BATHTUBS OVER BROADWAY (A-minus) - Dava Whisenant, a former editor for David Letterman's talk show, tags along with Steve Young, a "Late Show" writer, as he explores his passion: the underground world of industrial/commercial musicals of the 1960s and '70s.
Young is eminently likable as he geeks out on these vinyl treasures that captured a postwar era of big-budget company conventions where more money was spent on one-off shows than on the Broadway hits at the time. The film captures an era when the United States was still a manufacturing powerhouse, and a time when old-fashioned entertainment still held sway.
Young shares his nerd passions with other fans of the industrial musicals, such as punk-rock drummer Don Bolles and former Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra. Veterans of the shows appear, including Chita Rivera, Florence Henderson and Martin Short. Young tracks down the composers of these cheesy showtunes about tractors and plumbing fixtures. The centerpiece, undoubtedly, is "My Bathroom," which provoked my inner 12-year-old to guffaw uncontrollably:
My bathroom, my Bathroom
It's much more than it may seem
Where I wash and where I cream
A special place where I can stay
And cream and dream and dream and dream ...
Ah, yes. I recall those teenage years in the bathroom just as fondly. Whisenant finds both the retro humor and the true heart of the genre and the folks who lived it. The pitch is irresistible.
THE IMPOSTER (2012) (B) - There's a fine line between ridiculous and fascinating. This documentary, about a French con man who somehow tricked a Texas family into thinking he was their teenage son/brother who had gone missing three years earlier, is a little of both.
The filmmakers spend a lot of time with Frederic Bourdin, the trickster who pulled off his scam for a few months before locals, including a private investigator, got suspicious. Maybe it was the fact that Bourdin was 23, not 16 like the missing boy, had a heavy accent, and had brown eyes instead of the boy's blue eyes.
Nothing adds up here. Why did the family fall for it? Blind hope? Were some of them in on the boy's disappearance? Nothing gets tied up neatly in the end here, and the numerous re-enactments might try your patience. But it's all so implausible that it's hard to resist.
BONUS TRACK
From "Bathtubs," the incomparable, "My Bathroom":
And Madeleine Kahn, from "Young Frankenstein," with our title track:
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