Xanadu handles heaven heavy-handedly
By Bernard Drew
The ambitious new musical fantasy “Xanadu” turns out to be the daughter (or maybe stepdaughter) of those fantastic old 40s musicals “One Touch of Venus”and “Down to Earth,” wherein Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth left their heavenly pedestals, on which goddesses and muses were placed, to come down to Earth and fall in love with a mortal before returning to heaven.
Say this for “Xanadu”; it strives mightily to achieve magic, but for all its sunbeams, mirages and tricky dissolves. it remains humorless and earthbound.
Artist Michael Beck, impatient with his hack commercial work, tears a drawing into tiny pieces which fly across Los Angeles and land on, if memory serves, Santa Monica, smack into a mural of the Nine Muses, all of whom come to life, but especially Olivia Newton-John.
She has a habit of blithely roller-skating along the beach and suddenly disapppearing into a sunbeam. She meets gloomy Beck, kisses him, and vanishes.
Searching for her, he comes upon Gene Kelly, an old, Saroyanesque musi-cian who wistfully dreams of better days, when he had a small nightclub in New York City in 1945 and was in love with a singer looks suspiciously like Miss Newton-John, who certainly gets around in this, but who at that time resembled a fourth Andrews Sister.
Popping in and out of Beck’s life, she suggests that he and Kelly open a new nightclub which would feature an amalgam of their periods swing of the wartime 40s and rock and roll of the ’80s, which they do amid several produc tion numbers, a couple of which aren’t bad.
But heaven calls Miss Newton-John back, on the club’s opening night, of course. However, she is so in love with Beck that she finds the courage to argue with her parents, Zeus and Juno, whose voices are those of the matchless Wilfred Hyde-White and Coral Browne, and how I wish they might have been written into the story, which sorely needs their humor.
All ends happily, in case you were worried, or forgot how “One Touch of Venus” ended. It was directed by Robert Greenwald, who substitutes for magic an elfin whimsicality upon which “Xanadu” ultimately chokes.
A Universal picture, at Flagship theaters, Larchmont.
Bernard Drew is film critic for Gannett Westchester Newspapers