There was a point this past week where I found myself watching a strange double feature: Guys & Dolls (1955) and Cry-Baby (1990). One was a lavish, big-budget musical that had every perfect piece of confectionary sugar in place. The other was from the man who proudly earned the nickname “The Pope of Trash.” For that reason, I expected the latter to be this quick chaser, not even clocking in at 90 minutes while featuring a young Johnny Depp as a greaser. It was that lighthearted closer to my night, and one that I had zero expectations for. After all, we’re talking about John Waters, who I had last seen in the downright offensive and acidic Female Trouble (1974). I had no reason to believe that Cry-Baby was high art.
And yet, I came out the other end with some bizarre revelations. I was expecting to love Guys & Dolls more because I knew the songs. It seems like everyone in my family has a Guys & Dolls story because of how omnipresent the musical is. Add in that it’s directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the most underrated auteur of the Hollywood melodrama, and I was expected to be taken in by the awe. Everything was in place. The colors were bright, the songs were catchy, and yet I couldn’t shake a particular feeling: Cry-Baby is a more confident take on the 1950s musical.
Woah, Woah, Woah… Stop for a moment and look at what you just said. Cry-Baby is a better musical than Guys & Dolls? In the realm of film, it’s hard for me to say otherwise. As someone who devours the genre with regularity (even more since the quarantine kicked into gear), I just found myself disappointed with Guys & Dolls, which may get a pass because of how strongly it ends. However, the first 45 minutes only feature two songs and the rest is too much of a straightforward drama for me to feel like it wanted to be a musical. By the time that it got going, the pacing was a bit off and the supporting songs were just not that good. I’ll accept those who call it a masterpiece because it definitely has a lot of fun moments, but I personally grew impatient waiting for another song to kick in, which most of the time weren’t great. I’ve heard dozens of Frank Sinatra songs in movies, and most of these don’t rank too high on that list. Even High Society (1956) has more gems than this.
So, what makes Cry-Baby more of a great 1950s musical? I understand that the intentions were different, but they both embody elements essential to the popular culture of the time. Where Guys & Dolls glamorized the night club gambler lifestyle, Cry-Baby was your take on b-movies mixed brilliantly with the Elvis Presley Jailhouse Rock (1957)-style fantasy. This was Waters coming off of Hairspray (1988), another pastiche of polite society being rudely interrupted by a marginalized group. Despite making some of the most controversial films, he had a period where he became mainstream enough to make films that still had his outcast vulgarity, but through something more commercial.
That is the gist of why Cry-Baby may secretly be a masterpiece. It doesn’t have long to prove itself nor is it immediately obvious. The pastiche is cranked up in such a way that it goes into camp, winking at the camera with a cast that features one of the most wonderfully insane line-ups for a film of this caliber. Besides Depp, there was Iggy Pop, Troy Donahue, Willem Dafoe, Traci Lords, and Waters regulars that included Ricki Lake, Mink Stole, and Kim McGuire.
How does a film that seeks to tear apart the squeaky clean image feature a cast this manic, ranging from teen idols to proto-punk singers to a controversial porn star? It’s easy to understand once you understand that Waters is sympathetic to those who don’t fit in anywhere else. If you don’t know to look for it, it doesn’t impact the film. The more that you know, the more this secretly feels more raucous, serving as a faithful middle finger to films like Grease (1978) that could never entirely be as wild as they wanted to be. This is something rare, of seeing actors who would never be seen in a 1950s melodrama get the chance to be as weird as they wanted to be.
One of the greatest, and oddest, choices throughout the film is to present this not with a soundtrack define by crooners, but by the higher-pitched novelties. This is especially true of Cry-Baby’s (Depp) love interest Allison (Amy Locane), who is stuck dealing with the brightest, most clueless squares you’ve ever seen. Her voice couldn’t go any higher without breaking glass, and it’s something coveted by the town. Meanwhile, Cry-Baby ranges from rockabilly to prison ballads (backed by the deep-voiced inmates). I don’t even know if Depp is singing everything, but it doesn’t matter. There’s so much brilliance in the earnestness of Waters’ approach. He clearly has a love of the movie musical form, at times recalling Bye Bye Birdie (1963) as the wackiness paves the way for these hormonal teenage emotions. The story is kind of dumb and pointless, but you can’t deny that it’s among Waters’ most accessible and fun.
At the center is Cry-Baby, who is named as such because of a Dewey Cox-style tragic backstory that’s sad but also absurd. Both of his parents are dead from electric chair-style execution and the thought of thunder throws him into a tantrum. Nobody will see him cry, save for a single tear rolling down his cheek. Nothing is subtle with him. Even his guardians feel like white trash stereotypes, where Iggy Pop and Susan Tyrrell welcome his misfit friends in as if the square lifestyle outside is a horrific hailstorm. You feel joy in this moment, where their casual nature isn’t decried but celebrated for the healthy absurdity that it is.
