Hellzapoppin’

1941, H.C. Potter, USA

The 6pm screening will be preceded by the Annual General Meeting of The Wellington Film Society. This will take approximately 20 minutes, and the film’s end time has been adjusted accordingly – to about 7:45pm.

They truly don’t make films like Hellzapoppin’ any more. A comedy musical where the zaniness isn’t so much ‘plotted’ as ‘heaped up’, this vehicle for the vaudeville duo Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson hardly pauses for breath between jokes. Fittingly for the title, nothing is sacred, not even the boundary between the film and the audience.

Olsen and Johnson’s vaudeville shtick is completely inappropriate for the production of serious motion pictures, so at first it seems like the majority of this film will be the story described by the screenwriter Harry Selby (Elisha Cook, Jr.). Olsen and Johnson refuse to submit to the necessities of the dramatic Hollywood narrative, though, inserting themselves into the story and dragging it, kicking and screaming, off the rails.

The whole picture moves at the pace of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, the famed dance troupe who have the film’s showstopping number. From its groundbreaking employment of trick photography to the irony with which the film views its own romantic subplots, Hellzapoppin’ feels like it ought to be commonly known amongst comedy fans, up there with Mel Brooks and Zucker/Abrams/Zucker. After the rights were purchased in the 1960s, however, the film was withdrawn from syndication and faded from the public eye. While it was in theatres, though, it was a smash hit, with its box office figures surpassing even those classic comedians, Abbott and Costello.

“It follows no known formula, and its noisy, spectacular, and hilarious progress is like nothing ever seen on the screen before.” – Motion Picture Reviews, 1942