Oh, you could spend your money on worthwhile DVDs today, like Lindsay Anderson's If... or Dusan Makavejev's WR--Mysteries Of The Orgasm. You could pick up a copy of Panic In Needle Park or a freshly-scrubbed reissue of Don Bluth's only really good movie The Secret Of NIMH.
Or you could watch Mame.
There are bad movies and there are bad movies. Then there are movies in which absolutely nothing works; the most basic elements needed to form a coherent and involving narrative experience are simply absent. 1974's Mame is one of those movies.
Many of the worst movies ever made are musicals. There's the excrutiating 1930 El Brendel vehicle Just Imagine, which will literally make your skin crawl, or 1973's notorious Lost Horizon, or Peter Frampton and The Bee Gees (plus the song stylings of Donald Pleasance!) in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band...the list could go on.
But as horrible as they were, they still weren't this:
Where to begin?
With a score by Jerry Herman, based on Dennis Patrick's Auntie Mame, you would think this would be a camp classic without even trying. But as this clip shows, Gene Saks' direction seems to consist of simply turning on the camera and hoping for the best, leaving the editor to do his best with what seem to be random fragments of film.
Then again, Saks probably had his hands full dealing with the massive ego of his star. Lucille Ball was--how to put this kindly?--well past her prime when she made this, and even though Mame is supposed to be a blowsy old broad, Ball's closeups have enough Vaseline on the lens to hide Yoda's wrinkles, yet it fails to do her any good. And of course, there's her singing voice, Neville Brand channelling Marni Nixon.
Hollywood can be cruel to its aging stars, but in this case, Ball had no one to blame but herself. She fought for the lead, even invested in the damned thing to guarantee she'd get her way, and had veto power over the rest of the cast. Mame stands as a sort of ultimate cautionary tale on the perils of fame, a crumbling cinematic mansion inhabited by a real-life Norma Desmond.
