American Pop

Directed by Ralph Bakshi
1981
The United States of America

“I had this dream that animation could be the medium of the people...if Disney worked for the middle class, I was gonna work for the kids in the street.” - Ralph Bakshi

Somewhere in New York City, a skinny young man with hair as yellow as corn weaves in and out of a nerve-frayed punk wasteland. He carries a bag of narcotics which will soon pulsate through the veins of a generation of alienated musicians. It is the 1980s and everyone he meets seems bleary-eyed, sick, and apathetic. However, as he struts down the streets, he hears a sound which catches his attention: an Orthodox Jew singing a hymn. The young man stops, turns, adjusts his sunglasses to get a better look. Something stirs deep inside him and he begins to pulsate in time with the singing. As he walks away to meet his customers, the young man can’t shake the odd rhythm.

This young man is Pete Bolinski. And though he doesn’t know it, he has just reunited with a heritage that he didn’t even realize was his birthright. It is a heritage of culture and religion, of traditions lost in the shuffle of war and tragedy. It is a heritage of several generations of young men who in seeking to find their place in American society helped forge it. But most of all, it is a heritage of music; a heritage of American pop.

Audacious in scope and staggering in ambition, Ralph Bakshi’s American Pop is one of the great iconoclastic animator’s most indomitable films. The film manages to chart nearly 90 years of history in approximately the same number of minutes, creating a lush tapestry of emotion and drama that attempts nothing less than a summation of 20th century American popular music.

Most sources claim that American Pop follows four generations of the Bolinski family. But actually, it covers five. The first is Rabbi Jaacov Bolinski, the victim of a late 1890s pogrom in Tzarist Russia. As his community is attacked by Cossacks, Rabbi Jaacov forces his wife and ten-year-old son, Zalmie, to flee as he stays behind to finish his interrupted prayer and protect the Torah. The scene of Jaacov’s death, his family’s flight, and the ghetto’s destruction is set to the sounds of a Ukrainian religious chant. This haunting music is like a kaddish for the Bolinskis as they mourn the loss of their old lives, their old ways, their old songs.

As a nation of immigrants, American culture and music was borne not on its own shores, but from the tattered remnants of the Old Countries. In this way, Rabbi Jaacov Bolinski and his martyred songs are just as important as his descendants.

Zalmie and his mother eventually take up residence in New York City’s Lower East Side. While Mrs. Molinski slaves away in the garment-district, Zalmie finds work handing out chorus slips at burlesque houses. His talents as a singer are quickly discovered by the other performers. After Mrs. Molinski is killed in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company holocaust, Zalmie becomes a full-time performer specializing in “juveniles,” or roles that take advantage of his angelic voice.

But after receiving a vicious throat wound during World War One, he abandons the stage and falls in with mobsters so he can support his new wife and child, Benny.

As a teenager, Benny throws himself into the world of music and becomes a jazz piano virtuoso. And yet, there is something...off...about Benny. I suspect that today he would be diagnosed with either autism or Asperger’s. Painfully shy and rigidly introverted, he doesn’t even scream or cry when he watches his mother get accidentally killed by a bomb intended for Zalmie. He just silently watches and continues playing the piano.

He eventually marries the daughter of Zalmie’s mob boss and impregnates her. But it’s easy to suspect that if the marriage hadn’t been arranged, Benny would have lived a life of self-imposed celibacy

Despite Zalmie’s objections, Benny enlists to fight in World War Two. In one of the truly transcendent moments of Bakshi’s career, Benny discovers a piano in a bombed out building in Nazi Germany. As he begins to play As Time Goes By, a Nazi soldier emerges from the rubble and takes aim at him. Benny pauses for just a moment before playing the first few bars of Lili Marleen. The Nazi, overcome with emotion, closes his eyes. For a few short seconds they partake in a communion of beauty and joy. “Danke.” Gunshots. A blood-stained piano.

