It's surprising that it's taken me this long to catch up with the film adaptation of Bye Bye Birdie (1963, George Sidney), considering the knowledge of the stage musical I attained when covering my high school drama club's rehearsals of it as an intrepid school-paper arts reporter. (With several friends of mine acting in the school's Birdie production, I was frankly able to do as much hanging out as actual "reporting," but, hey, let's not split hairs, shall we?)
Perhaps subconsciously I had remembered that Bye Bye Birdie, aside from its catchy songs, is a feeble piece of musical theatre, defined by antiquated gender politics and low narrative stakes. What exactly does peachy small-town teen Kim McAfee (played in the film by Ann-Margret) hope to gain from winning a contest that allows her to share a kiss with her pop-star crush Conrad Birdie (Jesse Pearson)? Ten seconds of intense arousal, and...what else? Similarly, how is Kim's dad's (Paul Lynde, mugging up a storm) goal of seizing upon Kim and Conrad's televised kiss as a chance to pimp his brand of fertilizer to an audience of millions worthy of its own subplot? And I'm glad I had forgotten entirely about the villainous character of songwriter Albert's (Dick Van Dyke) mother, a vicious shrew of a woman utterly one-dimensional and mean-spirited in creative conception and played by a game Maureen Stapleton as well as any fine actress can play such a thin caricature.
Much like Stapleton, director Sidney (I wrote about his superior Scaramouche last week) does what he can with the material, which, luckily, turns out to be an awful lot. Sidney employs a gleefully '60s-kitsch-heavy style, full of whip pans, trippy bits of animation, aggressive camera movements, and even a framing device that features Ann-Margret breaking the fourth wall and shaking her ample bosom for the audience--all of which means that Bye Bye Birdie achieves intermittent exhilaration even if it's too dramatically puny to entirely satisfy. An energized nightclub crowd breaking into a hand-jiving rendition of "A Lot of Living to Do" is a particular highlight.
But one other central problem which the spirited musical numbers are tasked with disguising is the egregious miscasting of Pearson as Birdie. I hadn't heard of this actor before, and I'm not about to do too much research on him (it's fitting that there's no glamour photo accompanying his IMDB page), but his lack of charisma and affected gruff-old-man vocals are downright embarrassing. He comes off like Paul Schneider attempting a bad Jack Palance impression, which I realize sounds like all kinds of awesome, but trust me--it's just wrong in this context. I couldn't bid farewell to his take on Birdie soon enough. Grade: C+
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