EVOLUTION: ‘TOP HAT’ TO ‘LITTLE SHOP’

The 1935 Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical “Top Hat” has lately been playing on television, the 1986 musical “Little Shop of Horrors” is in our friendly neighborhood theaters, and I doubt that you could find two films that demonstrate more clearly how the movies have evolved.

I watched “Top Hat” again for the umpteenth time, as they say. If there is a better black-and-white musical--and I don’t think there is--whatever it is, must also have Fred and Ginger in it.

“Top Hat” has a kind of sublime silliness. Its plot, as intricate and fragile as a spider’s web, rests on Ginger’s mistaken belief that Fred--and not Edward Everett Horton--is the philandering husband of Helen Broderick. Part of the delight of the movie is seeing how the writers, Dwight Taylor and Allan Scott, sustained the confusion, which would collapse the moment all four characters were together, or simply called each other by first names.

As it is, the delicious delusion lasts quite as long as it needs to, and then is airily dismissed. “Why didn’t you tell me who you really were?” Ginger asks innocently, in a sound-stage gondola.

These were Depression times, grim and getting grimmer. And, as antidote, director Mark Sandrich and art directors Van Nest Polglase and Carroll Clark create a white-on-white wonderland in which everyone is unbearably rich and nobody wears anything but satin gowns and white tie and tails--around the clock, as near as you can tell. The opening moments, of Astaire bored in one of those London men’s clubs where the rustle of a newspaper is a shocking affront to silence, is a wonderful mimed set-piece.

By now the Irving Berlin songs are part of the world’s birthright and the Hermes Pan dances are elegant and enchanting, grand and amusing without being camp (a subtle but real distinction).

“Top Hat,” 50-plus years later, wears its innocent sophistication like an untoppled crown. The silliness arrives with a wink that really understands the way of a man with a woman and vice versa. You could wish for an updating of the tinny sound track, although as it is, it has a period charm.

“West Side Story,” “Cabaret” and “All That Jazz” have led the film musical into worlds that are almost unimaginably distant from the London and Venice of “Top Hat.” The dancing is still dazzling and characters move from speech into marvelous song at the drop of a fiddle. But a real world, or a realer world, does not just lurk in the wings; it has edged on stage.

“Little Shop of Horrors” is a musical not quite like any that has preceded it, linked to the genre by characters bursting into songs which, now as then, celebrate unrequited love and other appetites.

Innocence, plain or fancy, has long since departed. “Little Shop of Horrors” is set not in pearly suites but on grime-on-grime Skid Row, and the alkies and the dispossessed are the jarring, accusing backdrop to the goings-on in Vincent Gardenia’s bizarrely mislocated flower shop.

As John O’Hara once remarked about the characters he invented in “Pal Joey,” only the ingenue is innocent and she is so dumb nobody could stand her. In “Little Shop,” only Rick Maranis as the protagonist is even relatively innocent; and he, too, turns to the fateful, magical plant for a little Faust aid in his love life.

The vampirish, person-eating plant, finally the size of a condo, is an extraordinary technical achievement. It also becomes, if you let it, an overwhelming symbol of any panacea that promises everything, up to and including perfect happiness, but delivers only a terrible, fatal captivity.

Audiences who come to hoot at the film’s dark observances may not care to see the plant as a metaphor for alcohol or drugs, for example, but the implication is hard to escape, especially given the location.

“Little Shop” is farcical and furious, nutty and very, very sardonic, a whole display case of grotesques, including Steve Martin as a sadistic dentist and Bill Murray as a masochistic patient and Ellen Greene as a blond both dumb and victimized, with a voice that would etch glass.

The trio of singers who are the film’s Greek chorus are an inspired invention, somehow joining the artifice of the form and the social and psychological (or psychiatric) realities that are being used as source material.

It is said that the film’s original ending, in which the plant wins, was redone when preview audiences found it too bleak for comfort. I found “Little Shop of Horrors” a vigorous, original and unsettling use of the movies (also and incidentally likely to put children off dentistry forever). Few musicals have had such split levels of meaning; its darkness is very dark. “Top Hat” it certainly isn’t, but time marches on, and the past is beyond recapture, though not, thankfully, beyond memory.