Cinema
Grease spots
Peter Ackroyd
Grease 2 ('A', selected cinemas)
Grease 2 opens with a great many people dancing in an hysterical fashion, arms and legs akimbo. Of course if you see a thousand dancers toppling upon one another it looks as if it has been rehearsed; under certain circumstances it might even be fun, but the only principle involved here is safety in numbers. And that, curiously enough, is the theme of the film.
Set in Rydell High School in the early Sixties, Grease 2 follows the essential pat- tern of the `St Trinians' saga: a number of strident and violent children run rings around a group of increasingly desperate teachers. But the merit of `St Trinians' lay in the fact that the English have a curious fascination with school life, reverting to nostalgic fantasies and strange, elliptical dialogue. The Americans, however, have no interest in the classroom except as an im- age of some tribal experience where young people learn that it is neither safe, nor honourable, to be a 'loner'.
The plot is couched in this vein, with a group of young bikers known as the 'T-Birds' and their girlfriends, the 'Pink Ladies'. Both gangs have their distinct uniforms, and between them control the school. A young English boy then joins Rydell — they call him 'Shakespeare' and the story concerns his efforts to join the 'T-Birds' and win one of the 'Pink Ladies'. Enough said?
The producers of this film, Alan Carr and Robert Stigwood, must by now have gained an international reputation for hav- ing buried the American musical. I believe that they were responsible for Grease I, which at least had the advantage of starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. They were not quite Irving or Siddons, but they seem like giants in comparison with the talent which is on offer here. Even as a musical entertainment, this picture is greatly inferior to its predecessor. Its choreographer is also the director, which is a case of adding insult to injury. It is not clear to what school of choreography she belongs, but I think it must be the school of hard knocks. The dancers have feet like meat-loaf and, in desperation, they shake their bodies in the same manner as toy rab. bits do in the back windows of cars. The songs are dreadful: 'We're going to score, score, score'. And we're going to snore, snore, snore.
The English boy is in fact played by an English actor, Maxwell Caulfield. I hear that he was a great success in a BroadwaY version of Entertaining Mr Sloane, but the shock of taking his clothes off on stage must have impaired his faculties: he spends a great deal of time with his mouth open. One wonders what he thinks he is doing. His hair has also been 'streaked' which, in 1961, would have been sailing dangerouslY close to the wind.
The only entertaining performances here come from actors who are old enough to know better. Eve Arden plays the head' mistress; if the film had been constructed around her, it would have possessed a cer- tain macabre fascination but, unfortunate- ly, her talent for whimsical bitchery i5 reduced to a minimum. Connie Stevens plays a sexy schoolmistress — her hair Piled. on top of her head like the leaning tower of Pisa, the result of years of back-combing' Tab Hunter plays a biology teacher. What a fall Tab's has been! Only recently he ar peared as Todd Tomorrow in a disgusting film called Polyester, where he played cIP posite a 15-stone drag queen. Here his pro- blems are multiplied: he is forced to sing and suddenly one realises why Tab, after 40 years in show-business, has never starred ni a musical. Stevens, Arden and Hunter: in Grease 2 they are like three whales beached upon an alien shore. The manner of Carr and Stigwood is visi- ble throughout: it would once have been described as 'camp', relying as it does upon a deliberate exaggeration of mannerisms and an inconsequential playing with images and cliches of the past. It seems that nov the Sixties have become an appropriate period to parody — if they were not already inadvertently parodying the Eighties by assuming that we will be entertained 11 such historical re-treads. And, like all empty-headed American musicals, it makes use of the great Hollywood dream: the boys are innocent, infantile almost, while the girls are mature and predatory. The young are fun, the old are boring unless they are finally redeemed by entering their second childhood. Since Maxwell Caulfield is an Englishman, he must be converted through t a series of initiation rites to this grey American way. He discusses Hamlet Win,' having hamburgers — everything is con- verted downwards — eventually discarding_ the name of Shakespeare, previously re ferred to as 'deep junk', and becoming 3 'T-Bird'.
This is altogether a wooden enterprise! which shows an astonishing contempt 01 its audience: the editing is clumsy, the dialogue sometimes impossible to hear, and the direction painful in its lack of inspira- tion. Perhaps it will be a success in Italy or Turkey, or somewhere else where they are More lenient about such matters, but I doubt it.
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