Cut to years later and Zalmie’s son, Tony, is a spaced-out pressure cooker of anger and fear who steals his stepfather’s car and goes on a cross-country roadtrip. During one stop in Kansas, he finds a moment of peace with a beautiful blonde-haired, blue-eyed waitress. We suspect that this tryst will be one of the last times that anything will truly make sense in his life. For Tony is so uptight that he seems doomed to self-destruction.

Once in San Francisco, Tony joins a six-piece rock group as a harmonica player. Visions of Haight-Ashbury, heroin, and rock ‘n’ roll coalesce into the mother of all bad trips that leaves his lover, the lead singer of the band (an amalgam of Grace Slick and Janis Joplin), dead of an overdose and himself stranded in New York City with a familiar-looking blonde-haired young boy.

Perhaps realizing that his continued presence will only serve to doom his son, Tony abandons the boy (after taking his acoustic guitar to pawn for drug money).

The boy eventually becomes a man: Pete Bolinski, drug-dealer extraordinaire for the New York punk scene. Just as Zalmie before him, Pete is a stranger in a strange land, forced to hustle for survival on the mean streets of NYC. And just like his fathers before him, he is destined for a career and future in American pop. One day he forces one of his clients to record one of his songs or he will cut off their supply. The band reluctantly agrees. The rest...is history.

American Pop saw the height of Bakshi’s talents both as a storyteller and an animator. The rotoscoping techniques that Bakshi experimented with in Wizards (1977) and The Lord of the Rings (1978) reach new levels of beauty and magnificence in American Pop.  By rotoscoping his characters (and historical footage from classic movies like The Public Enemy [1931] and Stormy Weather [1943]), the film exudes an aura of authenticity, almost like an animated documentary.

Unlike his earlier films like Heavy Traffic (1973) and Coonskin (1975) where characters were represented as extreme racial caricatures, Bakshi and his animators took great pains to detail every nook and cranny of their subjects. Some might find this technique repellant, but I think it highlights a facet of Bakshi’s work that has gone criminally under-appreciated and under-examined: his warm humanism.

As I see more and more of Bakshi’s films, the more and more I’ve come to view him as a cinematic humanist of the same caliber as Jean Renoir and Robert Bresson. Yes, Bakshi exploits crude stereotypes. He is provocative, but very rarely towards individuals. Bakshi’s crosshairs are always pointed at corrupt societies, manipulators, liars, con men, and sell-outs. His characters wear the grotesque labels of racism, homophobia, misogyny, and hatred as badges of honor, transforming them into weapons with which to annihilate the ignorant. Here in American Pop, Bakshi refuses to simplify his characters. They are fat, misshapen, ugly, scared, and transcendentally beautiful.

Some might say that American Pop is a tragedy that mourns the destructive influence of American society on the marginalized. But I think Bakshi had other ideas. Notice how, despite everything that the five generations of Bolinskis lose, they always have the music. It is an inexplicable bond that connects them together through the fires of war and the march of time. It is something that can never be broken, defined, or explained. It is the fire of the pogroms, the crowded seats of vaudeville halls, the bleary-eyed piano players, the human debris of the Lost Generation, and the punks with nothing to lose. It is American Pop.

A Word on Roger Ebert

The fact that I never got to meet Roger Ebert and say "thank you" for inspiring me to pursue film criticism will haunt me for the rest of my life. All I can think of is the scene in LIFE OF PI when Richard Parker left Pi.

"And then Richard Parker, my fierce companion, the terrible one who kept me alive, disappeared forever from my life. I wept like a child, not because I was overwhelmed at having survived, although I was...I was weeping because Richard Parker left me so unceremoniously. It broke my heart...I wanted to say 'Thank you Richard Parker, you saved my life. I love you.'"

Well you saved my life, Roger.
And you left before I could say goodbye.
You left before I could say, "I love you."

