performers all come to a head as the show approaches. In the end, Hugo runs on stage and punches Birdie out before the kiss takes place. The movie ends with multiple happy couples finding love together, including Kim & Hugo, Rosie & Albert and Albert’s mother & Mr. Maude (a widower she has met).

Starring Ann-Margaret as Kim, Janet Leigh as Rosie DeLeon, Dick van Dyke as Albert Peterson and Bobby Rydell as Hugo. Paul Lynde and Mary LaRoche play Kim’s parents Harry & Doris. Maureen Stapleton is Albert’s mother Mae, Jesse Pearson plays Conrad Birdie, and Ed Sullivan appears as himself.

My Thoughts: Here we are, at the very end of this whole year of guided film viewing. We conclude with Bye Bye Birdie, which is just a wacky film, perhaps the most culturally-foreign movie that I’ve seen in this entire series–and this in a year that has included watching Dodes’ka-den and The Passion of Joan of Arc and La Nana. I think there is just something about musicals that brings out the most extreme elements of any film aesthetic, and maybe high-energy comedies of the 1960s are already a strange place to start.

The film’s plot is like a juiced-up sit-com, with multiple overlapping plots dealing with all sorts of obstacles that the staging the last big performance of singing superstar Conrad Birdie (a barely-veiled take on Elvis Presley) before he joins the army. There is, for example, the romantic stress between Rosie and Albert; there is Albert’s overly-submissive devotion to his mother; there is Hugo’s jealousy of Kim; and there is Kim’s overly protective father and all that Albert must promise him to get his permission to put Kim on TV. And if that’s not enough, there is also a bunch of difficulties with the Russian Ballet and their demandingly-long performance that threatens to derail the whole endeavour, which is only overcome thanks to an invention of Albert (in addition to a song-writer, the man is also a brilliant biochemist) that makes animals and people move around at super-speed.

Yes, that’s really what happens. It’s all just completely bonkers.

And all this wacky storytelling is held together by a bunch of outrageous musical set pieces, kind of like a bizarre love-child of West Side Story and The Brady Bunch. It starts with an awkwardly dated production where all the town’s teenagers are gossiping together over the phone, and just gets cringier as it goes along. There is, for instance, the bit where Birdie plays for the people of the town and knocks the entire population unconscious with his sexual magnetism. There’s another strange number where Janet Leigh intentionally dances seductively to a group of Shriners, only to regret it when they get a bit too excited and do all they can to try to molest her. It’s all well-staged and performed, but just so weirdly conceived–I found myself just staring at a lot of it, a bit agape.

Eventually, though, the movie began to win me over, and I began to appreciate its bizarre charm. My favorite number was A Lot of Livin‘ to Do, which features Birdie, Kim and Hugo all dancing and singing at the local club, and Ann-Margaret, Bobby Rydell and Jesse Pearson each give it their all.

It’s where Hugo seems for the first time to be a real match for Kim (up until that point he’s just been wrapped around her little finger), and allows for Kim to show some vulnerability. And it’s where the movie’s exuberance and passion shine through with real authenticity, rather than just feeling like a strange relic of a bygone era.

Janet Leigh and Dick van Dyke are the top-billed in this movie, and they both get their moments to shine, but there is no doubt that the real star of this picture is Ann-Margaret. She’s not the only one who is good, but she gets the most screen-time, the most close-ups and the most songs. And there is no doubt that she is crazy beautiful and talented. This is the movie that got her the leading lady role opposite Elvis Presley in Viva Las Vegas (a film I watched a few years ago on earlier viewing-challenge). But there her role was apparently reduced so as to not outshine Presley–here there is no such opposition. It’s a much clearer opportunity for the young star (in her early 20s at the time) to shine.

This is actually the third film of hers that I’ve watched in these viewing challenges–the other one was a dramatic turn in The Cincinnati Kid, in which she was very good. All three of these movies came out in a two year period, which just goes to show how impressive she is as a performer.

And with these revelations about Ann-Margaret, we bring this past year’s movie watching challenge to a close. We’ll be giving it a rest before I embark on something like this again. In the meantime, I appreciate, as always, all the worlds that this deliberate viewing strategy has brought me to, from the different countries and different storytelling styles, including to the glitz world of big budget, crowd-pleasing musicals from the 1960s.

Check out the Masterlist here.