LORD LOVE A DUCK Review

One day, as my family and I were driving in the family car, we were listening to "Talk of the Nation" on NPR, and they were taking calls from the listeners with their votes for the greatest high school movie of all time. The call-ins were mostly the usual suspects: The Breakfast Club, Clueless, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and the like.

No Last Picture Show, No Welcome to the Dollhouse, no Cooley High.

And no Lord Love a Duck.

That Lord Love a Duck, from 1966, directed and co-written by George Axelrod, didn't make the list is not surprising, given that it wasn't a popular success at the time, and is rarely seen today. It's an odd Duck, indeed, and not easily categorized. Its credits sequence promises a beach party movie, with a great theme song by Neil Hefti and Ernie Sheldon performed by the Wild Ones: "Hey, hey, Lord love a duck/Don't nobody care?/So tired of swimming and getting nowhere/Down on my luck-o, stuck in the muck-o/Oh Oh Lord...Love a Duck!" It's a black comedy of the zany, madcap variety, but it also has dramatic moments that are even darker than the satire.

Roddy McDowell plays super-genius high school senior Alan Musgrave a/k/a "Mollymauk." Despite being 37 when he made the movie, McDowell is great in the part, and somehow believable. As our story begins, he is being pursued by half the graduating class of Consolidated High and several members of the local police force as well. Turns out it's because he just committed a mass murder. With a bulldozer.

Tuesday Weld is Barbara Ann Greene, the object of Alan's obsession. "Barbara Ann, whose deepest and most heartfelt yearnings express, with a kind of touching lyricism, the total vulgarity of our time."

Weld has called this her best performance, and it's right up there with her work in Pretty Poison, Play It As It Lays, and Who'll Stop the Rain. Her Barbara Ann is the All-American Girl, shallow, materialistic, too beautiful. "Everybody has got to love me. Everybody. This is my year. My horoscope says I'm going to be famous. I am a Capricorn and I can't miss. I deserve it, too. I've been good. I haven't done bad things with boys. Well, a little. But not really bad. And only if I liked a boy."

The sequence where she makes her father (Max Showalter) buy her a dozen angora sweaters has to be seen to be believed.

Barbara Anne's cocktail-waitress mother Marie is played by Lola Albright, whom you may recall from the Peter Gunn TV series or such films as A Cold Wind in August. Marie is a bit of a lush, and what they used to call a "pushover," but she and Barbara Ann share an almost sisterly relationship. Until she becomes an embarrassment to her daughter. That's when the film veers uncomfortably into dramedy.

I think a remake with Dina and Lindsay Lohan as Marie and Barbara Ann would be perfect, but in a post-Columbine world, a teen comedy about mass murder would be a tough sell. Not to mention the difficulty of getting insurance for Lindsay.

Also in the cast are Ruth Gordon as Barbara's mother-in-law, Harvey Korman as Weldon Emmett, principal of Consolidated High, and, in a small role, Playboy playmate and wife of baseball's Bo Belinsky, the lovely Jo Collins.

George Axelrod made his name as a playwright with The Seven-Year Itch, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, and Goodbye, Charlie. He also adapted the screenplays of Bus Stop, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and The Manchurian Candidate. Lord Love a Duck, adapted from a novel by Al Hine, was the first of only two films he would direct, the other being The Secret Life of an American Wife. Maybe he couldn't get work as a director because the suits at the studio didn't realize that the visible boom mics in many of the interior scenes were in the shot by design, as a sly, self-referential "it's only a movie" in-joke. Whoever mastered the DVD obviously didn't get the joke, choosing to use a cropped version of the film that eliminates the boom mics and the shadows of the crew on the walls.

 The promotional materials for the movie claimed, "This motion picture is against teenagers...Their parents....Beach movies...Cars...Schools, and several hundred other things," and espoused Axelrod's pet philosophy: "The planet Earth is the lunatic asylum of the galaxy."

Even though it has its flaws, and the second half of the movie, involving Alan's attempt to murder Barbara Ann's new husband (Martin West), loses a bit of steam, Lord Love a Duck is still my favorite high school movie of all time.

Available on DVD from MGM Home Video.