But I guess it's like Pi said:

"I suppose in the end, the whole of life becomes an act of letting go, but what always hurts the most is not taking a moment to say goodbye."

Goodbye, Roger Ebert.
I'll miss you.
I will always love you.

The Ballad of Little Jo

Directed by Maggie Greenwald
1993
The United States of America

In the American Western, there seem to be only three kinds of women: schoolmarms, hookers, and cowgirls. The schoolmarm, representing the encroachment of civilization in the savage West, is atypical of her harsh surroundings; a stranger in a strange land bringing culture and knowledge to the brutal and ignorant. The hooker, on the other hand, is an extension of the frontier itself. While they may get gussied up in French perfume and fancy finery, they are nevertheless an embodiment of lawlessness and exploitation; of disease and carnal commerce. And then there is the cowgirl. Donning the etiquette, manners, and iconography of her masculine counterparts, she is frequently framed as the object of desire and fetishization for a stalwart male hero; an untamed filly that must be broken in for a role of domesticity (or at the very least lassoed into a traditional heterosexual relationship).

These three women all have established spaces with the fictionalized world of the Old West that sustain and provide for them: the schoolhouse for the schoolmarm, the saloon for the hooker, and the ranch for the cowgirl. Though very different, they all play crucial societal roles.

But the mythology of the Old West is just that: a mythology. Not every woman who braved the Western frontier had a place carved out for them by society. Many had to improvise their own role. Those that did were faced with more than just the hostility of the unknown, uncontrollable wilderness. These women had to contend with an insidious, institutionalized misogyny that was ready and more than willing to prey on those who didn’t stay “in their place.”

Josephine Monaghan was one such woman. The true story of her life seems more of fiction than fact: after being disowned by her parents for having a child out of wedlock, she moved to Idaho and became a successful rancher for 30 years, all the while masquerading so successfully as a man that her true identity was only discovered upon her death. How did she manage such an illusion for so long? How did nobody find out? And why did she feel like she needed to dress as a man?

Maggie Greenwald’s The Ballad of Little Jo attempts to address these mysteries by charting Jo’s years of exile. The film begins with young Josephine traveling alone on a road on her way West. Immediately she is beset upon by men who view her as sexual prey. After escaping from a group of soldiers who try to rape her (after an older man that she thought was her friend attempted to sell her), she cuts her hair, scars her face, trades her skirts for pants, and becomes ‘Jo.’ Notice the scene where Josephine buys a set of men’s clothes. The shop-keeper, an old lady, scowls, “It’s against the law to dress improper to your sex.” This, of course, happens right after a muddy, terrified, and disheveled young woman bursts into her store asking if she’s seen two soldiers. She doesn’t say it out loud, but the look in the shop-keeper’s eyes reveal that she has put two and two together: this poor young woman was sexually assaulted. And yet, when she tries to buy men’s clothes to prevent future attacks, the shop-keeper chastises her. Herein we discover one of the most unsettling yet vital truths about the Old West: to act outside of one’s societal role is inexcusable. If Josephine must be raped, then so be it. Better for her to get sexually assaulted as a woman than for her to pretend to be a man.

Eventually Jo arrives at Ruby City, a crude mining camp populated by filthy workers searching for gems and gold. There are few, if any women. If there are wives, sisters, and daughters, then we do not see them. Periodically a traveling band of prostitutes come by and all of the men dutifully take their turn. Little Jo, having already been accepted as a man, is viciously mocked for refusing one of the prostitute’s advances. “Little Jo, I think you should reconsider. A man can get diseases he don’t do it regular,” one of them wisely explains. It’s not enough that Little Jo looks, acts, and talks like a man. Jo must go through the motions expected of a man to be accepted as one.

But still Jo refuses. Suddenly Jo is looked upon by the other men with a confused curiosity and a growing resentment. So after learning the basics of frontier life from Percy, an exiled Englishman who nurses a grudge against the female sex, Jo spends five years as a shepherd tending the flock of a man named Frank Badger. Periodically spending months without human contact, Badger worries that Jo might go crazy. But Jo assures Badger that the loneliness “suits me.”

