Ms. Culling reviews the animated film, Shinbone Alley.
“My heart has
followed, all my days, something I cannot name….”
So opens the lead-in song for a long-forgotten animated
musical, one which came before Disney monopolized the genre.
The story of Shinbone
Alley actually begins in 1916, when a very unusual columnist appeared and
began writing for New York newspaper The
Evening Sun. Archy, who had been “a poet who felt like a cockroach”,
transmigrated to the body of such an insect upon his suicide, and through the
regular feature “The Sun Dial”, Don Marquis brought the tales of the
philosophical bug to life in short pieces and poetic blurbs. Archy lived his
microcosmic life on the streets of the Big Apple, skittering into Marquis’s
office after the paper had shut down for the night to hop across the keys and
speak his mind. (Being a cockroach, Archy could hit only one key at a time – so
all of his writings appeared without punctuation or capital letters, which
would become emblematic for the column.) Archy’s lovesick odes to a wild alley
cat named Mehitabel, pontifications on life as an ugly insect in a human world,
and general political opinion from the perspective of the (literal) little guy
became quite popular in its day, and Marquis collected his ‘Archy’ pieces into
several books.
In the 1950s, Archy and Mehitabel became stars of a
musical album – Eddie Bracken and Carol Channing breathed life into their
adventures through the music of George Kleinsinger and the lyrics – many of
which were directly lifted from the source material – of Joe Darion. This
short-lived record became the basis for a musical, Shinbone Alley, and it is the 1957 stage adaptation, which starred
Bracken and Eartha Kitt as Mehitabel, which provided the inspiration for the
version animated in 1971 by Fine Arts Films. Carol Channing reprised her feline
role, and Bracken continued to voice the angst-ridden hexapod.
With simple, broad strokes and gritty comic-book colors, Shinbone Alley is a hopeless love story
wherein the underdog is the intelligent, thoughtful Archy. He plays against a
huge blue tomcat, Big Bill (voiced by Alan Freed, essentially playing a feline
version of his far more familiar animated caveman role), whose interests in
romancing Mehitabel last only so long as she continues to drown her kittens. As
she bounces between male admirers and dreams of superstardom from the gutters,
Mehitabel is constantly followed by her own cockroach version of Jiminy Cricket
– who finally gets his way when she ‘applies’ for a position as a house cat,
only for him to realize that she is at her most beautiful when she is colored
outside the lines.
As a musical, Shinbone
Alley is definitely unusual – boasting songs that tell the stories of a
prideful firefly called Broadway, the self-destruction of a moth who believed
his light was brightest burning half as long, and a gaggle of
ladybugs-of-the-evening advertising their spotted wares, among others. Like a
variety show cast, the underground creatures of 1970s New York City land to
tell their stories only briefly before the film returns to the main story.
Archy is the voice of the vermin, going largely unnoticed, and Eddie Bracken
brings a sweet sort of sincerity to his devotion to Mehitabel – and to the
creatures who share the shadow side of the city with him. His transition from
the poet who felt like a cockroach to a cockroach who feels like a poet is at
the heart of this film, and strangely, scenes of his attempted suicide in his
insect body are miserably funny. It is only after he has failed, and we see him
stumbling in maudlin drunkenness and depression, that the true gravity of his
character is revealed.
Shinbone Alley
is not a family film, although its innuendoes are gentle and its music would
entertain at any age – children will not understand the true moral conflict at
the center of Archy’s dealings with Mehitabel and her tomcat lovers, nor will
they see the political and social allegories present in many of the insect’s
anecdotes. But for the mature enough enthusiast of Western animation, this is a
quietly brilliant musical hidden in the bargain bin.
