Nathan Rabin's Happy Place's Definitive Guide to American Movies about the Film Industry
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Something to Sing About (1937)
For a legendary song and dance man who won an Academy Award hoofing up a storm as George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy, James Cagney made shockingly few musicals. Perhaps he thought moviegoers couldn’t handle the cognitive dissonance of him terrorizing humanity with a Tommy Gun in half of his pictures and singing sweetly to beautiful women in the other half.
The vaudevillian turned turned gangster icon returned to his beloved musicals in 1937’s Something to Sing About playing Thadeus McGillicuddy, AKA Terry Rooney, a successful East Coast band leader and radio star who gets the big call up to Hollywood and makes his first major motion picture vehicle.
The experience doesn’t agree with the moonlighting musician so he takes wife Rita Wyatt (Evelyn Daw) on a cruise to the South Seas to get away from it all. When he comes back he’s astonished to discover that his movie debut is a smash hit and he’s instant matinee idol. Success comes with a very stupid price, however. The newly minted movie star must keep his marriage a secret and feign interest in his onscreen paramour to prevent losing an audience of breathless, love-struck bobbysoxers romantically obsessed a guy who looks and acts like James Cagney.
Something to Sing About has an extraordinary gift in a singing, dancing Cagney. The production number that opens the film is dynamite. Cagney is a combustible and magnetic performer, a stampeding staccato musical force. Unfortunately Something to Sing About is just barely a musical, with only a handful of songs and even fewer dances.
Any moment Cagney is offscreen or not singing or dancing feels like a wasted opportunity so while this may be worth seeing just for the White Heat star in musical mode it’s a particularly silly trifle that wastes one of our greatest entertainers in a role that allows him to use all of his gifts.
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Cannes Man (1997)
The 1997 misfire Cannes Man clumsily combines The Producers and Pygmalion with The Emperor’s New Clothes. Hans Christian Anderson’s classic fable about a buck naked royal and the kingdom that indulges his narcissistic delusions is a perennial favorite of makers of movie world comedies because it speaks so incisively to Hollywood’s cult of the new. In Cannes Man the nude ruler is Frank "Rhino" Rhinoslavsky (Francesco Quinn), a dim-witted Los Angeles cab-driver who flies to Cannes during the festival to deliver something to Troma films and ends up the protege of lovably sleazy producer Sy Lerner (Seymour Cassel, in a role that suggests his comeback turn in In the Soup enough to suffer terribly by comparison).
Sy bets a contemporary that he can pick a random person off the street and make them the toast of Cannes based on nothing but hype. The old pro chooses the star-struck cabbie as the subject for his experiment and reinvents him as Frank Rhino, a poet turned screenwriter whose screenplay Cannes Man quickly becomes the talk of the festival despite it not existing as anything other than a cynical ruse.
Cannes Man’s primary draw is an insanely overloaded roster of guest stars playing themselves, a Hollywood who’s who’s that includes everyone from Robert Evans to Menahem Golan to Bryan Singer and Harvey Weinstein. A galaxy of big names were willing to lend the production their names and a very small amount of their time without contributing a single laugh. The comedy team of Johnny Depp and Jim Jarmusch are particularly painful in self-deprecating extended cameos as New Age buffoons tempted by Cannes Man’s scalding heat.
This feels badly made up on the spot by indulgent filmmakers and money people whose skill set does not include ad-libbing or improvisational comedy. Cannes Man is a wasted, overly familiar trip.
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