MOTHER GOOSE A GO GO (1966)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*

"This calls for a drastic step, above and beyond the call of Sigmund Freud."-- sexy psychiatrist Marilyn Richards

MOTHER GOOSE A GO GO, the only writer-director effort by Jack H. (THE BLOB) Harris, is simultaneously one of the worst film-farces ever made, and one of the best translations of Freudian theory into the formulas of farce.  

It's impossible to know why Harris-- most often known as a producer rather than as either writer or director-- would have decided to make this movie. Following the strong box-office of THE BLOB, his next two SF-movies, 4D MAN and DINOSAURUS, were not nearly as popular. But by 1966 a lot of older filmmakers-- Harris was nearing fifty that year-- responded to the "sexual revolution" by trying their hand at sex-comedies. Harris had never written a comedy-film before, and not only is the tone of MOTHER afflicted with a dimbulb, sniggering sensibility, everything looks like a squeaky-clean Disney comedy of the period. He manages to make utterly aseptic an opening scene with newlyweds Ted Hastings (Tommy Kirk) and his wife Margie (Anne Helm) preparing for their first night together.

But as in so many farces of the period, the possibility of sex, even consecrated by marriage, is a tease, for Ted has a little problem that causes him to freeze up and faint dead away, leaving Margie intensely frustrated. Yet the proximate cause of Ted's infirmity is brought about by a character the audience hasn't yet encountered. Before Ted makes his move, Margie can't resist showing her husband a gift from her uncle Jacques (Jacques Bergerac). We will later learn that the very hotel where Ted and Margie plan to have sex is owned by Uncle Jacques, so that what they're doing is symbolically under his aegis. And for some unexplained reason, Jacques chose to send his niece a very weird wedding-gift: a children's book of fairy tales. Since we also later learn that Jacques has always been like a "mother hen" to Margie, the logical conclusion is that he wants to keep her an "unkissed bride." And Margie subconsciously conspires to go along with her uncle's wishes, for she starts reading from the story of Little Red Riding Hood-- and that's what causes Ted to "go stiff," but in a bad way.

Ted dashes over to the office of psychiatrist Marilyn Richards (the sexy Danica D'Hondt). She will be the face of Female Authority as Uncle Jacques is the face of Male Authority, though to be sure, D'Hondt, Kirk, and Helm are all about the same age (late-twenties) while Bergerac alone was over ten years older than any of them. Though Marilyn is planning a vacation, she puts it off to help a patient who rudely barges into her office, possibly because the case of a man rendered impotent by a fairy tale intrigues her. Without doing any medical checks on her new patient, she spritzes him with a "psychedelic drug" from an atomizer. Ted then relates a fantasia in which Red Riding Hood (Helm) is menaced by a Wolf dressed up like her Granny. The Woodsman (Kirk) tries to save the imperiled lass, but he fails (more impotence), so Red has to save herself by bonking the Wolf with the axe (virility transfer?)

Ted suggests that Marilyn take her vacation at the same hotel where he and Margie are staying, so she does. Nosy private detective Sinclair-- a smarmy extension of Uncle Jacques, himself a major player with younger women-- begins watching both Ted and Marilyn as potential offenders against public morality. Margie knows nothing about Marilyn's surveillance, because Ted doesn't want Margie or Jacques knowing all his psychological details. The two young marrieds kiss near the hotel swimming pool, and Marilyn is sun-bathing nearby. But Marilyn's reading a magazine with an advertisement based on "Snow White," and when Ted sees the ad, he goes stiff and almost drowns in the pool. Marilyn, pretending to be nothing more than a professional nurse, helps Margie take Ted to a room, and then banishes Margie ("I'll take care of your husband"). Marilyn immediately spritzes Ted again. This time it's a fantasy about the conclusion of "Snow White," wherein the Queen (D'Hondt) has just tried to kill Snow (Helm), only to learn that a prince (Kirk) has rescued her. After the Queen dies from eating her own apple-- the consequence of her sexual competition with the young woman-- the two young people look into her magic mirror. When Ted comes to, he claims he saw himself as a furry monster-- which, believe it or not, does have a payoff down the line.