After saving enough money, Jo purchases a homestead way out yonder where her only neighbor is Badger. But one day while visiting Ruby City, Jo encounters Badger and a group of men lynching a ‘Chinaman’ for trying to “take our jobs.” After saving him, Badger and the others force Jo to employ him as a housekeeper so he won’t simply wander to another town and take a job away from another honest white man. Jo refuses, but eventually relents, adopting the ‘Chinaman,’ whose name is revealed to be Tinman Wong. At first, Tinman seems to be mentally slow and stupid. But after just three days, he reveals that he knows Jo’s secret. But Tinman explains that he has a secret, too: he is only pretending to be stupid. After 15 years of inhuman treatment while working on the railroad, Tinman, whose real name is ‘Tien Ma,’ learned that the best way to survive was to keep his head down and play the part of the stupid ‘Chinaman.’

The two strike up a passionate love affair, living a kind of role-reversed life where Jo is the masculine bread-winner and Tinman the feminine home-maker and cook. Both living in a society that affords them no place, Jo and Tinman find sanctuary in both their little homestead and in each other. It is here that Greenwald’s genius as a director and a social commentator truly emerges. Take one scene where Jo longingly stares at Tinman while he bathes. The visual grammar of the scene is directly reminiscent of the traditional male gaze.

Later, during a scene where Jo and Tinman cuddle together in bed after making love, they share a fascinating conversation that seems to summarize both the film and Greenwald’s artistic intent:

Tinman: [Regarding a picture of Jo before she got pregnant] Who is this society girl?
Jo: It’s me. Can you imagine?
Tinman: I like you much better as you are.
Jo: Why?
Tinman: This white girl would never do this with me.

Looking back over what I’ve written so far, I’ve noticed that I’ve skipped over much of the film’s plot: Jo’s tragic friendship with Percy, Jo’s relationship with a family of homesteaders, an Eastern corporation’s attempts to buy out all of the local land via terrorism and groups of men in white masks, and even Jo’s inevitable death and discovery. But the plot is secondary in importance to the character of Little Jo. The film is not necessarily concerned with what happened to Josephine Monaghan when she moved out West, but instead with why and how they happened. How did a refined, educated high society woman survive for 30 years on the Idaho frontier? Why did Josephine become Jo? How did she manage to deceive everyone for decades? Why were the men so easily duped?

I like Roger Ebert’s theory that the men of Ruby City were fooled into thinking Little Jo was a man because on some sub-conscious level they chose to believe it. As he wrote: “So ingrained was the notion that only men could do "men's work," Greenwald says, that if a woman could ride and rope and run a ranch, she was accepted as a man even in the face of other evidence.” How ironic. Could it be that the very societal forces that damned Josephine in the first place were in part responsible for the success of her transformation into Jo? Perhaps. Perhaps not. All that’s clear is that the Old West was no place for a woman who wasn’t a schoolmarm, a hooker, or a cowgirl. Make of that what you will.

Bangue Bangue (Bang Bang)

Directed by Andrea Tonacci
1971
Brazil

In a stark white bathroom, a young man wearing nothing but grey shorts, a pair of sunglasses, and a cheap monkey mask pours himself a drink. Bringing it to his lips (or rather, the flimsy monkey ones), he spills most of it into the ruddy sink below him. He is surrounded by two large mirrors: the first, on the bathroom cabinet, capturing his bizarre visage and the second, on the wall, a massive film camera. Picking up a small electric razor, the man begins to buzz away at the mask’s whiskers. Slamming the cabinet shut, he turns around and stares directly at the camera, the giant machine now reflected in the sunglasses. He begins to sing.

“I dreamed that you were so beautiful/at a party of rare splendor.
I still remember your ball gown/it was white, white, all white, my love.
The orchestra played some plaintive waltzes/I took your arms and we started dancing, both in silence.”

