Word: cancan
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Minsky stripper at the first morning show. And as Minerva, Ballet Theater Angel Lucia Chase achieved the air of a brave but discouraged workhorse whose limbs simply can no longer negotiate that hill. In the end, Dancer de Mille's tired but hefty seductiveness, climaxing in an elephantine cancan step, won the contest of the three disgraces...
...much-favored Guatemala City bordello. Once inside, they discovered that half a dozen young military cadets had engaged the attentions of La Locha's choicest residents. Waving pistols and machine guns, the Liberators dragged the unhappy cadets into the corridors, forced them to strip and dance an incongruous cancan. When the cadets were finally freed, they dashed off to the Eseuela Politecnica (Guatemala's West Point), aroused their fellow cadets and told them of the latest indignity visited upon the regular army by the makeshift militia with which Colonel Castillo Armas seized power from Guatemala...
Excursion to Hades. Offenbach was a kind of 19th century, Parisian Cole Porter, only better. A superb musical satirist, he could also turn out sentimental waltzes and respectable grand opera, but his specialty was cancan, with its piston-like rhythm and irrepressible gaiety. Orpheus contains some of his best satire and his best cancan tunes. The libretto used at Lambertville (by the late Ring Lardner, with additional lyrics by Edward Eager) tries to modernize the original. The result is stained Varsity-Show humor, but still...
...except that they never are for long-Can-Can whirls and foams. Jo Mielziner's sets of Montmartre rooftops, studios and dives are charmingly evocative, and Michael Kidd has worked up the best dances of the season. There is a fine, hair-dragging apache number, a legsome cancan, and an enchanting, Garden of Eden ballet spoof, full of flamingoes, frogs and inchworms, as well as Eve and the serpent. As Eve (and several other things), red-headed Gwen Verdon has a wonderfully fetching dance personality; as the Jezebel, Paris' blonde Lilo has lots of voice, as well...
...there is often little illusion of depth, particularly in closeups. The picture's writing and direction are also blurry, and the extra dimension is used primarily as a trick. All sorts of objects pop out at the audience from the screen: fists, a skeleton's hand, cancan dancers' legs, guns, pickaxes, spears, falling bodies. As Waxworks Proprietor Price says at one point: "I'm going to give the people what they want-sensation, horror, shock." If, as Hollywood fondly hopes, this is what moviegoers want, House of Wax is a howling success...