OVP: Bye Bye Birdie (1963)

Film: Bye Bye Birdie (1963)

Stars: Janet Leigh, Dick van Dyke, Ann-Margret, Maureen Stapleton, Bobby Rydell, Jesse Pearson

Director: George Sidney

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Scoring, Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Ann-Margret-click here to learn more about Ms. Ann-Margret (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We're going to start our look at Ann-Margret's career this month with where most people started their looks at Ann-Margret's career.  The redheaded actress made high-profile films before this feature, including Pocketful of Miracles with Bette Davis and the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical State Fair with Pat Boone, but it was 1963's Bye Bye Birdie that turned Ann-Margret from a prominent supporting player into a genuine movie star.  The all-American girl with clearly a little mischief in her eye, her work here would turn her overnight into an icon, a new sex symbol for the post-Marilyn era, one that would be so prominent that decades later her work would be central to an episode of Mad Men.  But what was it about Bye Bye Birdie that made Ann-Margret so intoxicating?  Let's investigate.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is a musical, largely inspired by the real-life decision of Elvis Presley to join the army.  Here, an Elvis-like figure named Conrad Birdie (Pearson) is drafted, and before he goes into the military, they decide to have one last appearance of Birdie on The Ed Sullivan Show.  Songwriter Albert Peterson (van Dyke) is down-on-his-luck, and so his girlfriend Rosie (Leigh) convinces Sullivan (playing himself in the movie) to use one of Peterson's songs for the show for Conrad to sing (therefore making him a fortune).  Rosie intends to do this so that perhaps Albert will marry her, though he's unable to break free of his mother Mae's (Stapleton) shadow.  As part of the appearance, they run a contest that will have a local girl being sung to by Conrad, and he'll kiss her in the end, and this girl is Kim (Ann-Margret), who wants to kiss him even though her boyfriend Hugo (Rydell) is jealous.

Things unfold as I think you'd imagine based on the plot.  In the end, both Kim & Rosie get their men, as well as success, though Conrad never gets his kiss (Hugo punches the singer on live television).  The musical is cute, and I liked some of the numbers, particularly the ridiculously sexual ones that Pearson is forced to sing as Conrad Birdie (Pearson is so much fun in this movie).  I'm not wild about Dick van Dyke's movie roles during this era (he was a very big star) even if I love him as a celebrity (then & always), and that's true here-he's too one-note, and it's kind of hard to imagine what va-va-voom Janet Leigh, smart & sexy as Rosie, sees in him, but it's a musical so it's time to suspend some belief.  The sound was also Oscar-nominated, and while Birdie's numbers have an elevated quality I liked, the rest is more middle-of-the-road pleasures.

And as for Ann-Margret?  Yeah, I get the draw.  The movie actually opens on the actress singing the title song, seemingly as if she's on a treadmill running forward against a blank blue screen.  It's weird-she's a good singer, but not a great one, but it works so well.  She's intoxicating, alluring, magnetic.  It's hard to imagine what this must have been like to watch for the first time in 1963 (we have, in retrospect, the knowledge that Ann-Margret would become a legend), as it's pretty much a textbook example of star power in its rawest form.  The rest of the movie never quite lives up to that jaw drop of an opening act, but Ann-Margret is an actress who can command the screen, and I'm excited to see what she does with our three other films this month.