KYMM'S 365 DAY MOVIE CHALLENGE #46: GILDA LIVE (1980, dir by Mike Nichols & Lorne Michaels [uncredited])
“I love to be unhappy/I live to be in pain/When days are full of sunshine/I’m looking for the rain!”
I saw this movie when it first came out and Gilda was alive, and everyone was young and full of promise, so it’s a lot different watching it now.
Well. That’s not the right way to start talking about such a funny, charming film starring one of the greatest character comedians of her generation! Yes, the line “I mean, I’m sorry about the lab animals, but statistics prove that most guys prefer skinny girls with cancer over healthy girls with bulging thighs!” lands differently these days, but the song about the FDA banning saccharine is still hilarious.
Gilda Live! is the filmed version of Gilda Radner’s one woman show that filled the Winter Garden for 52 performances in 1979. She plays all of her most beloved characters, Roseanne Roseannadanna, Miss Emily Litella, Judy Miller, Lisa Loopner, and also Gilda Radner.
Also in the show are Don Novello as Father Guido Sarducci and a young and hairy-headed Paul Shaeffer doing both music and playing Don Kirshner. They both help fill in while Gilda is quickly changing clothes like a maniac backstage. They show us some of it, and she looks like a race car getting serviced during the race, swarmed by mechanics.
The funny thing is that I haven’t thought about this show in decades, but when I started watching it, I remembered it all. I think there was an album, which I must’ve owned, because I remembered every single solitary lyric of every song. If you had asked me, “Do you remember a song called Honey that Gilda Radner sang?” I would have sworn on my life that I had never heard such a thing, but all I needed was the intro to warble along with her word perfect, “Honey, touch me/With my clothes on/Sweetie, baby/Longer than you do…” I guarantee you I will know it on my death bed. Although, it will be funnier if I started singing, “Oh, the animals, the animals/Let’s talk dirty to the animals/F*** you, Mr. Bunny/Eat s***, Mr. Bear/If they don’t love it, they can shove it/Frankly I don’t care!” That’ll start some talk around the old folks home.
This is what happens when you listen to a record multiple times when you are sixteen years old, it all goes in there and burrows its way into your cerebral cortex. I can listen to something one meellion times now, forty years later, and it will never be as fresh as Gilda back then.
This is a very good movie (directed by Mike Nichols with an uncredited assist by Lorne Michaels) of an excellent show that really holds up. Even the very specific 1979 references are understandable in context. The Youth of Today™ may not know who Don Kirshner was, but Paul Schaeffer’s impression of him is still funny. Today, Jimmy Carter‘s legacy is that of a man who did great things post his presidency, not a President presiding over inflation and the gas crisis as he was then, but Father Guido Sarducci’s hilarious presentation about Carter in cod Italian is an absolute hoot.
It’s on streaming, it’s on DVD, track it down, you won’t regret it.
Kymm Zuckert is an actor/writer/native Angelino. When Kymm was a child, her parents would take her to see anything, which means that sometimes she will see a film today and say, “I saw that when I was eight, I don’t remember any of that inappropriate sex stuff!” Check out her entire 365 day blog @ https://365filmsin365days.movie.blog