In a hotel lobby, three muddied bandits cavort and crawl on the floor. The first, a beefy transvestite, crams fruit and foodstuffs into her mouth in large chomps. The second, a blind man, trips over onto the ground and fires his pistol randomly at the walls. The third, a smartly dressed man in a white suit, herds them into an elevator. They head up, up, up...but to where?

On the streets of São Paulo, a man gets into a fight with a taxi driver when he keeps missing his turn. In a crammed bedroom a magician summons birds and human beings instantly with the snap of a finger. On a rooftop a woman dances to the sound of a guitar. In a bar, a drunk harasses another patron. Another fight breaks out between taxi driver and customer. Somewhere a car chase ends in death and destruction. Again the three bandits, shooting and eating. Again a man singing in a bathroom, this time sans monkey mask. A man and woman repeat the same conversation five times in a row. At long last, one bandit tries to explain the plot, but is quickly silenced by a cream pie.
As bizarre scene cuts to bizarre scene, the audience grows restless. What is the point? Who are these characters? What are they doing? Do these questions even HAVE answers?

If they do, director Andrea Tonacci isn’t telling. For these are questions borne from watching Bang Bang (1971), one of the most radical, infuriating, intriguing, and bold Brazilian films ever made. A self-described “Maoist detective comedy,” Bang Bang is a film that, for one reason or another, never quite begins. There are characters, but no motivations. There are story developments, but no explanations. There are chase scenes bereft of impetus, explanation, and resolution.

Do not make the mistake of dismissing Bang Bang as a meaningless exercise in cinematic deconstruction. There was a distinct method to Tonacci’s madness, one rooted in the chaotic maelstrom of late 60s, early 70s Brazilian society. Between 1960-1972, a new movement known as Cinema Novo swept through Brazil. Largely inspired by Italian Neorealism, the French New Wave, and early Soviet filmmakers, the directors of Cinema Novo sought to re-invigorate Brazilian cinema, which had become artistically stagnant thanks to Hollywood saturating the Latin American film market, and politically mobilize the public against Western cultural imperialism. Their films sought out the dark, destructive areas of Brazilian life where social and economic contradictions were most endemic. They were more than just films; they were calls to action within Brazilian society.

 The poster of Nelson Pereira dos Santos' Vidas Secas (1963), one of the most important films from the early days of Cinema Novo.

However, as the 60s lumbered forward and the Brazilian government was swallowed by a military coup and a subsequent coup-within-a-coup, Cinema Novo began to evolve into a parody of its past self, adopting deliberately kitschy, gaudy stories and aesthetics in a desperate attempt to remain publicly, politically, and culturally relevant. By the end of the decade, Cinema Novo had polished itself to such a staggering extent that it had transformed into a cheap reflection of the very cinema that it had attempted to distance itself with in the first place.

 Compare the poster for Vidas Secas with this poster for Joaquim Pedro de Andrade's Macunaíma (1969). Macunaíma was one of the later Cinema Novo films that deliberately tried to appeal to the masses.

Disgusted with the state of Cinema Novo, a new movement began in the city of São Paulo: Udigrudi (the Brazilian pronunciation of ‘underground’) cinema. Udigrudi cinema basked in all that was dirty and provocative. While Cinema Novo desperately tried to court the general populace into the movie theater, the Udigrudi spat in their mouths and kicked them out the door. As Udigrudi director Rogério Sganzerla announced: “I will never deliver clear ideas, eloquent speeches, or classically beautiful images when confronted with garbage.”

 Compare the previous two posters with this one for José Mojica Marins' At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul (1964), the first entry in the Coffin Joe series and one of the earliest Udigrudi films.

