What a Way to Go! (J. Lee Thompson, 1964)
Shirley MacLaine enriches herself despite protests in this should-be cult classic.5 All parts of what the studio called a “love happy laugh hit” ought to be hungrily consumed, Shirley MacLaine’s outfits copied, and many of the Betty Comden-Adolph Green lines spoken along at midnight screenings. The plot concerns Luisa’s (Shirley MacLaine) power as a widow-maker. From a stylish mid-century modern oversized wedge couch, in chic black pouf hat, simple black dress, and a giant diamond brooch, Luisa tells psychotherapist Bob Cummings her woes: every man she marries becomes hugely successful, and then, shortly afterward, dies.
Each of the film’s doomed romances plays as flashbacks in a different style of the film. The opening prelude is all pink, and we eventually find out why. The first thing we see is Shirley MacLaine in huge letters, all awash in a pink filter. But the framing is medium, still, somber. Pallbearers emerge with a pink casket, covered in pink flowers. The camera moves smoothly as they descend the pink stairs to dirge-like music. Since this is the wacky sixties, they drop the casket! Down the stairs, it flies, eventually collapsing in one flummoxed pile on the casket and title.
A screwball setup to color, literally, all that will follow. Screwball skewers capitalism. This implication of capitalism and the financial roots of the purportedly-romantic marriage institution is on symbolic display when, in the very first scene, after the camera slowly ogles up Luisa’s tween gingham-clad body, we are violently thrown into a shock cut.
In extreme close up, the evangelical preacher howls “money is the root of all evil!” Continuing to relate her woes beginning with a very sexualized and monetized childhood, she describes how her mother embroidered this and other phrases on the wall. Letters fall away from the embroidery, to leave “Money is all.”
Leonard Crawley (Dean Martin) courts Luisa first. Cool, callous, just right. He’s hot for her, cooing “you suggest good breeding.” But she is indifferent. By contrast, Dick Van Dyke’s Edgar Hopper is Crawley's opposite, a Henry David Thoreau enthusiast and as earthy and poor as Crawley is slimy and corrupt.6 Or so it seems.
To her materialistic mother’s horror, Luisa and Edgar elope. In a scene straight out of Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936), Luisa describes their early life as a silent movie. We see the next stretch of time as a great silent, entitled “Love Conquers All…” filled with bits of physical comedy, intertitles, 1.33:1 framing, all ending in the titular phrase and a joyous mutual back-kick while they kiss. Edgar becomes a success just to please Luisa. Perhaps suggesting an ominous prescience or the revisionism wealth allows, she pleads and argues that she doesn’t want any more than they have, nor to fix or replace their tiny, leaky cabin despite Leonard’s jeers.
However, Edgar quickly and easily displaces all his Thoreau-esque creativity and credibility into success and selling out. Eventually opening a mega-successful department store, Edgar says during a terrific “soaring to success” montage, in a drastically-canted angle: “make them think they CAN’T live without doorknobs that light up in the dark. Think BIG!” Meanwhile, Luisa laments on Christmas in their huge new house, minimized in distant framing.
In a way, Hopper gets buried before he dies at the end of his segment: buying out the town, renaming it Hopperville, and then dropping dead shortly after a canted montage of him literally getting buried in the money piles of his daily work. The next flashback comes as Luisa flees annihilative wealth and success to Paris.
As she and Paul Newman’s artist Larry Flint fall in love, time flies in montage, as a series of high-contrast black and white shots of the by-now cliché artsy pretentious and bohemian style. They bathe and make love in smaller and smaller washbasins, until the camera finally pans up them in the shower together, a “censored” bar over their midsections, a wink and a nod to the rising counterculture and the falling of the code. Success creeps, via bohemian artistic pretension! Luisa helps Larry develop a giant robotic multi-armed machine that paints dynamic abstracts to music.
