The Beggar's Opera / Earth Girls Are Easy
Because they're both MUSICALS, see? And both involve Crimes.
The Beggar’s Opera (1953). Grade: C+. Earth Girls Are Easy (1988). Grade: D+
Sometimes, there’s a great joy in revisiting something you haven’t heard/seen/read in ages. You like it again, with the different perspective that your age now brings. It connects you to your younger self.
Other times, you go, “what was I thinking?”
I’m pretty sure I know what I was thinking when I enjoyed Earth Girls Are Easy in the late 1980s — and I still like what the writers were going for. But, not the execution, not so much.
Your plot is, there’s aliens in space, covered in Day-Glo fur (everything in the 80s had to have bright, garish colors), and they’re horny. They pick up a TV broadcast of a exercise video (again, very 80s) and it gets them excited about the “hairless” females. So they crash-land their spaceship into Geena Davis’s swimming pool.
Meanwhile, Davis has worries of her own. She’s supposed to be married soon, to hunky doctor Charles Rocket (who frequently played these kinds of handsome cads; one of his nicknames was Charlie Kennedy).1 Who’s not showing any sexual interest in Davis of late — that’s because he’s been cheating on her with several more buxom babes from the hospital. (Davis tells her friend Julie Brown how long she’s gone without sex, and Brown, shocked, exclaims “two WEEKS?”)
The lead alien is played by Davis’s then-husband Jeff Goldblum; the other two are then-little-known Jim Carrey and Damon Wayans. After the initial shocks are dispensed with, Davis takes the aliens to Brown’s hair salon, the “Curl Up & Dye.” Brown gives all the aliens a makeover, shaving their fur, and we see that the aliens — especially Goldblum — are now Hawt.
They all go to a club, where Brown’s fun song “I Like ‘em Big and Stupid” is heard (barely) over the din of terrible 1980’s “let’s party” music. Because Carrey (here) is blonde, he gets all the ladies and because Wayans is Black, he’s got to have a dance-off with a sharp-dressed Black dude. It’s a moderately interesting dance sequence, although filmed poorly. Here’s a clip link, if you like.
The better dancer’s name in that clip is listed on IMDb as Wayne ‘Crescendo’ Ward. From YouTube commenter vinnytrippetti222: “The guy Damon is dancing against, his name is Crescendo, he was popular in the 80s. (He won) every dance contest I would enter back in the day, I always hated when he would walk in the club! Not too far off from this scene!”
Meanwhile, on the patio outside the club, there’s some elegant 40s movie-style atmosphere where a guy’s tastefully tinking light jazz on the piano and there’s no indication of the rowdy dance music inside — this club has the best soundproofing of all time! Goldblum gets to be smooth and sultry and have Davis state longingly at him. They do look great together, and did in The Fly, too, before Goldblum started melting into gooey slop and becoming, you know, The Fly.
I think I liked this in the 1980s because it was kind of mocking the L.A., party-all-the-time hotness contest culture, which a whole chunk of teenagers I knew dreamed of joining. I mean, half the reason Tom Petty’s song “Free Fallin’” became a hit is because the video showed sun-kissed California scenes. (And it’s a good, well-structured song… but the video was a huge reason, too.)
The project came from a 1984 Julie Brown song of the same title, and Brown wrote the script with her musical colleague Charles Coffey and husband/colleague Terrence E. McNally. It’s a thin script, but it does have some good ideas and some funny lines. (When the aliens leave for their home planet at the end, Davis tells Carrey, “I think I’ll miss you least of all” as a Wizard of Oz joke.) The main problem with the movie is the sheer incompetence and cluelessness of the director, Julien Temple.
Remember how the other day I mentioned that several good directors got their start in TV ads and/or music videos? Well, Temple made a lot of videos, and many were popular, and he’s an atrocious fugging director. Just a complete and utter hack. He did a video for one of my favorite latter-day Kinks songs, “Come Dancing,” that’s stupidly literal-minded and absolutely misses the point of the song. (The song is about the loss you feel when something from your youth/childhood you enjoyed is torn down or built over, and the loss Ray Davies feels for the England of an earlier day — like a bunch of other Kinks songs, that last bit.)
Temple was handed the reins to an adaptation of Colin MacInnes’s beloved 1959 novel, Absolute Beginners, about life in London at the dawn of the rock-and-roll era. (It was a huge influence on Paul Weller of the fantastic band The Jam.) Both the film and the promotions ran way over budget, and the movie was not a success. Temple was already slated to do Earth Girls, and the failure of Absolute Beginners meant that the budget here was slashed by a large margin.
It wouldn’t have mattered, if Temple had any brains in his head or any sense of humor or style. Per Wiki, his “studious eye for detail” caused multiple delays on the set, and he “brought his own ideas” to the script — well, none of the set details are any good, and the way Temple mangles most of the decent jokes, I’m sure none of his ideas were any good, either.
Take the scene where Brown introduces Davis to the newly-hottified, made-over aliens. It could have been very funny. Like how Tim Curry reveals his magical boy-toy creation in Rocky Horror. That movie had a teeny budget; the jokes in it still land (at least for the first half of the movie or so). Or the way Temple directs the very funny Michael McKean as Davis’s surfer-bum pool guy. McKean isn’t funny in this — that takes anti-talent to undo. Or, oh my gawd, the lengthy scenes where Carrey and Wayans are driving in a Wacky Chase and making stupid faces and… it’s all terrible.