The most popular and enduring films of the Udigrudi movement were the Coffin Joe horror series by José Mojica Marins. But while Marins managed to court financial success with his films, the other Udigrudi filmmakers were less enthusiastic about appealing to the public. Of these remaining films, Tonacci’s Bang Bang was one of the three most notorious. The other two were Sganzerla's The Red Light Bandit (1968) and André Luiz Oliveiraʼs Meteorango Kid: Intergalactic Hero (1969). The Red Light Bandit told the story of Jorge, a criminal in Boca do Lixo who robbed and raped the rich. Comprised mostly of disjointed scenes and episodes, the film eschews what Ismail Xavier termed “psychological coherence” and functioned more as a collage of film genres and a meta-textual statement on the nature of cinema. Meteorango Kid: Intergalactic Hero, on the other hand, follows Lula, a disenchanted teenager from Bahia, amidst the political turmoil of the late 1960s via a kaleidoscopic wash of pop music, bizarre images, and abstract daydreams.

The posters for The Red Light Bandit and Meteorango Kid: Intergalactic Hero.

Like The Red Light Bandit and Meteorango Kid: Intergalactic Hero, Bang Bang abandoned traditional narrative devices. But whereas those two films did so in order to make broader examinations of the cinema and Brazilian culture, Bang Bang concerned itself with the dissection and destruction of narrative storytelling. With Bang Bang, Tonacci stripped the diegetic world of cinema of context, interpretation, and relevancy. With a mere 85 minutesʼ worth of celluloid, he forced narrative cinema into obsolescence.

So ignore the monkey mask, the bandits, the magician, the conversations, the arguments, the car chases if you can. You will find no narrative solace. Here there be dragons. With Bang Bang, Tonacci has presented the world with a cinematic Möbius strip: a story-less story, a narrative-less narrative.

Skidoo

Directed by Otto Preminger
1968
The United States of America

 
The year was 1968 and the writing was on the wall. Vietnam was burning, students were rioting, hippies were dancing, and Hollywood was failing. As ticket prices dropped, studios began selling their backlots and props just to make ends meet. The legendary stars of the past were shoved aside to make room for teenage heartthrobs like James Dean and Elvis Presley. Hollywood just couldn’t comprehend these bizarre Baby Boomers who craved sex and violence, rebellion and rock ‘n’ roll. The first faint glimmers of the Hollywood New Wave could be seen on the horizon, heralding the birth of a new generation of filmmakers and actors at the expense of the old. It was from this environment that Otto Preminger’s Skidoo seemed to burst into existence both fully-formed and irrevocably apathetic. With nothing left to lose, the film saw a mixture of the Hollywood old guard and a pantheon of 50s television stars throwing up their hands towards the future and saying with one voice, “Screw it. We give up.”

In a quiet, picturesque neighborhood nestled somewhere in the American suburban wasteland of the late 1960s, retired hit-man Tony Banks (Jackie Gleason) is suddenly ordered back to active duty by his old mob boss “God.” At first Tony refuses, having grown quite comfortable with his new life of Teflon frying pans, tacky furniture, and color television. But when one of his close friends is soon discovered in a car wash with a bullet in his brain, Tony reluctantly agrees.

His target is his old pal “Blue Chips” Packard (Mickey Rooney), a crook with a date with the US Senate’s Crime Commission. In order to “silence” Packard before he gets a chance to testify, Tony gets sent to Alcatraz Island where he is being held in an impervious prison cell of the future. To get to Packard, he must team up with Fred the Professor, a draft-dodging, brown rice eating electronics genius who just happens to be one of his cellmates, so they can modify a television set to communicate with him inside his cell. But after making contact, Tony realizes that he can’t go through with it. Knowing that “God” will never rescue him from Alcatraz if he doesn’t perform the hit, Tony begins to plot one of the strangest prison breaks in history.

