gwen verdon
by Douglas Messerli
George Abbott (screenplay, based on
a novel by Douglas Wallop), Richard Adler and Jerry Ross (music and lyrics),
George Abbott and Stanley Donen (directors) Damn Yankees / 1958
There is something absolutely ridiculous about Lola, formerly the
ugliest woman in Providence, Rhode Island, whom the Devil has transformed into
a Cuban-like trollop, determined to get what she wants from every man she (and
the Devil) desires to corrupt. Mock striping, as she dances, Lola writhes over
the stolid body of ball player Joe Hardy (hilariously rendered by gay actor Tab
Hunter), using his persevering figure as something close to a pole bar against,
through, and across which she transverses, attacking him like a bull, waving
her black negligee and clicking fanny, to negotiate what she presumes is the
inevitable—his abandonment of moral values into absolute lust. The dance is
almost an old-fashioned hoochie-coochie, but so sparklingly satiric in its
conception that we can only watch in wonderment.
Of course, it doesn’t work: Hardy is in love with his wife, and the
actor in love with men. But if ever anyone might have shaken up the opposite
sex, it should have been Verdon as Lola; and later, in the lovely song and
dance number, “Two Lost Souls”—almost as good as Verdon’s siren song— she
nearly succeeds in unfreezing him.
Los Angeles, April 4, 2011
Reprinted from World Cinema
Review (April 2011).
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