![]() Yet it’s as a screen musical that Xanadu fails most peculiarly, in spite of a slick, catchy songbook: 50% Olivia Newton-John and 50% Electric Light Orchestra, as if the film forgot its old-meets-new formula at the composition stage and simply opted to pit two disparate pop acts against each other. ![]() Photograph: Universal/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock Olivia Newton-John and Michael Beck in Xanadu. The bar for character development and motivation in this kind of bauble is low: Xanadu never remotely rises to it. Terpsichore – nicknamed Kira, for reasons that make as much sense as her wardrobe of pastel dust-ruffle dresses and leg warmers – tells us that she has acted as muse to Michelangelo, Shakespeare and Beethoven in the past this, however, is the project in which she finally feels emotional investment. The script, such as it was, existed mostly in theory: in response to Newton-John’s later claim that the film was being rewritten on the hoof, director Robert Greenwald tartly corrected, “It was being written on the hoof.” Its slender premise offered us Newton-John as the muse Terpsichore, brought to Earth as a sparkly wheel-footed dream girl for the sole purpose of helping feckless artist Sonny (Michael Beck) and washed-up big band leader Danny (Kelly) to realise their joint dream of opening a glam-rock-swing roller-disco in a disused Los Angeles auditorium. Both of them on roller-skates, of course – if you don’t know what you’re doing, the thinking seems to have been, it helps to do it at speed. With Newton-John in Hayworth’s place, as if to turn it into Grease by sheer force of presence, and Gene Kelly to fill in the vintage half of the old-meets-new formula. And The Wiz was working from an inspired update of cast-iron source Xanadu, by contrast, lifted the skeleton of a plot idea from Down to Earth, a little-remembered 1947 musical-comedy vehicle for Rita Hayworth, and decided to wing it from there. What they failed to notice in the same year as Grease, however, was the box office collapse of another musical that attempted to bridge misty Hollywood nostalgia with late-1970s glitter: The Wiz, Sidney Lumet’s gaudy, elephantine film of Broadway’s all-black Motown rewrite of The Wizard of Oz. It was retro and current at once, as embodied in the out-of-time star presence of wholesome chart queen Olivia Newton-John: that, then, is where dollar signs lit up in the eyes of Xanadu’s producers Lawrence Gordon and Joel Silver. It had bouncy Broadway-originated numbers but modest production values, while its mixture of radio-ready contemporary songcraft and the throwback nostalgia of its 1950s-set narrative engaged a surprising cross-section of generations. The next year, Grease applied that pop sensibility (and John Travolta) to a more traditional musical form. Saturday Night Fever proved that you didn’t need unnatural on-screen singing to sell a film on scorching dance numbers and an infectious soundtrack: it was low-key realist drama that just happened to have happy feet and a head full of pounding disco bangers. Yet toward the end of the decade, a couple of smash hits showed a different path forward for the genre. ![]() The 1970s had been an awkward age for musicals, with the forward-thinking, adult-minded standalone success of Cabaret surrounded by the limp corpses of various dud attempts to emulate the family song-and-dance blockbusters of the 1960s. ![]() If you disassemble its many lunatic moving parts, however, you can sort of see how Xanadu was conceived in the first place, as the bloated outcome of the kind of zealous, coked-up “it’s X-meets-Y-meets-Z” studio pitches that Robert Altman skewered in The Player. Nothing about it makes any sense, its birthday least of all. Xanadu is 40 years old this week, but it may as well be 4,000, or a missive from an as-yet-unborn future. A grand studio folly that attempted to mesh the comforting sensibility of 1940s Hollywood musicals to the fast-expiring disco mania of the 1970s, leaning into the latter’s then current roller-disco offshoot and simultaneously flailing about for glam rock and new wave reference points, Xanadu arrived both immediately dated and desperately of-the-moment – like an overstuffed time capsule of a half-dozen different eras, only assembled by Martians who had been observing popular culture from afar. This week marks exactly four decades since Universal’s epically derided musical blitzed its way on to US cinema screens in a queasy haze of lilac neon light, yet 40 seems an entirely banal middle age for a film that elastically stretched the concept of time from the very beginning. In the case of Xanadu, however, the numbers game doesn’t really apply either way.
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