It’s the perfect juxtaposition to the squares. While there’s no shortage of terrible upper-lip preppies in cinema, there’s something fun about this interpretation. Every smile feels like it comes with a natural injection of Botox, and there’s a scene where the square characters dance to Allison’s doorstep down the center of the road doing a convoluted sock-hop dance… with the band accompanying them. They’re such a caricature that they openly embrace it. This is an on-the-nose satire that openly mocks the era while recognizing something wonderful underneath. It wasn’t just an era for Leave It to Beaver. These weirdos existed alongside them.
That may explain why the important shifts in the story come from the least momentous things in a person’s life. Cry-Baby is drawn to madness when the straights burn his motorcycle. It throws him into a life of crime while Allison is kidnapped over having a high-pitched voice. In some ways it’s the story of a knight saving a damsel in distress from a tower (the ending takes this literally as Cry-Baby’s gang bombards a concert at this new thing called a “theme park”). However, it’s all just a chance for Waters to wax poetic about every strange thing he loves about 50s cinema that wasn’t done by MGM. In that way, even the most inconsequential tool feels like reclaiming a decade.
On the surface, this movie probably would be considered as something lesser. Who really needs another story about a teenage rebel falling in love with the good girl? To make matters worse, the soundtrack has something inherently hokey and cheap, like the opening song that has a whine so rich that it may grate on you. Everyone is dressed in such a cartoonish way (Cry-Baby himself has a great hairdo undone by one strand of hair falling over his face) that you can’t take any of it seriously.
Then again, that’s part of Waters’ appeal. Even at his most offensive, he has found the line between caricature and offensiveness. Something like Female Trouble is intentionally offensive because of how tawdry the subject matter is. However, it’s undone by the fact that Divine unconvincingly plays a teenager who rebels in the most appalling ways (the timeline is also a nitpicker’s nightmare). That’s the type of subtext that Cry-Baby has going for it, where you know that everyone is in on the joke and there’s something to Depp’s earnestness. I could only imagine what this film played like at the time before he entered the 21st century as the Prince of Weird with Tim Burton. What was it like to play with is 21 Jump Street image in this way? There was clearly something even more subversive than the time he appeared on SpongeBob Squarepants as a surfer whose only line was “Woah!”
Like the characters would suggest, there is something fun about seeing this and having your first reaction being “this is trash.” Nothing about this is consequential, and at times the story lacks a deeper reason. And yet, that’s essential to why the film works. It’s more of a chance to have a madcap comedy that can feature Willem Dafoe in a wonderful cameo as an angry guard berating the inmates with such fruity language before they break out into a song about their longing for freedom. The way that they bond so quickly and form those rich of harmonies doesn’t make sense, and yet Waters shoots it with such a naïve confidence that we all have when we’re teenagers. We all have this grander sense of self, and it’s what makes this story so masterful.
Of course, it’s the final stretch where it lands the wacky tone so beautifully. Cry-Baby doesn’t only seek to be one of the most unassuming musicals, but it wants to have a prison break scene that’s just as goofy. Cry-Baby’s gang manages to get a helicopter and flies in to save the day. Windows are broken. Cry-Baby crawls through a tunnel only to land at the hands of laughing police officers. The sense of feeling trapped remains until there’s a unified run by the inmates, all now friends.
As a story of being trapped by the social structure, this film is a Trojan horse of attacks. Every character that we’re supposed to sympathize with has something oppressing them, and it fits within the rebel teen drama like a glove. The final attack comes in a “chicken” race that recalls Rebel Without a Cause (1955) but taken to more ridiculous heights. Cry-Baby sings while holding onto the top of the car driving to potential death. Inside a pregnant character (Ricki Lake) has a baby pop out. It’s a sequence that ends with the straights driving into a shed full of chickens, laying on the symbolism with a lack of subtlety that at this point feels customary. Everyone is celebrating Cry-Baby’s journey, and we revel in the conjoined madness.
In what may be the strangest aspect of this film, the soundtrack may not necessarily be full of new standards. It’s only been a few days and I can’t recall a song. There are melodies and moments, but if Cry-Baby has a downside it’s that it isn’t a memorable musical. However, it is so committed to its shameless tone where anything goes that you can’t help but admire the audacity of the vision. Waters drives it into the ground and it explores like a trainwreck of fireworks. There’s nothing like it, managing to fully understand the function of a musical and turning a three-minute gag into something that’s both homage and mockery. There’s sincerity at the moment, and we have to wonder just what’s going on. I can only hope that the stage musical, with music by Adam Schlesinger, improves on this.
For the first time, I feel like I understand how Waters eventually came to define the mainstream in the 1990s comedies. Cry-Baby’s supporting cast is full of these strange quirks that exist for a moment, but whose discomfort makes us laugh. If you altered things slightly, this is just another Adam Sandler film down to its use of absurdity and friendly offensiveness. Even then, I think Waters has so many layers where you wouldn’t expect to find them. There is something exciting about seeing him take on homophobes, or how Traci Lords turns down a creep that makes her seem more chaste than her previous career suggests. He’s constantly winking at us, and that’s what makes this film fun. Even when it seeks to appall, Waters lets you know that everything is okay and that this is all just a joke. Don’t get too riled up by the lack of nuance. It’s just a movie about singing teenagers who really hate thunder.
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