We haven’t done an installment of The Micro Five in a couple of weeks, so let me give you a refresher: the basic idea is not to create a definitive (read: totally subjective) Top Five list, but to pick a super-specific topic and examine how five films handled it differently. You can read previous installments here, here, here and here.

This time out, we’re looking at musical numbers of the 80s. The Hollywood musical is thought in some quarters to have lost its way in the late 70s/early 80s (although recent reappraisals have been kinder to the era that produced curiosities like One From the Heart.) Still, the influence of MTV on all aspects of 80s culture (but especially youth culture) by the end of the decade led to an normalization of song and dance scenes (but especially dance scenes) in non-musicals. See my take on five numbers involving John Hughes, Spike Lee and Christopher Walken, after the jump.

“We Are Not Alone”, The Breakfast Club (John Hughes, 1985)

To say that John Hughes’ masterpiece hasn’t aged well would be an understatement. Still, while all those long scenes of the criminal needling the jock, the princess and the brain into bearing their souls have become interminable, the post-pot smoking dance scene survives. Seen within the context of the narrative, it’s a much-needed tension breaker for both the characters and the audience. Seen on its own on YouTube, it’s one of the most exhilarating one-and-a-half minutes of the era, a heart-grippingly pure snap shot of teen culture circa Fall 1985. Screw the script–that voyeuristic long shot of Molly Ringwald on the stairs is how John Hughes became the voice of (highly commercial) teen alienation. But make sure to keep an eye on Anthony Michael Hall: from The Air Traffic Controller to The Windmill, The Brain shows he’s got the widest variety of mirror-honed dance moves in the pack, even if he’s the only one who leaves the library without a “hot beef injection” in his future.

The Technicolor scene from She’s Gotta Have It (Spike Lee, 1986)

Spike Lee’s first feature was a bawdy, black-and-white comedy about the many loves of the young Nola Darling. According to John Pierson, who eventually invested his own money in the film and repped it for sale, Lee had conceived the seemingly in congruous five-minute full-color choreographed dance scene as “an homage to Vincente Minnelli and The Wizard of Oz“, although in execution it’s really more Astaire and Rogers. Regardless, at the film’s first screening, no one got it. As Pierson wrote in Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes: “Previously, when Spike proudly had shown the sequence to his father, Bill Lee reportedly said, “It could make a glass eye cry.” Like father, like son, like no one else.” Lee stuck to his guns and kept the dance scene in; he went on to rankle his critics (intentionally?) with the insertion of superfluous dance scenes in both School Daze and Malcolm X.

“Xanadu”, Xanadu (Robert Greenwald, 1980)

Oh, what else is there to say that hasn’t been said? In his initial review of the film, dated September 1, 1980, Roger Ebert tried to be diplomatic: “It’s not as bad as [Village People origin story] Can’t Stop the Music. It is pretty bad, though.” I fell in guilty love with Xanadu’s batshit insane eight-minute final scene after seeing it projected on the wall of a gay bar in San Francisco; I’ll defend the light-up floor Busby Berkeley shot and the Gene Kelly-on-roller skates homage to It’s Always Fair Weather to the end; I cannot, however, defend the cowgirls. Or the acrobats. Or the teleportation of the back-up dancers. As Douglas Carter Beene (who adapted the current Broadway musical version) put it, “It’s like people say, ‘When you hear Ray Charles play, you can hear the heroin’? When you watch Xanadu, you can see the cocaine up on the screen.” We should be happy that it looks as good as it does. Footnote: Greenwald, who is now a well-respected lefty documentarian, has excised Xanadu from his online resume.

“Let’s Misbehave” from Pennies From Heaven (Herbert Ross, 1981)

Heaven was a huge failure for MGM in 1981 (it grossed $3 million and cost about seven times that to produce), and many blamed it on the plasticity of the actors lipsyncing to Depression-era recordings. Most viewers at the time apparently agreed with Fred Astaire, who allegedly said he’d “never spent two more miserable hours in my life.” I actually find that plasticity charming, but there’s no arguing that Christopher Walken brought a certain carnality to his big number (embedded above) that was largely missing from the rest of the film. But still — he may be stripped to his panties and tap dancing on a bar surrounded by paintings of naked ladies, but I still say Bernadette Peters’ blank-stare reaction shot makes the scene.

“Darling Nikki”, Purple Rain (Albert Magnoli, 1984)

Last week, I coincidentally caught a VH1 Classic airing of Purple Rain, hours after writing this post about the puffy-shirted passion embodied by “I Would Die 4 U.” I had never seen the film all the way through in one sitting before, so (much to my boyfriend’s chagrin), I insisted on watching it. I had seen clips of Prince writhing around on the floor and doing that thing with his tongue in relation to Tipper Gore (the Second Lady To-Be credited Prince’s ode to casual sex with giving her the impetus to start the Parent’s Music Resource Center), but the placement of that, um, choreography within the context of the narrative blew me away.
On some level, “Darling Nikki” is a logical companion piece to the Walken scene from Pennies From Heaven: both are male exhibitions intended to make a point about the sexuality of a woman who is in the room, watching with a mix of horror and attraction. Both men draw power to their performances from the gaze of these women. Bernadette Peters’ wide-eyed refusal to be moved colors that scene as a comedy; Appolonia’s fury turns it into tragic melodrama. When she storms out of the room, The Kid runs off stage, unable to continue the performance without its intended audience. The shock value is contained within the story, which in turn renders it futile. Tipper may have been mesmerized by the word “masturbation”, but within the context of Purple Rain the movie, “Darling Nikki” is all about monogamy. Crazy, tortured, mostly misogynist monogamy, but monogamy nonetheless.