Of all the G-rated cinematic diversions of the 1960s, director George Roy Hill’s “Thoroughly Modern Millie” remains one of the weirdest — in its deceptively merry way, no less bizarre than Bob Rafelson’s Monkees vehicle “Head,” or Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Tracing its sources, and its afterlife as a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, provides a twisty lesson in the profitable practice of spoofing the Roaring Twenties. We’ll get to that.
First, the news hook: If you’ve ever wanted to see a good 35mm print of the original, heavily padded roadshow edition of “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” complete with overture, intermission and (cut for the shorter general release version) Julie Andrews singing “Drink La Chaim” in a truly unexpected Jewish wedding sequence, the Music Box’s ongoing weekend matinee tribute to the films of 1967 is happy to accommodate.
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After “Mary Poppins” and “The Sound of Music,” star Andrews was the berries in terms of box office dominance. Universal wanted to film the charming London and Broadway ’20s pastiche, “The Boy Friend,” which made the droll ingénue Andrews a star in 1954. But the rights were tied up. Producer Ross Hunter scrapped the “Boy Friend” idea (Ken Russell mangled it on screen four years later) and hired Richard Morris to write a “Boy Friend”-y ’20s goof instead. For “Millie,” Morris borrowed heavily from a 1956 London spoof called “Chrysanthemum,” which featured a white-slavery subplot.
The Millie of “Millie” runs afoul of the duplicitous Mrs. Meers (Beatrice Lillie, struggling with Alzheimer’s during filming) and her Chinese lackeys. Pat Morita and Jack Soo play “Oriental One” and “Oriental Two,” and their humiliation is almost unendurable, especially in the excruciating slapstick climax. Elsewhere in “Millie,” the Kansas transplant of the title seeks big-city romance with John Gavin; friendship with Mary Tyler Moore (stuck in faux-operetta-bimbo mode); and a surrogate Auntie Mame by way of Carol Channing’s filthy-rich Muzzy.
What’s good about the movie? The Sammy Cahn/Jimmy Van Heusen title song. And Andrews, despite the material. Director Hill wanted “Millie” to be short and sweet, a little under two hours. But because Andrews was a huge draw, the studio said no, and put back in everything Hill’s cut left out. This explains, in part, the movie’s eerie underwater pacing. The roadshow addition, two-and-a-half hours long, is what’s playing at the Music Box 11:30 a.m. Saturday and Sunday.
A somewhat shorter but no less strange general-release version squeaked into the Top 10 box office attractions for 1967. Andrews followed it up with two gargantuan flops, “Star!” and “Darling Lili.” In 2000 a Broadway-bound stage adaptation of “Millie” premiered at the La Jolla Playhouse. I reviewed it for the LA Times; it had problems, but it was swift and pretty charming. The worst of the racial and sexual stereotypes, comic or otherwise, were dealt with, and the new songs by Jeanine Tesori and Dick Scanlan helped considerably. Then the show went to Broadway, where it won the Tony but traded easygoing silliness for a more grating brand of camp.
My moviegoing life as a kid changed forever when the General Cinema Corporation opened the Cinema I & II in Racine, Wis., in 1967. “Millie” was the first movie to play there. I remember being a little freaked out by the white-slavery folderol, and the women stuffed in bamboo crates, and James Fox in drag. I remember not cracking a smile during the slapstick climax, which was and remains shrill desperation in search of a wrap-up. But thanks to “Mary Poppins” I was already in the bag, in a prepubescent way, for Julie Andrews. And she’s why “Thoroughly Modern Millie” got by in the first place.
11:30 a.m. Saturday and Sunday, Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave.; www.musicboxtheatre.com.
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