Bye Bye Birdie

1963 "The Most WONDERFUL Entertainment EVER! EVER!"
6.6| 1h52m| G| en
Details

A singer goes to a small town for a performance before he is drafted.

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Reviews

Hellen I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much
Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic
Abbigail Bush what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.
Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.
ags123 On the surface, this film is still moderately entertaining. But there's much to take away from it half a century later that was never intended. It depicts a world that suddenly disappeared soon after. Clinging to the last vestiges of Eisenhower-era innocence (when the Broadway production played) the film was dated by the time it opened. 1963 ushered in a slew of events that changed everything - the Kennedy assassination, the civil rights movement, The Beatles. The people of "Bye Bye Birdie" didn't know what was about to hit them. Ann- Margret's chaste romance with Bobby Rydell is way too saccharine. Janet Leigh is an uncomfortable choice as a Latina spitfire (a role played onstage by Chita Rivera who apparently wasn't palatable for movie audiences). Paul Lynde steals the show with his hilarious signature shtick, which today would be openly gay. It's hard to take any of this without a grain of salt. Not to be overlooked are the embarrassing opening and closing sequences where Ann-Margret sings and mugs for the camera while inexplicably mispronouncing "Birdie."
atlasmb Adapted from the stage musical, "Bye Bye Birdie" is based on the real-life story of Elvis Presley being drafted. In the film, Conrad Birdie (Jesse Pearson)--a teenage heartthrob--is to visit a small town in Ohio and kiss a local girl as a promotional appearance that would be part of The Ed Sullivan Show's live broadcast.The real star of the film is Ann-Margret (as "local girl: Kim McAfee). There is quite a contrast between the teenage boys, who are all feet and Adam's apples, and Ann-Margret, whose more mature sexuality makes her feel like a Las Vegas dancer. This film does, in fact, serve as a bridge in her film career between "State Fair", with the wholesome Pat Boone, and "Viva Las Vegas", with Elvis.On the adult side, Dick Van Dyke (Albert F. Peterson) and Paul Lyndev(Harry McAfee) reprise their stage roles and sing the songs they are best known for: "Put On a Happy Face" and "Kids", respectively. But for my money, it is Janet Leigh (as Rosie Deleon, Peterson's long-suffering girlfriend) who really shines.The camera work is sometimes amateurish and the choreography liberally borrows from "West Side Story" (1961). The film's story, perhaps more than the stage version, feels very choppy and uneven. Pearson's portrayal of Conrad is more like Lonesome Rhodes ("A Face in the Crowd) than Elvis. Worst of all, Maureen Stapleton is saddled with a caricature of the smothering Jewish mother; the role is so cartoonish it would fit better in "Li'l Abner".Decades after the film's original release, Ann-Margret's performance of the title song, which was added in post production, is the most memorable part of the film.
DKosty123 What is most interesting about this film is the cast. Dick Van Dyke is in top form. As for the women, Ann Margaret and Janet Leigh are both in stunning beauty here. Paul Lynde is cast here in the hit Broadway role that helped establish him in the national spot light. Ole stone face Ed Sullivan even mugs a few camera shots in.The story is a bit of a mess but in a way this is the Grease of the 1960's. Some of the sets even look like sets used in the 1970 Disco film. One of the scenes in the apartment bedroom with Leigh and Margaret reminds me very much of a scene in Grease too. The main differences between the 2 musicals are the music and script.While Grease introduced a disco beat to musicals, Bye Bye Birdie introduces very little music that is new to anybody. Grease focus on the love story of the lead characters. Birdie wanders between 2 or three love stories and sometimes wanders totally off into nonsense.Still, I like looking at pretty women and by golly the main ones in this one definitely qualify. Van Dykes physical comedy is a bit stretched here. For some reason this movie tries to take advantage of a public that has gone Elvis crazy and is into going Beatle crazy and tries to make Conrad Birdie into another Elvis. On that count, it falls woefully short which is why the music is so ordinary.
secondtake Bye Bye Birdie (1963)A silly, colorful, overlong, upbeat, and, yes, silly musical. Some of it has worn well, like the one really famous song, "Put on a Happy Face," and some of it looks like plain old awkwardness, as with Dick Van Dyke, who was a paradigm of charm and humor in his day.It's certainly not a bad movie. Like many musicals this follows a general formula, including the songwriter on the skids. It adds a couple of fun twists, like the Flubber-like invention of a chemical that changes a person's behavior. (Flubber debuts in the original movie "The Absent Minded Professor in 1961 and if you haven't seen it, it takes silliness much farther.)The main event here is the parody of Elvis in the guise of Conrad Birdie, who drives high school girls wild (and in one scene sends the whole town into a kind of rock and roll love stupor). And of course there is one girl in particular who is drawn into his sway. Kind of. In fact, the problem with the movie throughout is a "kind of sort of" mediocrity. Even the love stupor scene, which might have expanded into something hilarious, is cut short and left to fizzle. The Ed Sullivan show segment (with the real Ed Sullivan) is fun but filmed with deadening rigidity. The one near-exception to all this is the sped up Moscow Ballet sequence, which is quite long, and which is hilarious. It includes a few references to Cold War tensions, even with one Russian onlooker banging on his head with his shoe. You don't get it? Exactly. If you don't remember (or haven't heard about) Khruschev and his shoe, it's a subtlety lost.Next to Van Dyke is a whipped up Janet Leigh--quite the opposite of the Leigh now legendary for being slashed in the show of a Hitchcock thriller, or for being tortured in an earlier Welles noir. Yes, a good pedigree, even just finishing the archetypal version of "The Manchurian Candidate" the year before. I like her more and more as I see her less pigeon-holed, and she holds up her part well as the hopeful bride-to-be. The music? The choreography? The dancing and singing? It's mostly fair to middling stuff. Enjoyable to a point (depending on your leanings) but it falls short compared to other musicals of the time. It apparently fell far short of the Broadway version it was modeled after, too, getting panned for its lame choreography by critics in 1963. So why see it? Well, for one thing, the sheer nutty, Technicolor artificiality of it all--it's like entering another world. It's not reality--not a minority in sight, no hints of the real 1960s starting to unravel. This is already a slightly nostalgic look at an Elvis kind of 1957 universe, six years after it was over. Weird.