Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 20 March

World Happiness Day Special!

Today is the United Nations’ International Day of Happiness, the one day a year when we are all asked to prioritise happiness – our own and the happiness of those around us.

I don’t know about you but, locally and internationally, happiness seems to be a commodity that’s in short supply. We wake up to awful news every day. Meanness, selfishness and cruelty appears to be the standard order of business wherever you turn.

Life is a constant struggle – this house is not insulated from those pressures – and we end each day exhausted, wondering when the tide might turn.

So, when the UN issues an instruction to be happy, my first thought was, “what are they smoking in New York?”

But, on reflection, maybe it isn’t such a bad idea.

Last night I asked my beloved what we could watch that would make her happy. Since childhood, she’s always had a soft spot for the 1980 glorious shambles that is Xanadu, a film notorious for its excessive production, messy result and subsequent critical failure.

Xanadu is the film that inspired the Golden Raspberry Awards, a notion so toxic to film culture and appreciation that true movie fans should choose to watch it as a form of protest.

We weren’t protesting last night. We wanted to have fun and fun was what we had. Almost 45 years on from its initial flop, we saw a film that was kitschy, romantic, and true to its time.

Michael Beck (who had become a star in Walter Hill’s gang drama The Warriors the year before) plays a frustrated artist named Sonny. He’s a gifted draftsman but has no inspiration. One of the nine greek muses, Kira (Olivia Newton-John), comes to life and inspires him to start a roller-disco with former jazzman, now property developer, Danny McGuire (Gene Kelly).

Against protocol, but not against the odds, Sonny and Kira fall in love, forcing a very mild confrontation with the voice of Zeus (Wilfred Hyde-Whyte) to persuade him to let Kira live on Earth.

An attempt to fuse the glamorous Hollywood musicals of the past – there are visual nods to Busby Berkeley among others – with the disco and new wave present, it is a film that tried so hard to please everyone but ended up satisfying no one.

But from this distance, without the tribal allegiances to big hair, jitterbugging, roller-skating, etc., we can enjoy it for what it is. A lot of that is down to the music, thanks to Jeff Lynne and ELO being at the peak of their powers (not a sentence I thought I would ever write).

Kelly (68-years-old at the time) is game for a laugh and charming, as always. His duet with Newton-John is beautifully built up. At first you think he’s going to walk through it, like Rex Harrison talked through his musical numbers, but by the end he’s raised quite a sweat and you can tell that he’s still got it.

And there’s a Don Bluth animated interlude to ELO’s “Don’t Walk Away” – I think included because Beck can’t carry any of the songs himself – in which our two leads transform into fish and birds, Newton-John’s bird weirdly wearing the same legwarmers that the character sports throughout the film.

Once upon a time, I was bemoaning my unhappiness to a pal who looked at me and said, “think of a time when you were happy”. Sure, I said. “What were you doing then?” I told him. “So, why don’t you go back and do that again?”

So, for World Happiness Day we went back to Xanadu.

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Where to watch Xanadu