Not Your Typical Fairy Tale

Jul 24, 2019 13:20

Today's review: Once Upon a Time.

I wound up watching Once Upon a Time because the summary on the back of the DVD box was so ridiculous that I had to watch it just to see if it lived up to the expectations the summary set. While it didn’t play out the way I’d been expecting, it compensated by being ridiculous in completely different ways. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing, but it definitely made the movie more memorable.


The movie starts off normally enough. Jerry Flynn (Cary Grant), is a theater producer/writer who had a string of successes but has recently had a run of flops, so much so that his banker is threatening to foreclose on the theater in a week unless Jerry comes up with $100,000. Just as Jerry is wondering how he can come up with the money, he runs into two little boys who are trying to show people something in a cardboard box. That something is a caterpillar named Curly, who dances when his owner, the boy nicknamed Pinky (Ted Donaldson) plays “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” on the harmonica. Jerry is duly impressed by Curly, and does what he can to turn the caterpillar into a sensation. But just as you think he’s going to try to build a show around Curly, it becomes clear that Jerry intends to sell Curly to the highest bidder, which goes against Pinky’s wishes. A lot of the plot beats you’d expect play out (including the fact that Pinky has an older sister [Janet Blair] who starts out disliking Jerry but then…), but it’s the route to get to those beats that makes the movie somewhat mind-boggling.

Once Curly the dancing caterpillar is established, the movie becomes weird and then just keeps on going. The very premise of a dancing caterpillar is odd enough, and the fact that he only dances to one specific song is odder still. But then the movie takes it to the next level by never actually showing you a dancing caterpillar. Instead, the other characters (but especially Grant) have to act against a cardboard box that they peer into. I know Curly is the MacGuffin for the tale, but a) you shouldn’t promise a dancing caterpillar and then not show it to us, and b) that just highlights the absurdity of the situation. Making matters even more surreal from a meta perspective is the fact that by 1944, Grant was pretty much at the top of his game. By this point, he’d made a lot of movies that would go on to be classics, including Bringing Up Baby, Gunga Din, His Girl Friday, and The Philadelphia Story. How he wound up in a movie like this is a mystery. In fact, the fact that this appear to be an A movie at all is a mystery; it would have fit much better as a B movie. I’m not going to complain, though, because the fact that this exists in its current state somehow makes it even better.

There are so many little moments in this movie that leave me scratching my head or laughing in disbelief. Besides the elements I’ve already discussed, there’s the fact that the highest bidder for Curly is Walt Disney (though despite my fervent hope that Disney himself appeared in the movie, IMDB says he was played by Walter Fenner). Then there’s the fact that the whole city winds up invested in Curly, leading to a lot of funny little bits of business or newspaper headlines. Above all, there’s the entire third act, which starts with a dramatic moment that could never happen in a modern movie, and ends with a bit that starts out predictable and then goes off in a direction that’s absolutely not earned, but is so incongruous that it’s kind of hilarious. It’s not quite to the point where there’s something baffling happening every minute, but there’s certainly enough of them to keep you going “What the…” on a regular basis.

I’m recommending this movie, but mostly because it’s so surreal that you have to see it for yourself. It’s not quite on the same level as a “so bad it’s good”/MST3K worthy movie, but you should probably be in that frame of mind when you sit down to watch it. If you are in that frame of mind, though, you’ll be in for quite the wild ride. Even though there’s absolutely nothing action-packed about this movie.

mst3k suggested, tripping through the universe, what just happened?

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