VAULTS: DVD overdue for ‘Movie Movie’

Warner Bros. had the biggest attraction of the holiday film season 30 years ago in “Superman: The Movie.” It distributed a second film that also excelled at deadpan humorous nostalgia: Stanley Donen’s “Movie Movie,” which cleverly condensed and parodied reliable Hollywood staples of the early 1930s, the prizefight melodrama and the backstage musical, in an affectionate matched set of comedies titled “Dynamite Hands” and “Baxter’s Beauties of 1933.”

The original title was “Double Feature,” abandoned shortly before release when Mr. Donen feared that it might be misconstrued as a revival package of films that had co-starred George C. Scott earlier in the decade, perhaps “Patton” doubling up with “Islands in the Stream.” Not even the management of the revered Circle Theater on Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest thought of that one when revival pairings were its stock in trade.

One of the inside jokes of “Movie Movie,” which boasted nine cast members playing roles in both 45-minute featurettes, was that Mr. Scott echoed himself as gallant sacrificial characters.

In “Dynamite Hands” he portrayed the crusty fight manager “Gloves” Molloy, obliged to shield an ingenuous young middleweight, Joey Popchik, an auspicious debut opportunity for Harry Hamlin, from the corrupting influence of gangster promoter Vince Marlow (Eli Wallach) and nightclub moll “Troubles” Moran (Ann Reinking).

In “Baxter’s Beauties,” Mr. Scott promptly returned as the elegant Broadway impresario “Spats” Baxter, determined to stage one final hit song-and-dance revue after being informed that his days are numbered. To 30, to be exact, since he has contracted a malady called Spencer’s disease, incurable but known to prey on the hypersensitive nervous systems of show folks.

Art Carney played bad-news doctors in the opening episodes of both stories; his characters set the plots in motion with dire prognoses. Joey pursues the fight game in “Dynamite Hands” in order to earn the $25,000 needed to pay for his kid sister’s eye operation in faraway Vienna. The prevailing pithy idiom finessed by screenwriters Larry Gelbart and Sheldon Keller had been fondly appropriated from Clifford Odets’ “Golden Boy,” which became a license to coin mixed comic metaphors. For example, the crisis in the Popchik family elicits the rhetorical question, “You know how much they charge for an eye?” and the immediate reply, “An arm and a leg!”

Mr. Gelbart had recently terminated his long, successful association as a writer-producer with the “MASH” television series. He wrote a Broadway farce that starred Mr. Scott, “Sly Fox,” derived from “Volpone,” before reuniting on the “Double Feature” project, originally envisioned as a package that would include parodies of a vintage newsreel and “Flash Gordon” serial chapter. The basic notion was to evoke a day of total immersion in neighborhood moviegoing, as Mr. Gelbart once wasted typical Saturdays in his boyhood.

The supplements got whittled down to a single preview trailer, which hilariously bridges the featurettes while touting a World War I aviation melodrama called “Zero Hour.” A knowing and compact spoof of “The Dawn Patrol,” this beau geste is enhanced by advertising copy that contrives to sustain and even outbid the soaring, hyperbolic note of affirmation that has just concluded “Dynamite Hands.”

Stanley Donen, who seemed to be recapturing his humorous stride after a trio of unsuccessful films released between 1969 and 1975, got a brainstorm that resulted in a new denouement for the prizefight plot, transforming it absurdly but also logically into a courtroom melodrama. It’s one of the happiest afterthoughts ever executed.

Mr. Donen and the writers may not have perfectly attuned. The Gelbart-Keller comic specialty happens to be kidding the cliches of movie exposition. Expert and entertaining as this is, it may shortchange the most desirable specialty in Mr. Donen’s skill set - the staging and filming of musical highlights.

The first song in “Baxter’s Beauties” - obviously inspired by “42nd Street” and titled in homage to Warner Baxter, who played the hard-driving director in that prototype - proved a superlative showcase for Barry Bostwick. Cast as ingenuous accountant Dick Cummings, who aspires to be a songwriter, he joins the immortals in Dick’s audition number, “I Just Need the Girl,” an interlude so exuberant and endearing that it seemed to promise a stellar breakthrough - of a cheerful, melodic kind that Hollywood was no longer inclined to nurture.

“I Just Need the Girl” and “Shows To Go You,” a love duet between Mr. Bostwick and newcomer Rebecca York, whose likable resemblances to Carol Burnett were also neglected in the aftermath of “Movie Movie,” got the musical numbers off to a felicitous start. The expected follow-throughs remained elusive. The numbers that should have clinched the opening night of Baxter’s last show look rushed and perfunctory. It’s as if the filmmakers feared that they had outworn the welcome of an overspecialized pretext and couldn’t risk a full-blown musical comedy send-off. A pity.

A generation later, it’s also a pity that “Movie Movie” hasn’t merited a DVD reincarnation, preferably with recollections from Mr. Donen, Mr. Gelbart and the surviving cast members. It’s available only in scattered, obsolete VHS and laserdisc copies that may undercut the original release strategy. At the outset “Dynamite Hands” was printed in black-and-white and “Baxter’s Beauties” in color. This gambit lacked historic authenticity, of course, since a “Beauties of 1933” would probably have been a black-and-white musical.

Not quite sure how the public would react, the filmmakers shot “Movie Movie” in color but tested it in monochromatic, polychromatic and in-between with preview audiences. The in-between option got the nod. In my fading VHS edition, both titles are in color, but color of a hue that cries out for correction and regeneration. An overdue DVD release needs to repair the defacement while making it convenient to watch either component in optimum black-and-white or optimum color. I’m not sure who owns “Movie Movie” 30 years later, but it has become a worthy restoration project for some benefactor.

TITLE: “Movie Movie”

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