Li'l Abner (1959)

Let's be realistic.

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Released in 1959 - Lil' Abner is a perfectly delightful combination of satire, music, dance and cartoonish fun - All based on the popular comic strip of the same name created by Al Capp.Lil' Abner is wonderfully loud and brassy. Its humor is cute and corny. And there are plenty of good songs to enjoy, as well.This vividly colorful Musical features all of Capp's most memorable characters, including Abner Yokum, Daisy Mae, Earthquake McGoon. General Bullmoose, and Stupefyin' Jones.Set in the remote, hillbilly town of Dogpatch, USA - The highlight of Lil' Abner's story is the hilarious Sadie Hawkins Day race in which all of the single, young women in town chase after all of the eligible bachelors, and the one that any of them catches is the one that they marries.Lil' Abner certainly ranks right up there as one of the best Musicals of the 1950s.

In 1956, after a wait of some three years, The work of famed cartoonist Alfred Gerald Caplin, otherwise known as Al Capp, took center stage on the big screen as " Li'l Abner. " Directed by Melvin Frank and originally written by Al Capp himself the world of 'Dogpatch, Kentucky, USA. From his fertile mind, arose the memorable characters of Li'l Abner Yokum (Peter Palmer), Daisy Mae (Leslie Parrish) and all the other colorful inhabitant's of the mountain enclave. From the beginning, the whole place is a lazy, carefree, song filled adaption which invites all to join them in such innovation as 'Sadie Hawking Day' and then the desperate race to find something 'Useful' in the town with which to keep the burg from being destroyed by a nuclear blast. All this, and the government's search for the secret formula of Yokumberry tonic. Fun, frolic and musical gayety's await every audience member. Featured players include Stubby Kaye, Howard St. John, Julie Newmar, Stella Stevens, Billie Hayes, Joe E. Marks and Bern Hoffman as Earthquake McGoon. An extremely good film and a Classic of the first order. ****

I first knew about this (apart from Leslie Halliwell’s Film Guide) via its poster in a bulky scrapbook of my father’s containing adverts from the time such films were released in Malta. It’s never been shown in my neck of the woods and, therefore, I had to wait till I got hold of the DVD to check it out; despite not being a Musicals fan and the unappetizing backwoods milieu of the narrative, I’d always been interested in it – being based on a comic strip, it was bound to be stylized and filled with colorful characters (with equally descriptive names).The songs are pretty good (one of the best numbers is the girls’ plea to turn their men from narcissistic bodybuilders – including future “Euro-Cult” stalwart Gordon Mitchell! – back into uncouth but amenable country-folk) – though, once again, the dance sequences (choreographed by Michael Kidd) go on too long and cause the almost two-hour film to drag. As I said in my review of the earlier and lesser straight 1940 version, the plot is much more elaborate this time around – not only do we get an attempt to evacuate the community to make way for A-Bomb tests (a nice touch of topicality) but Abner, Marryin’ Sam (Stubby Kaye) and later many of the people of Dogpatch go to Washington to present the Government with an essential homegrown product (the town had been deemed “the most useless in the U.S.A.”) and then to save the naïve Abner from the clutches of megalomaniac General Bullmoose (Howard St. John).Sexuality is even more to the fore here – with several great-looking and scantily-clad ladies (Leslie Parrish as Daisy Mae, Carmen Alvarez as Moonbeam McSwine, Julie Newmar as Stupefyin’ Jones and, best of all, Stella Stevens as Bullmoose’s moll Appassionata von Climax!). Incidentally, the loutish Earthquake McGoon is less of a grotesque this time around; Abner’s parents, though, still look like they belong on another planet – also, Robert Strauss (very popular around this time) turns up under heavy (make that filthy) make-up as Daisy Mae’s opportunistic close relative, whereas Jerry Lewis does a very brief uncredited cameo as a dopey-looking character called Itchy McRabbit! By the way, just as RED GARTERS (1954; a viewing of which preceded this), had characters constantly referring to “The Code Of The West”, the people of Dogpatch live by “The Code Of The Hills”…

Fifties movies are -- well -- fifties movies. You accept them for what they are. In those terms, Li'l Abner is fun, especially Stubby Kaye as Marryin' Sam. Just why the fifties are a vast movie wasteland is an interesting subject. I grew up in the fifties, and you could be marked as a non-conformist by not wearing a tie. You got laughed at if your haircut didn't show at least an inch of neck above your collar. Naturally, all this had a chilling effect on television and movies, and so we have only a handful of great movies between the glories of The Third Man and To Have and To Have Not in the forties and Lawrence of Arabia and To Kill a Mockingbird in the sixties. Look at the Oscar winners from the fifties to get an idea of just how bad things were. And so we turned to science fiction -- Destination Moon, Forbidden Planet, This Island Earth -- and to movies based on comic strips like Li'l Abner. When you watch Li'l Abner, just remember, in the fifties this passed for pungent political satire and risqué humor. ricknorwood, sfsite