Your faithful Streaming Hell columnist regularly watches, with pleasure, movies that would send the typical moviegoer running away as if on fire. From talking animal movies to no-budget work from the nearly-rehabilitated Andy Milligan to the South African E.T. rip-off Nukie, we’ll take the bullet, and like it. But even your intrepid trash consumer has yet to find a solid version of Belgian experimental author Maurice Maeterlinck’s oft-adapted play L’Oiseau Bleu. The work premiered on a Moscow stage in 1908 and was subsequently adapted twice for the silent screen and later for a 1940 Shirley Temple vehicle that, if it was one’s first impression of the onetime U.S. Ambassador to Ghana, would make one swear off dimples for good. But the most excruciating iteration, one that tries the patience of even the most tolerant connoisseur of garbage, is the 1976 Soviet-American production The Blue Bird, featuring an all-star cast directed by the legendary George Cukor. The camp aficionado and camp-curious may be attracted to this strange bird like moths to a lava lamp, but take it from us, it’s one of the most painful cinematic experiences on Earth.
The film opens in a magical agricultural land where windmills slowly turn and herds of sheep bleat on dirt roads; this precious B-roll shows the only moments of pleasure you will enjoy during this 99-minute journey. Much as the 1940 film was tailored to showcase Shirley Temple (turning her into an unpleasant brat that wiped away the charm that makes so many of her other movies so endearing), this too was kind of a vanity project: Grande dame Elizabeth Taylor, the first marquee actor you see on screen, gets three-count’em-three significant roles, as Queen of Light, Mother Witch and Maternal Love.
The maternal element is mother to peasant children Mytyl (Patsy Kensit, who as an adult would star in Absolute Beginners) and her brother Tyltyl (Todd Lookinland, whose real-life brother was television’s Bobby Brady). We first see the kids running through the woods with Tylo, their black dog (a nod to depression?), stopping before a rickety bridge that seems to be the only way to cross a raging river. The woodland action is juxtaposed with Taylor flexing her maternal muscles, furrowing her brow with worry that her kids aren’t home yet.
Mytyl and Tyltyl are bratty kids; they worry their mother sick, then when they can’t fall asleep, they run off through the woods to spy a lavish party. Back home, they’re greeted by the mysterious Mother Witch (Taylor, wearing a little more makeup), who demands that the kids look for the blue bird (of happiness) so they can give it to a poor invalid child in town. The witch gives the kids a diamond, which suddenly transforms Mother Witch into the Queen of Light (a Vaseline-lensed Taylor showing a lot more décolletage).
The magical queen changes the elements, as well as ordinary household items, into human form: thus, fire and water manifest in the form of Russian dancers Yevgeni Shcherbakov and Valentina Ganibalova; Tylo turns into James Cole (James Coco was originally cast but left the production after the nearly inedible food left him with a gall bladder attack), and their cat Tylette turns into Cicely Tyson; sugar, bread and milk also become human.
This all sounds much more fun than it is, the fantasy elements feeling awkward despite or maybe because of the marquee cast. Cukor, then 75, had trouble with both the Russian cast, with whom he didn’t know how to communicate, and the American cast. Rumors flew around this ill-fated product: Cukor reportedly accused Tyson of casting voodoo spells, and by all accounts, she detested him. Jane Fonda, for her part, supposedly tried to engage the Soviet cast and crew in political discussions.
What might be the most embarrassing part of this Blue Bird may be the same cringeworthy scene that sunk the 1940 version: the land of yet-to-be-born children, in which the viewer is left to wonder who these kids are supposed to be? Mytyl and Tyltyl are introduced to a number of strange toddlers, like a babbling Russian kid who they’re told “will found the confederation of the solar planets.” And apparently, a sleeping little blond kid somebody points out will “bring pure joy to all mankind…with ideas that no one’s had yet!”
The ostensible moral here seems to be that the kids should be happy with their lot in life, but the misguided spectacle makes it all a hideous muddle. One ends up looking forward to the devastating, central forest fire that threatens to level them all, but never comes. Maybe you’d be better off not seeing any version of this at all.
The post From the Vaults of Streaming Hell: The Blue Bird appeared first on Spectrum Culture.