Hairspray **** (1988, Ricki Lake, Divine, Sonny Bono, Ruth Brown, Debbie Harry, Jerry Stiller, Mink Stole, Pia Zadora) – Classic Movie Review 1149

Director John Waters’s 1988 hit Hairspray is his breakthrough movie, finally leaving micro-budget shockers behind an going for the mainstream. Who’d have thought, a John Waters movie with a PG certificate!

It’s a fabulously campy, hugely entertaining, warm-hearted, retro chic spoof of suburban values in the Sixties era in a story that centres on a real-life TV dance show. The semi-reformed shocker director Waters provides a eye-catching gaudy look, an infectiously happy screenplay and a gently alternative and subversive atmosphere, while the actors step up with hilarious performances.

Waters vividly conveys his great nostalgic affection for all outsiders and the 1962 Baltimore, Maryland, setting of his adolescence. He clearly loves all the songs, both good and moderate, and he simply seems to adores his performers.

The film centres on the self-proclaimed ‘pleasantly plump’ teenager Tracy Turnblad as she pursues stardom as a dancer on a local TV dance show and rallies the folk of Baltimore against the racial segregation of the day. Playing the plump and appealing heroine, Ricki Lake makes an adorable impression and creates a memorable character as the misfit teenage girl out to win first prize on The Corny Collins Show, with help from her equally ‘pleasantly plump’ mother Edna.

Edna is played by the outrageous drag queen Divine (Glenn Milstead), who is a superb showstopper, though, perhaps disappointed it’s not the star part or the only attraction, is sometimes a little in the shade by not having the main role in his last film before a fatal heart attack. Ricki Lake doesn’t upstage Divine, but she gives as good as she gets and they’re a great double act. It was Divine’s only film with Waters in which he didn’t play the lead.

The famous name casting is inspired, with hilarious turns from Sonny Bono and Debbie Harry as a far-out couple called Franklin and Velma Von Tussle, Jerry Stiller as Tracy’s dad Wilbur Turnblad, Mink Stole as Tammy, Leslie Ann Powers as Penny Pingleton, Colleen Fitzpatrick as Amber Von Tussle, Ruth Brown as Motormouth Maybelle, Shawn Thompson as TV host Corny Collins and Pia Zadora as a beatnik. And Waters gives himself a role as Dr Fredrickson.

Waters is inspired too, and gets everything just right, showing that this really is how to put on this sort of show. Splendidly frivolous as it is, it even manages to be about something with its serious issues about racial harmony and good will to minorities. It’s not hammered home at all, just organic and even quite subtle, and that’s a good trick if you can pull it off, and Waters shows he can.

Waters wrote the screenplay under the title of White Lipstick, with the story loosely based on real events. The Corny Collins Show is based on the real-life Buddy Deane Show, a local dance party TV show that ran in the Baltimore area in the 1950s and early 1960s.

The school scenes were filmed at Baltimore’s Perry Hall High School, with locations including the library, a first-floor English class and the principal’s office.

Only a moderate success on release, earning a modest $8million, Hairspray happily went on to attract a much larger audience on home video in the early 1990s and became a cult classic. In 2002, it was adapted into a Broadway musical that won eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical in 2003. Harvey Fierstein played Edna and the show ran six years. A second film of Hairspray, adapting the stage musical, was released in 2007.

The 2013 documentary ‘I Am Divine‘ offers a poignant, insightful portrait of the drag queen, gay icon and John Waters’s muse, Glenn Milstead.

RIP the hilarious Jerry Stiller, who died on 11 May 2020, aged 92. He also played Carmine Vespucci in The Ritz (1976) and Maury Ballstein in Zoolander (2001).

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1149

Link to Derek Winnert’s home page for more film reviews: http://derekwinnert.com/

Glenn Milstead’s grave at Prospect Hill Park Cemetery, Towson, Maryland.

Glenn Milstead’s high school yearbook photo at the age of 17.