In recent years, show biz mom extraodinaire Ruth Landers has been producing movies as vehicles for her beautiful singing, dancing and acting daughters, Audrey and Judy, together and separately. The results have not been so pretty.
Two lamentable Landers showcases premiered on home video in 1991, Judy's bombastic political satire CLUB FED and Audrey's CALIFORNIA CASANOVA (actually the older of the two, bearing a 1989 copyright date). The nicest thing that can be said about CALIFORNIA CASANOVA is that it makes CLUB FED look
like Moliere. It's a dismal melange of cliches old and new, music, melodrama and slapstick, completely uninvolving and ineffective.
Audrey plays J.B., the headline act and waitress at a Los Angeles nightclub run by cruel gangster Leach (Bryan Genesse). He's framed her for drugs possession and personally controls the parole board, so J.B. must put up with his constant sexual harassment. Peter (Tyrone Power Jr.) is the club's
stumblebum lighting technician, who's attracted to J.B. but has no luck with women at all. Fired by the jealous Leach, Peter comes under the tutelage of Constantin (Jerry Orbach), a professional gigolo, and looks forward to a career of seducing kinky, elderly heiresses. Belatedly J.B. realizes
what a good-hearted dope Peter really is, and the pair defeat Leach and wind up in each other's arms through circumstances too stupid to describe in detail.
Much footage is devoted to showing off Audrey Landers' good looks in a variety of music-video numbers and pensive, poster-perfect poses. Then there's the strained "comedy" in the form of frantic chase scenes over a Keystone Cops-style soundtrack, and the most unwelcome presence of Spike (Ted
Davis), as a mincing, pop-eyed, whining homosexual that's as offensive a stereotype as was ever devised. "I don't see what you see in girls!" he squeaks, trying to nag Peter into becoming his lover. Strangest of all is Jerry Orbach as the veteran "dance instructor" who pretends to be a dashing
Russian noble exiled by the Bolshevik Revolution! This sort of character was stale when talkies were young. At one point, he introduces the colorless Peter to an entire gallery of similarly well-preserved White Russian royalty.
From time to time writer-director Nathaniel Christian (who also helmed CLUB FED) attempts to address the theme of loneliness, or to point up the disparity between dreams and reality; it nearly works in one scene where a middle-aged male secretary (Ken Kercheval) dances alone with a live-sized
cardboard cutout. But mostly CALIFORNIA CASANOVA is an ill-conceived waste of time and talent. (Violence, profanity, sexual situations, adult situations, nudity.) leave a comment
