Hellzapoppin' (1941)

 

Shitposting has always existed.

Hellzapoppin' was originally an immensely popular stage musical that ran on Broadway from 1938 to 1941.  It featured newsreel footage of politicians, electric buzzers under audience members' seats, acrobatic dancing, magicians, animals, fourth wall breaks, etc., and the show was altered freely.  For its creators, the vaudeville duo Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson, no joke was too lowbrow and no gimmick was too absurd.  It must have made the film look subdued, which is saying something. 

The film has a lot of the same things but also has something resembling a story.  It begins with a projectionist in a cinema loading the film into a projector.  The film-within-a-film depicts a group of well-dressed people descending an ornate staircase, singing "I had a vision of heaven, and you were there."  Then the staircase becomes a slide under their feet, explodes, and they all go careening down into hell.  

The way the film opens with brief imagery of wealth and seemliness and then violently discards it to literal hell has a similar irony to the opening of Gold Diggers of 1933.  That film starts with chorus girls dressed in gold, singing "We're in the Money."  They finish their routine, leave the stage, and we learn the Great Depression is in full swing.

After the explosion, a devil pulls a curtain down with a disclaimer: "Any similarity between HELLZAPOPPIN' and a motion picture is purely coincidental."  The curtain goes up, and we see "hell," where devils sing, dance, cartwheel, jump and flip midair while tormenting the condemned, who are chased with pitchforks, stuck on rotisseries, and sealed in big metal drums labeled "Canned Guy" and "Canned Gal."  The devils sing: "anything can happen and it probably will!"  They're right. 

Another explosion happens and a taxi appears.  A devil opens the door and an impossible number of farm animals pour out, dragging Olsen and Johnson behind them.  They start breaking the fourth wall, speaking to us and to the projectionist, demanding that he rewind the film.  We then find out that all this has been taking place on a film set: the director stops the action to complain about how nonsensical it is.  

This is where we start to learn what is supposed to be the film's premise: Olsen and Johnson are making a film adaptation of their Broadway production.  That said, even the world of the studio, outside the film-within-a-film, is surreal.  When the director reviews headshots and test footage with Olsen and Johnson, the actors' pictures and recordings come to life and converse with them.

As they piece their film together, Olsen and Johnson enter the world of the film and try to manipulate its events.  At many points it becomes muddled whether they're filmmakers or characters in the film they're making.  They know the trajectory of the script and have the power to make almost anything happen, but they talk and act as if the characters were real people, and they control the course of events by physically moving objects and people around.  They are motivated more by sympathy for their own characters than any sense of obligation to the studio.

The studio demands that the film have a coherent story, and what they're making appears to be something like Busby Berkeley's 1943 film The Gang's All Here.  At least, it's supposed to be, but Olsen and Johnson mock and upend the conventions of Hollywood musicals, and some other genres, and in the end, offer an almost completely random series of jokes while the story's narrative logic becomes increasingly paradoxical.

The only unifying reason for all this is a sort of desperate creativity, a fascination with craft and tools that translates into Olsen and Johnson's overflow of ideas for gags, satirical commentary, and visual experiments with film stock and the motion picture camera.  One of the greatest dance sequences in cinema, maybe the greatest, is the highlight of this film, performed by Whitey's Lindy Hoppers, the only performers besides Olsen and Johnson to carry over from the stage production to the film.  The level of skill they display, the enthusiasm of the performances, especially by Martha Raye and Mischa Auer, and the creativity of the film's imagery belie the randomness.