But while Tony languishes in Alcatraz, his wanna-be hippie daughter Darlene (Alexandra Hay) and her spaced-out boyfriend Stash (John Phillip Law) decide to confront “God” on his yacht located deep (and permanently) within international waters. They find “God” (played by Groucho Marx in his final film appearance) unwilling to change his mind despite having long since grown tired of his self-imposed exile. When her mother Flo (Carol Channing) discovers that “God” has effectively taken her prisoner, she rallies a massive group of hippies and storms his yacht like pirates.

To make matters even worse, at that moment Tony and Fred arrive at the yacht in a massive hot air balloon made of freezer bags and garbage cans that they used to escape Alcatraz after spiking the prison’s food supply with LSD. In a sequence that seems oddly reminiscent of Groucho’s earlier film Duck Soup (1933), the characters scurry around like madmen in a bacchanalian frenzy of outrageous costumes, music, and crowded sets as a couple are married, a family is reunited, and an old mob boss suddenly dressed as a Hare Krishna smokes a joint and slips away.

For a film by Preminger, a director most known for his legendary output as part of the Hollywood studio system during the 1940s and 1950s, Skidoo displays an unusually vicious contempt for the entertainment industry, American society, and new technological advancements. It’s very easy to miss considering the film’s music and tone, but it is definitely there. Take the virtuoso sequence that occurs during the film’s first five minutes, for example. An animated title sequence featuring a dancing caricature of Preminger zooms out to reveal a television set. Suddenly, the television rapidly changes channels through a kaleidoscope of bizarre programming. First a Senate hearing. Then a skinny blonde woman with a pink pearl necklace, “Now you, too, can be beautiful and sexually desirable like me.” Back to the hearing. Now back to the woman, “Instead of that fat, disgusting, foul-breathed, slimy, wallowing sow that you are...” Now John Wayne on a battleship. Now a fat Bavarian drinking foamy beer. John Wayne. A noisy pig. “You’ll never lose your man if you drink ‘Fat’ Cola.” John Wayne. Two children and a dog smoking cigarettes. The hearing. “Get a gun for everyone in your family. Remember, for family fun, get your gun!” And all the while Flo can be heard complaining, at one point even chiming: “No, Harry, I don’t like films on TV. They always cut them to pieces.”

Skidoo’s America is one of artificial people trying, and failing, to put up a better front around others. Gleason’s Tony is a bloated, short-tempered grouch. Stash and the hippies are ignorant, easily manipulated morons. The local mayor occupies himself with “anti-ugliness” campaigns. Fred claims to despise technology while neck-deep in circuitry. Even the futuristic, technological creature comforts that dominate the film’s interiors fail to work properly. Take one scene where Flo tries to seduce a gangster in order to gain information on Frank’s whereabouts. His “pad” is an automated No Man’s Land of malfunctioning gadgets and gizmos: the remote-controlled lights and stereo go haywire, a liquor cabinet sputters open and closed, and a mechanical bed that rises from the floor accidentally drags her underground.

And then there are the drugs. LSD, marijuana, birth control pills...the film is a cornucopia of chemical delights. During the prison-wide LSD-fueled freak-out, garbage cans dance, guards collapse in laughter, and visiting government officials...*ahem*...lose their composure. In an earlier scene, Tony unwittingly licks an LSD-laced envelope, resulting in one of the best drug-trip sequences of the 1960s (“Mathematics! I see mathematics!”). Preminger seems to condemn them one moment as the playthings of the stupid and unmotivated and then at other moments praise them as the means through which individuals can escape the conformist nightmare of Vietnam-era America.

So what’s the point of the film? Perhaps there isn’t one. Perhaps Preminger merely wanted to air out a career’s worth of dirty laundry within the confines of a film that his producers would overlook and the critics would casually dismiss. Perhaps the film finally gave voice to Preminger’s long-held frustrations with his adopted culture. But perhaps we’re over-thinking it. Whatever the case, Skidoo is a technicolor enigma of pop culture detritus. It must be seen to be believed. But don’t expect to understand it instantly. As some are wont to point out, you never get high your first time.