(Wayans and Carrey are funny just for a bit, when the aliens don’t know English and are repeating Davis’s words back to her; it kinda sounds a little like the silly talking of the aliens in Galaxy Quest, although it’s far, far better in that film.)
Basically, I would have liked this in the 1980s because I thought it was satire and it had goofy sci-fi elements to it. And, in the hands of a director who wasn’t a total fool, that’s what the movie could have been! As it is, though, it’s a wreck. It even wrecks another of Brown’s fun songs, “‘Cause I’m a Blonde,” by staging it so terribly.
Brown, who grew up in Southern California (and both of her parents had office jobs with NBC), started performing in nightclubs in the 1970s. In the 1980s, she put out a number of comedy/novelty records, the sort of thing that Dr. Demento would play (and some of us nerds loved a great deal). Rather than show you any clip from this awful movie, let me share one of Brown’s fun songs that Temple didn’t wreck (Tom Daley directed it):
“In her good ear” is just priceless. God bless the wonderful Julie Brown.
AND NOW we turn to a weird 1953 musical, The Beggar’s Opera. Why? Because I said so! No, actually because it’s a version of the material that The Threepenny Opera adapted, and I LOVED that movie. So, to recap:
The original was written in 1728 by English author John Gay, with music arranged by Johann Christoph Pepusch. The plot was a joke/dare suggested by Gay’s friend, the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift — why not set a light opera in the infamous hellhole, Newgate Prison? So Gay took the dare and did just that. Kinda. The main character, a highway bandit, is eventually caught and placed in the prison, although that doesn’t happen for awhile.
In The Threepenny Opera, writer Bertolt Brecht took the structure, tweaked it a bit to resemble what were then-conditions of poverty and crime (and corruption) in Germany, and had partner Kurt Weill compose entirely new songs (several of which became famous). This Beggar’s Opera is an adaptation of the 1728 original, using the original songs.
It stars Lawrence Olivier as Captain Macheath, the infamous highway bandit with a taste for the ladies. He secretly marries the virtuous Polly Peachum, whose parents are appalled. But they can’t do anything about it. Unless, that is, if Macheath were to be captured and hanged for his many crimes. Then, that would give them their daugther back! (Family values, folks, family values.) Luckily, there’s a woman around who Macheath seduced, and dumped; she’s more than happy to lure a trap for him to be captured.
All of this is to hang a lot of musical merriment around, with stuffy old pompous men, funtime whores, the devil-may-care Macheath, and an eventual tug-of-war between his new wife and the woman he betrayed, to see which one he’ll finally give his heart to. It’s all in good spirits, although the music’s a little bit of a bore.
That might be from the original… but it might be from a movie convention that was common at the time. Frequently, musicals would feature actors who couldn’t sing very well. So their voices would be dubbed by professionals. Marnie Nixon was one of the most famous — she was in The King and I, West Side Story, and My Fair Lady — without her face being in the movie. She sang all the lead female roles, instead. She was always uncredited, too — I guess Hollywood wanted us to think Natalie Wood could sing, for some reason.
The dubbed-in singers here ARE credited, at the end, which is nice. Unfortunately, they all sing in the same, blandly professional, projecting-to-the-back-row sort of way. So they’re all kind of a drag. And their style means I frequently missed some of the lyrics, too, which was possibly unfortunate as a few lines were pretty amusing.
The only ones who sing for themselves are Olivier and Stanley Holloway (he played Eliza’s debauched dad in My Fair Lady, singing “Get Me to the Church on Time”). And so they’re actually fun to listen to! Their voices have personality. Holloway was a great comedic actor, and he can drop his voice to a low, LOW bass that’s very funny. Olivier, at 46, was maybe getting a BIT too old to play the rowdy rousty Macheath, yet his voice is very pleasant and he gets a good dose of humor and romance into it.
The director, Peter Brook, was a legendary stage director, and this was his first film. He’s not abysmal, but he’s not inventive, either; none of the scenes are staged awfully, and none are staged especially well. Olivier took the part just to work with Brook, and unfortunately, they didn’t click. Brook ignored every suggestion Olivier made. It’s too bad he didn’t just direct it himself — he did a fine job directing himself in Henry V, Hamlet, and Richard III. But he had wanted to work with the legend guy, so, he did. It just didn’t work out so great. (Olivier got injured in a stunt scene, and that shot production costs up, and he was co-financing the film, too — he ended up taking a bath on the thing.)
This isn’t a “go-out-and-get-it-now!” sort of film, yet it’s not unpleasant, either, and there’s worse things to do than watch Olivier singing lightly pleasant tunes. He’d never do a full musical again, but his role in 1960’s The Entertainer (as a bitter, washed-up music-hall performer) had some singing in it, and he was fine at it there, too. Here’s the climax of that movie (I’ve shared it before, and might do so again, why not?). You can turn it off when Olivier leaves the stage, or watch the whole film, if you like. It’s not bad at all.
He died in 2005. Here’s a nice obituary by a friend, saying Rocket was an influence on Talking Heads in their Rhode Island days, and a really well-loved, kind person all-around.