On the surface, this film is still moderately entertaining. But there's much to take away from it half a century later that was never intended. It depicts a world that suddenly disappeared soon after. Clinging to the last vestiges of Eisenhower-era innocence (when the Broadway production played) the film was dated by the time it opened. 1963 ushered in a slew of events that changed everything - the Kennedy assassination, the civil rights movement, The Beatles. The people of "Bye Bye Birdie" didn't know what was about to hit them. Ann- Margret's chaste romance with Bobby Rydell is way too saccharine. Janet Leigh is an uncomfortable choice as a Latina spitfire (a role played onstage by Chita Rivera who apparently wasn't palatable for movie audiences). Paul Lynde steals the show with his hilarious signature shtick, which today would be openly gay. It's hard to take any of this without a grain of salt. Not to be overlooked are the embarrassing opening and closing sequences where Ann-Margret sings and mugs for the camera while inexplicably mispronouncing "Birdie."

Ugly hetero-maniac fantasy that unintentionally gives a revealing portrait of American middle class' fears and morality in the 1960s. The inhabitants of a little town feel threatened by Conrad Birdie, a pop rock singer (inspired in Elvis Presley) who unwittingly questions their social, cultural and sexual roles, just by being himself. When this film was released in 1963 I was 12 years old and for some reason I never saw it, but I remember that Jesse Pearson (in his personification of Birdie) caught my attention, as much as Ann-Margret, whose career was in ascent, playing Kim McAfee, the teenage girl who will receive a farewell kiss from Birdie, when he is recruited by the Army. Today when at last I saw it I realized that both are the best elements of this motion picture. However, when the musical ends, the starry-eyed and rebellious Kim has been "tamed". As she sings the final song, the 22 year old actress, who looked like a teenager during the rest of the film, suddenly seems older, more "adult", but not because Birdie passed through her life, but following the Hollywood strategy to turn her into a new Swedish sex icon. Growing up for Kim does not mean renouncing to the pleasures that Birdie offers, but to adjust to the romance with her hometown boyfriend (Bobby Rydell), including the games in car backseats. Conrad Birdie, on the other hand, disappears during long stretches of the narrative and is finally disposed of, when the silly hometown boyfriend knocks him down. But Birdie is not the typical vain and blunt rock star. He is a pleasant parodic character, and Pearson plays him with gusto, always smiling, always mocking. It is obvious that the actor is enjoying it, and making fun of the character in the best Brechtian tradition. He makes fun of what Birdie represents, and it is not only Elvis, but all those macho singers who, with a boastful "profusion of testosterone", seduce women and men alike, even if males opt to deny the erotic attraction, accusing the artist of homosexual (as it often happened with Elvis). With every pelvic movement (as emphatic or perhaps even more striking than the movement of hips during sexual intercourse) Birdie creates chaos among the white citizens of the Capraesque town of Sweet Apple, Ohio, dazed with his arrival. Birdie is fun; he preaches sincerity and expresses his philosophy of pleasure in song and dance. But there was no space for him (and for that matter, for Pearson, who quickly disappeared from films) in this reactionary state of things: and I do not mean the supposedly funny jokes on the Soviets, so typical of American humor during the Cold War, but its agenda in defense of the respectability and status quo of the moral majority, opting to exalt the romance of the heterosexual couples (one of which changes music composition for chemistry to get married), through lackluster songs and trite choreography.

Bye Bye Birdie is an adaptation of a stage musical into a bright, colourful lit film but some bland songs and rather off acting especially by Jesse Pearson who plays the Elvis like Conrad Birdie.Conrad Birdie is a heartthrob rock n roll singer who is drafted to the army. However he ends up coming to a small Ohio town for a farewell television performance, singing a song written by a local chemistry teacher and aspiring songwriter and kiss a female fan. However his arrival causes a stir with locals and some of the young men are not happy especially the boyfriend of the fan due to kiss Conrad.The film is bouncy, bright and colourful but looks rather quaint now. A bubblegum version of early 1960s teen culture and small town America before the counter culture emerged. The songs rather reflect this and lack a hard edge although there is some subversiveness in the lyrics here and there.There is a talented cast with Dick Van Dyke, Janet Leigh but the standout is Ann Margret showing early promise.

Bye Bye Birdie (1963)A silly, colorful, overlong, upbeat, and, yes, silly musical. Some of it has worn well, like the one really famous song, "Put on a Happy Face," and some of it looks like plain old awkwardness, as with Dick Van Dyke, who was a paradigm of charm and humor in his day.It's certainly not a bad movie. Like many musicals this follows a general formula, including the songwriter on the skids. It adds a couple of fun twists, like the Flubber-like invention of a chemical that changes a person's behavior. (Flubber debuts in the original movie "The Absent Minded Professor in 1961 and if you haven't seen it, it takes silliness much farther.)The main event here is the parody of Elvis in the guise of Conrad Birdie, who drives high school girls wild (and in one scene sends the whole town into a kind of rock and roll love stupor). And of course there is one girl in particular who is drawn into his sway. Kind of. In fact, the problem with the movie throughout is a "kind of sort of" mediocrity. Even the love stupor scene, which might have expanded into something hilarious, is cut short and left to fizzle. The Ed Sullivan show segment (with the real Ed Sullivan) is fun but filmed with deadening rigidity. The one near-exception to all this is the sped up Moscow Ballet sequence, which is quite long, and which is hilarious. It includes a few references to Cold War tensions, even with one Russian onlooker banging on his head with his shoe. You don't get it? Exactly. If you don't remember (or haven't heard about) Khruschev and his shoe, it's a subtlety lost.Next to Van Dyke is a whipped up Janet Leigh--quite the opposite of the Leigh now legendary for being slashed in the show of a Hitchcock thriller, or for being tortured in an earlier Welles noir. Yes, a good pedigree, even just finishing the archetypal version of "The Manchurian Candidate" the year before. I like her more and more as I see her less pigeon-holed, and she holds up her part well as the hopeful bride-to-be. The music? The choreography? The dancing and singing? It's mostly fair to middling stuff. Enjoyable to a point (depending on your leanings) but it falls short compared to other musicals of the time. It apparently fell far short of the Broadway version it was modeled after, too, getting panned for its lame choreography by critics in 1963. So why see it? Well, for one thing, the sheer nutty, Technicolor artificiality of it all--it's like entering another world. It's not reality--not a minority in sight, no hints of the real 1960s starting to unravel. This is already a slightly nostalgic look at an Elvis kind of 1957 universe, six years after it was over. Weird.