Xanadu review
by Gannett News Service
The ambitious new musical fantasy, Xanadu, turns out to be the daughter for maybe stepdaughter of those old 40s fantastic musicals, One Touch of Venus and Down To Earth, wherein Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth left their heavenly pedestals on which goddesses and muses were placed to come down to earth and fall in love with a mortal before returning to heaven
Say this for Xanadu. It strives mightily to achieve magic, but for all its sunbeams, mirages and tricky dissolves, it remains humorless and earthbound. Artist Michael Beck, impatient with his hack commercial work, tears up a drawing into tiny pieces which fly across Los Angeles and land on, if memory serves, Santa Monica, smack into a mural of the nine Muses, all of whom come to life, but especially Olivia Newton-John.
She has the habit of blithely rollerskating along the beach and suddenly disappearing into a sunbeam.
She meets gloomy Mr. Beck. kisses him and vanishes. Searching for her, he comes upon Gene Kelly, an old Saroyanesque musician who wistfully dreams of better days, when he had a small nightclub in New York City in 1945 and was in love with a singer who looks suspiciously like Miss Newton-John who at that time resembled a fourth Andrews Sister.
Popping in and out of Mr. Beck’s life, she suggests that he and Kelly open a new nightclub which would feature an amalgam of their periods swing of the wartime 40s, and rock’n’roll of the ’80s which they do amid several production numbers, a couple of which aren’t bad.
But heaven calls Miss Newton-John back on the club’s opening night, of course, but she is so in love with Mr. Beck that she finds the courage to argue with her parents, Zeus and Juno, whose voices are those of the matchless Wilfred Hyde-White and Carl Browne, and how I wish they might have been written into the story which sorely needs their humor.
All ends happily, in case you were worried, or forgot how One Touch of Venus ended
It was directed by Robert Greenwald, who sub stitutes for magic an elfin whimsicality upon which Xanadu ultimately chokes.
The film is rated PG