Working from a Hyapatia Lee-penned script entitled Burning Point, itself somewhat inspired by Herbert Ross’s 1977 drama Turning Point, Bob Chinn clocked his final collaboration with both Lee and Caribbean Films with 1983’s Let’s Get Physical, a fairly straightforward domestic drama set in the world of ballet. Though it was first the unfortunate final line of Body Girls that was cheekily delivered by then-husband Bud Lee (who only gets an AD credit here), Let’s Get Physical (the actual movie) builds enough dramatic strength to rank second to The Young Like it Hot as the best of Chinn’s four films with Hyapatia Lee.
Wracked by the guilt she feels over the car accident that left her ballet-star husband, Carl (Paul Thomas), a cripple, Maria (Hyapatia Lee) is torn over being an instructor and dancer in her husband’s studio and her dream of dancing and choreographing more modern, Luigi jazz-based routines. Complicating issues is the sexual dysfunction that has arisen in their relationship since the car accident which has created a rift that becomes ever widening when Maria and Carl begin to have separate eyes for, respectively, Scott (Mike Horner) and Rene (Shanna McCollough), two of the students in their dance company.
Despite getting hung with a one-sheet poster that makes the movie look like a downmarket Jazzercise come-on, Let’s Get Physical is pretty stately and takes its dramatic issues seriously. Hyapatia Lee is dealing with the kind of unsatisfied sexual dysfunction that comedically plagued Laurien Dominique in Hard Soap, Hard Soap but she’s also having to fight a separate battle with her husband in regards to her own career. Though it’s completely coincidental as Bud was likely concentrating more on the behind-the-camera action to gear up for his own directorial debut that was soon to come, it is a little more than interesting that Let’s Get Physical would be THE film that has the least amount of Bud Lee, making it feel a little as if the project were a silent scream from Hyapatia as she pleads to strut her stuff without his presence anywhere to be seen.
Stylistically riffing on Olivia Newton John’s 1981 Physical craze, Let’s Get Physical has an honest-to-goodness dance montage set to a soundalike instrumental of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”. This sequence, well cut by Pearl Diamond, shows just how much went into making Hyapatia Lee a star. Almost all of her films with Caribbean highlight at least one of her myriad talents and here we get a chance to see her show off her dance skills with a tightly choreographed stage routine that she performs with skill and aplomb and without having to remove one stitch of clothing.
One of the great strengths of Let’s Get Physical is that Paul Thomas has a plum role as Hyapatia Lee’s conflicted, depressed, curmudgeonly, and nattily dressed husband. His character likes to spend his time hobbling onto the scene with his cane and pissing all over her dreams, cautioning her against getting involved in rock and jazz dancing which will absolutely RUIN her body and disallow her to become a prima ballerina. Thomas’s trademark wolf mode finds a way to slide into his performance and his inevitable “We dig your vibe; come have dinner with us” moment with Shanna McCollough is divinely hilarious as nobody played such a suave, lovable, and oafish pervert than Paul Thomas. And, as was the case with Eileen Welles in Candy Stripers, it’s always compounded fun when Thomas’s character is romantically involved with someone who doesn’t mind a little mild entrapment in search of a good time. Hyapatia Lee gets to fill the role here and their scene with McCollough is a great one that, surprisingly, has some real emotional stakes to it. And, I have to admit, I want to see whatever show we get a slight glimpse of in the opening flashback because whatever features Paul Thomas sporting a red leotard is bound to be entertaining.
The other strength of Let’s Get Physical is its technical sheen that doesn’t draw a great deal of attention to itself. Cinematographer Jack Remy pulls out the Vaseline for the flashback and fantasy sequences which gives them a white curtain softness that’s at its best during the romantic scene involving Hyapatia Lee and Mike Horner. Along with being a realistic production detail, Chinn’s use of mirrors has a practical utility as they lend a lot of depth to the frame and make the dance studio set, courtesy of Vince Earl, Jim Malibu, and Marvin Wood, appear much more spacious than it probably was. And extra points go to Chinn who flexed hard to move heaven and earth to get his parquet floor secured and laid in time for the shoot which, indeed, really does work overtime in helping sell the illusion.
Let’s Get Physical sports an obligatory girl-girl scene with Lee and McCollough which doesn’t hit the same temperature as the Erica Boyer/Robin Everett number from Body Girls but it is also much less showy and animated. This is a feature and not a bug throughout all of the sex scenes in Let’s Get Physical as they stick to more realistic grounds in its six pairings and permutations compared to the wild and wooly nature of the fifteen fuck junctions packed into Body Girls. Two such sex scenes bookend the dramatic arc of the film, first with Thomas’s betrayal of Lee with student Anne Giani, and finally the reconciliation between Lee and Thomas in which he occupies a subordinate position that is a mirror image of his dominate position in the first scene, subtly signaling a power shift in both their sexual relationship and in their lives as artists and performers.
And while the final sex scene between Thomas and Lee is pretty good, better is the capper between gorgeous dance students Mark (Francois Papillon) and Shelley (Erica Boyer). And though their characters are the most incidental to the plot, topping the film off with their scene is like getting a Christmas bonus check that was way bigger than you expected. With not enough superlatives to describe the kind of energy Erica Boyer brings to the screen, it should also be mentioned that between Francois Papillon and Alain Patrick at the opposite poles of his career in celluloid, Bob Chinn showed remarkable talent in being a professional magnet for hot guys with French accents.
Though it’s a little bit slight and lower energy, there’s not a lot to complain about in regards to Let’s Get Physical save and except its title song which, if you can believe it, might be the winner in a race to the bottom alongside the theme song for Body Girls. It trades in the misguided operatic ambition of that tune for a cantankerous sneer that can’t even be mocked aloud without annoying everyone within earshot. Also, the pivotal car accident that causes Paul Thomas to have a slight limp is definitely one in which absolutely nobody would walk away from. For instead of missing a turn and hitting the side of a building or something simple, Chinn lets Thomas and Lee fly over the side of the cliff as if the shot escaped from a Hal Needham film. Thomas’s scream of “Oh my God!” is solid gold but the moment had absolutely no real chance of dramatic survival after “Toonces, the Driving Cat” nestled into the pop culture landscape a decade or so later.
At the end of it all, someone in quality control at Caribbean dropped the ball as Bob Chinn got his last name misspelled on as “Bob Chin” on the one-sheet poster for Let’s Get Physical. While this also was the case in cut-rate productions such as Little Orphan Dusty and Las Vegas Lady, it was a hell of a send-off to the guy who made nine very profitable films for a boutique company in a four year span while also helping propel Hyapatia Lee’s film career into the stratosphere. But given his feelings about the direction of the adult film industry at the time and his enthusiasm for traveling along in the same direction, he probably shrugged his shoulders at the fuck-up and thought little of it as he fixed himself a Scotch.
(C) Copyright 2023, Patrick Crain
Apollo Twin 