All the while, as we work through the jazz, classical, and other trending styles of ‘64, we feel Luisa’s mounting apprehension in reaction shots. Larry begins the slow death that materialism engenders, becoming a pretentious faux-beat, chewing on mutton and belching in his patrons’ faces. Success and his gigantic house bring out the worst in him. Meanwhile, Luisa moves farther from her vie de boheme. I won't spoil the end, but you can bet it’s poetic justice and deeply symbolic in Larry’s greed symbolically destroying him. Wacky fun.
Next in our parade of doomed masculinity, Rod Anderson, Jr. (Robert Mitchum) inherited his fortune. To Luisa’s astonishment, and perhaps disappointment, Rod displays character. Doubts persist accompanied by razor-sharp scripting: “another object lesson in what money and fame can do to a person.”
She falls for him, and what follows is something in the grand MGM style: lavish, mistily shot, awash in pastels, reeking of class, a movie where we wonder, as she puts it, “what will she wear next” in the fictional but typical big-budget film of the now-dying studio era, That Touch of Mink. Luisa swirls in slow-motion out of one of her many limousines and into parties in an insane array of gorgeous outfits – all masterfully evocative by the great Edith Head, at a hefty-for-the-time half-million-dollar price tag.
When Rod bites it, Luisa flees to San Francisco to escape romance’s death knell. At a diner, Pinky Benson (Gene Kelly) woos her by rhyming earnestly and tiredly performing a dinner show across the street. A customer's disdain (Margaret Dumont in a cameo) is visible as he sings “I think that you and I should get acquainted,” referencing both Astaire’s sandman dance from Top Hat (Mark Sandrich, 1935) and this own newspaper-ripping number from Summer Stock (Charles Walters, 1950). The warm performance is obviously great (this is Gene Kelly after all), but his desperation and combination clown-hobo outfit turns off all and sundry.
As usual, Luisa falls in love with the latest man she bumps into and works her way into his superficially simple life. Luisa recalls this rosily in the musical number “In a Houseboat Built for Two.” The flashback begins in operatic Nelson Eddy-Jeanette MacDonald style then updates to jazz dance. Here Shirley is made to dress and dance like Eleanor Powell surrounded by a battleship’s crew.7
Then we shift to a hipster beat ballet, black, baby spotlights, and a raunchy jazz number. We revert to the ship, and the hazily patriotic red, white, and blue of an earlier form of Kelly’s choreography. “Oh how we love Luisa,” the battalion sings as all the men hold her up with flowers in hand; MacLaine and Kelly waltz away and a crane shot shows everyone shaped to form the word “love.”
Luisa suggests Pinky take off the makeup, and perform as the everyman – which works so well for Kelly. Her instincts prove out again and he becomes mega-successful and paints everything, including her, pink…until at the premiere of his film, Flaming Lips, he’s trampled to death by his fans, set to the distracting sounds and images of stampeding elephants.
Luisa is defined almost solely by her relationships, and her effects on those men; the small balance of her character’s development shown in the spectacular Head wardrobe. What’s more, Thoreau runs straight through the film, and its anti-capitalist message predates the hippies by a few years. The moralism of every character dying as a result of their greed works as sort of a grown-up Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Mel Stuart, 1971). And a happy ending for cineastes makes this a film you can rewatch endlessly. What a way to go, indeed!
Stay tuned for Part Three of this series to discover more obscure musicals!
5. How was I hipped to this incredible film’s existence? A simple keyword search in my library’s catalog, I stumbled across this neglected curio. So often true. Try ordering up everything featuring Gene Kelly or from A24. It’s an exhilarating experience.
6. The screenplay is sharp without a moment’s lag. A bit later, Luisa bumps into Edgar while he’s fishing, stunning him (and us) in her bathing suit as she is pulled up into the humble vessel paraphrasing Thoreau to flirt with Edgar: “Our lives are frittered away on detail. Simplify.”
7. This number references the dance finale spectacular from Born to Dance (Roy Del Ruth, 1936) as well as so many other Powell numbers. For more on how these films are connected, I Dood It ends with this exact sequence from 1936! Audaciously thrifty!