Bye Bye Birdie (1963)

Director: George Sidney

Cast: Janet Leigh, Dick Van Dyke, Ann-Margret, Maureen Stapleton

Have I Seen It Before: I feel like I have seen those episodes of Mad Men where they try to cannibalize this movie for the very first Diet Pepsi* commercial. Does that count?

Did I Like It: There’s something vaguely unsettling about the movie at its very core, as if it were the natural conclusion of someone trying to make a gender-swapped Lord of the Flies.

Maybe it’s just that I get the sense that there was a version of this film—and certainly the broadway play—where Kim (Ann-Margret) is something of a second-tier character, and the story is really about Rosie (Leigh) and Albert (Van Dyke).

That film could have been a nice romantic comedy centering on two of the more charming personalities to ever be in a movie. That isn’t the film as presented.

As it stands, the teenage girls swarm over the characters of the film like locusts. I don’t even think the film is being fair to the phenomenon of adolescence, or even the phenomenon of adolescence in the late 1950s which it is seeming to satirize. But these girls are frightening. There isn’t even a frolicking chase to keep things light, as in A Hard Day’s Night (1964). These girls won’t be bough, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. They just want to consume this music star, Conrad Birdie** (Jesse Pearson), even if they’re not entirely sure what consuming him might be. There might not have been any need for Carpenter to re-make Village of the Damned (1960), this production got the job done only three years after the original.

No wonder Van Dyke and Leigh get pushed out of almost every frame they’re in. And it might be contrary to say so, but the film is poorer for it.

*Or Patio, if you’re nasty.

**While we’re on the subject, Birdie is clearly supposed to be a stand-in for Elvis, but named to spoof Conway Twitty, who ended up becoming the schmaltziest kind of country crooner. His beg legacy is a running gag on Family Guy. At least The Beatles and Elvis had some good songs…

Night at the Museum (2006)

Director: Shawn Levy

Cast: Ben Stiller, Carla Gugino, Dick Van Dyke, Robin Williams

Have I Seen it Before: Never. Which elicited a shocked response and an immediate vow to rectify from my wife… I didn’t know it was so important. I’m hesitant to admit—even if it may be implied—that I’ve never seen the sequels, either.

Did I Like It: It’s hard not to like a movie like this. It was very carefully orchestrated to be pleasing and unchallenging. 

The story all fits together, if unremarkably. It’s not astonishingly funny at any moment, but any kid who saw it way back when couldn’t have been judged too harshly for cackling at the antics on display. There’s even enough of a current of intellectual curiosity at the core of the movie—with the possible byproduct of encouraging kids to actually want to visit a museum. It wouldn’t appeal only to stupid kids, or make otherwise bright children any dumber. That’s more than we can expect from many films aimed at children.

Every actor is likable, and selected for the specific purpose of being imminently likable. Indeed, is there another performer in the history of the moving picture more able to elicit those sort of feelings than Dick Van Dyke? Even Robin Williams was in One Hour Photo, and for that matter, Popeye (1980). That’s kind of a strange miracle in a film which features Ricky Gervais, a performer whose built an entire career out of being iconically unlikable.

Is it wrong for a film to be bland in this fashion? I think not, it has modest goals and largely accomplishes them. It’s not subversive in the slightest, and while one may be implied to knock the film for not reaching for more, is it more a knock against a studio system no longer capable of making children’s fare that is at all subversive. Then again, across all criteria, I may very well be the unreasonable one for even wanting something like that.