Mr. Khrushchev’s strictures on the Can-Can production are too well known to need repeating, but “vulgar” is still the right summing-up. If he had stayed around a little longer he would have found the dullness even worse than the vulgarity. He might even have helped out a little, in the spirit of Camp David. For if he could have been persuaded to give his elephantine gold-toothed interpretation of the can-can in Technicolor it would have livened up the present production by several hundred per cent.
It needs a mathematician to determine the exact degree of badness of Can-Can. To take a second-rate Cole Porter musical and reduce it to a third-rate picture results in a compound fraction of ennui. This must be multiplied by the double-entendre cliché of French venery and added to the tourist stereotype of gay Paree to complete the Todd-ao wide-screen equation.
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