Ted and Margie take in a drive-in movie, but sad to say, there's a Three Little Pigs cartoon, so it's lights out for Ted again. Back at the hotel, Margie rather inappropriately asks her uncle if he's ever had similar performance problems. He then shows his first sign of licentious feelings toward his niece with the old "If you were just older, or I was just younger" line. Margie exiles Ted from their room, but both Marilyn and Jacques counsel the confused man to climb the trellis to Margie's room. But a neighbor sees Ted and asks him if he thinks he's Jack climbing the beanstalk. It's "frigid city" again, and down goes Ted, who luckily lands in some bushes.

Apparently Marilyn doesn't think there's need for a Jack-and-the-Beanstalk sex-fantasy. Yet Marilyn and Margie separately get the idea that maybe Ted could perform better if he just gets liquored up and lets his "beast" out. Ted and Margie then waste several minutes at both a club and a bar. Again Margie shows ambivalence toward what is supposedly her anti-virginity mission. She keeps Ted from seeing the name "Goldilocks" on some appliance-- yet when they're back in their room, and Ted's ready to go, she herself speaks the name "Goldilocks," and that's it for Ted. Just to waste more time, Sinclair keeps spying on the couple even though they're legally married, Jacques chats up Marilyn, and celebrity radio spokesman Joe Pyne periodically interrupts the story to get on phones and argue with his listeners.

Oddly, after  this third failure Ted has a breakthrough. There's no telling why Marilyn left her drug-filled atomizer in the married couple's room, but while talking to Marilyn on the phone, Ted accidentally doses himself, and Marilyn talks him through a very short Goldilocks fantasy, consisting of a sexy Goldilocks trying out various mattresses. In the midst of this new fantasy, an old memory pops up-- and you know it's old, because it's black-and-white while the rest of the film is in color.

This provides Marilyn with a clue, so she invites Ted to her room and puts him under hypnosis. The big reveal? When Ted was six, his mother caught him looking at an adult sex-magazine. Harris doesn't say that Young Ted was beating off to a picture of a hot girl, but the unseen mother's dialogue implies it. She tells Young Ted that such things can make little boys turn into "monsters with fangs and fur and a long ugly tail," which to my mind is just one step beyond "it'll grow hair on your palms." To keep the kid away from impure thoughts, she gives Young Ted a Mother Goose book. So "Mother Goose" is actually the same as "Mother Forbidding Sex."

So Marilyn liberates Ted from his complex by revealing its genesis, but as the new mother-imago in his life, she decides to go "above the call of Sigmund Freud" by testing his ability to make love after she says a fairy-tale key-word. ("Think of me as Margie," Marilyn advises.)

Meanwhile, Sinclair has been monitoring the illicit association of Ted and Marilyn, and he tattle-tales to Jacques and Margie. They invade Marilyn's room just as an overstimulated Ted is unleashing his "beast" on the psychiatrist, who didn't anticipate going quite that far. There's a brief exchange of blows between Margie's husband and her father-substitute, but even though Ted loses the fight, he wins Margie afterward. Jacques and Marilyn, the "father" and "mother," are implicitly united, while an end-sequence shows Ted and Margie in bed together years later, a small brood of kids watching their parents make out. I guess after their experience, Ted and Margie decided to be more "liberal" with their offspring than Ted's unseen mother was.

I don't imagine Harris knew that much about Freud's work, but the layered nature of the sex-fantasies here suggests more than a quick read in a Sunday supplement. While Freud argued that children formed Oedipal fixations upon the parent of the opposing sex, the world of Harris's MOTHER actually focuses more on older adults imposing their sexual fantasies on the younger adults who are their symbolic "children." So this is one of those cases where a creative person had a basic idea with some strong symbolic richness, but lacked any other skills to make the idea into an entertaining story. Further, the actors in GOOSE are not much better than Harris. Kirk plays his part as he were trying to ape Jerry Lewis, Helm is dull and has no chemistry with Kirk, and Bergerac is a one-dimensional "sexy French guy." D'Hondt is the only performer who shows a little restraint as the patrician but somewhat horny psychiatrist, and MOTHER was her next to last acting credit before she began pursuing alternative career-paths to Hollywood acting. Her list of movie/TV credits is not long, but it does include one other item I reviewed here favorably: the MAN FROM UNCLE episode "The Girls of Nazarone Affair," which concerns itself with a different sort of "feminine authority."