The Fuzzy End of the Lollipop

Since when was the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre funny? Even fictionalised - as it is in this movie - it’s hardly a barrel of laughs, is it? Especially when you’re looking down the barrel of a Tommy gun. It’s enough to make you choke on your tooth-pick. Maybe being filmed in black and white disguises the brutality of the scene (this certainly is no Scarface or The Untouchables). The blood on his spats that he’s troubled by later - not as bad, surely, as the coffee (that isn’t really coffee) which had been spilled on them in an earlier scene - these are the least of the worries that the humourless, cardboard cutout villain of the piece should be concerned with, surely?

Transgender rights are hotly-contested these days. But if you’re hoping for a nuanced approach to such matters, you won’t find them here. And it has to be said that the two cross-dressing leads - playing a pair of wisecracking down-on-their-luck musicians who have inadvertently witnessed a slice of gang warfare - really don’t look all that convincing at all as members of the fair sex. Even in black and white. Where’s Robin Williams when you need him? It’s not just the much-put-upon manager of the all-female band that they infiltrate (in their attempt to escape the Chicago Mob) who appears to have lost his glasses - everybody else is just as myopic, and there can be no other explanation, surely, for how they get away with their implausible scheme for so long.

The film’s view of millionaires (they would be billionaires now, of course - such are the effects of inflation) is quaint, to say the least. The assumption that most of them would be octogenarians is clearly outdated. Silicon Valley geeks were clearly a thing of the future. A modern-day remake of this film would doubtless feature a villainous billionaire looking like just like ‘Dr Evil’, with an obsession with space - and the package that is delivered in a key scene containing an expensive bracelet for one of the cross-dressing leads that he has unaccountably fallen for (more shortsightedness at work, clearly), would now be delivered by the billionaire’s ubiquitous freight service (which would be named Orinoco, or something suitable exotic). But instead of which, we must contend with stereotypical investors in stocks, shares, and futures; and watch as their beady eyes lift up in concert from the columns of the Wall Street Journal to peruse a rather more shapely set of statistics heading their way - not our gender-bending protagonists, but the seductively-proportioned ukulele player who functions as the female lead of the movie.

By all accounts, she didn’t get on at all with her male opposite number, and so the joke about the frigidity of their characters’ on-screen relationship may have mirrored what was actually happening behind-the-scenes. Not that any of this seems to bother the other male lead, the double bass player - one shake of his maracas, and he’s being proposed to by a lecherous millionaire who bears absolutely no resemblance to Elon Musk. Give it another thirty years, mind…

The reliance upon coincidence to further the ridiculous plot is telling. The most obvious example of this is when the hoodlums end up staying at the same hotel (out of all the many, many possible candidates) as the fugitives, where their improbable disguise as lovers of Italian opera is as unlikely as the fate they come to as a result of a suspiciously overlarge birthday cake. Viewers might be forgiven for assuming that at this point the female lead would pop out of said cake singing, ‘Happy Birthday, Mr President.’ No such luck. Never mind the sheer implausibility of a guy with a submachine gun hiding in a cake. Instead, let’s all chuckle as the spat-wearing villain spats out his final line: ‘Big Joke.’ It’s no Madame Butterfly.

Lots of screwball comedy ensues, with endless running around frantically (so much so, I was expecting Benny Hill to turn up at one point, and for Yakety Sax to start playing). But no, the only sax on view belongs to the square-jawed Spartacus star (no, not Kurt, the other one) who the ukulele player has fallen for, hook, line and stinker - despite the fact that, by his own admission, all he call really offer her is coleslaw in the face, old socks, and a squeezed-out tube of toothpaste. What an implausible end for these characters - though not quite as much so as the fate that awaits not-Spartacus’ best buddy. Despite asserting his true masculinity at the very conclusion of the movie, he still faces the prospect of marriage to a dirty-minded Bill Gates-substitute. Wowser.

In the final analysis, it’s all a bit of a lemon. I’m sorry to have poured cold water on those who think this movie is some kind of classic. But what more can I say about the film director who gave us this unlikely piece of whimsy - other than this?

‘Well, nobody’s perfect.’