The Third Banana

Kovacs on the Corner (1952)

2010-06-01T10:48:00.000-07:00

Is this thing on? Hello?

Hello?

Here's something I never thought I'd see.. the much-maligned and very short-lived Kovacs Philly daytime vehicle Kovacs on the Corner. Clearly taking its "inspiration" from Allen's Alley (which bombed spectacularly on TV), Ernie copes with the show's weak motif by largely ignoring it. The result has something of the same loopy conversational charm as Kukla, Fran, and Ollie and there's a nice anarchic sheen around the edges but Ernie is clearly biding his time. KOTC lasted a mere three months and telelegend has it that he took a hammer to the sets on the final episode. I don't doubt it, but I suspect it wasn't done with the ferocity that has been suggested. Kovacs clearly doesn't have that kind of emotional investment in it.

Incredible awesomeness...

2010-04-22T07:09:00.000-07:00

Read the article here.

(Almost) Every Single Bowery Boys Titlecard

2010-03-11T12:42:00.000-08:00

1946 to 1958.. Big bands to rock and roll.. The longest running feature film series of all time. 48 films in all. And the Three Stooges were the hardest working comics in film? Don't believe it, gang. Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall produced, incredibly, four of these a year (FIVE in 1946!) for Monogram and, ultimately, Allied Artists. The three missing titles are Ghost Chasers (1951), No Hold Barred (1952), and Hot Shots (1956).. and if anyone wants to trade for those, contact me.

The Violinist (2010)

2010-02-16T06:59:00.000-08:00

An excellent new "silent" comedy short from director and longtime 3rd Banana reader Greg Glienna. Enjoy!

Max Takes Tonics (1911)

2010-02-12T12:08:00.000-08:00

Just found this on archive.org and thought I'd share. On average, Max Linder's work holds up remarkably well nearly a century later.

"Oh, Lackaday and Misery Me!"

2010-01-12T11:49:00.000-08:00

Isn't the internet wonderful? Here, in its entirety, is His Royal Highness (1932) starring George Wallace, Australia's most popular comedian of the late 20s and early 30s. The film fits neatly in among such better known depression-era "crazy kingdom" comedies as Duck Soup, Million Dollar Legs and Cracked Nuts (did I say better known?). Wallace himself is an engaging and often endearing comic who shares much in common, both in looks and style, with Hugh Herbert. And yet he dances like Bert Wheeler. Amazing.

THIS HALLOWEEN PAUL CASTIGLIA WANTS TO SCARE YOU SILLY!

2009-10-16T06:50:00.000-07:00

Veteran writer-editor launches blog to preview upcoming book on classic Hollywood horror-comedies

Transylvania, 6-5000 (October 13, 2009) – Do you like laughs with your gasps? Do you prefer your horror on the hysterical side? For anyone who enjoys the pairings of ghouls and fools, spooks and kooks and madcaps and monsters, prepare to be scared silly!

This Halloween at midnight, veteran writer-editor Paul Castiglia launches a blog to preview his forthcoming book, SCARED SILLY: CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD HORROR-COMEDIES. The blog can accessed at http://scaredsillybypaulcastiglia.blogspot.com

It’s been said that comedy and drama are close cousins – what is dramatic for one person may be funny for another. The connection between laughing and being scared might be even closer. Both are a way of releasing emotion, and when laughter follows a scare it relieves tension. In literature, drama and especially in movies, the concept of including a funny sight gag or line of dialogue after a dramatic event in an otherwise serious story came to be known as “comic relief.”

By the 1920s, playwrights flipped the formula by introducing scares into otherwise comical stories in works like “The Cat & the Canary,” “Tbe Bat” and “The Gorilla.” Hollywood was quick to follow suit. The horror-comedy has been a venerable movie staple from the start when silent film comedians including Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd successfully used scares to get laughs.

Horror-comedies were so popular that famous 1930s comedy teams like Laurel & Hardy and The Three Stooges were able to bring the form into the sound era, paving the way for brash 1940s comedy stars like Bob Hope and the ultimate horror-comedy players, Abbott & Costello to perfect the genre.

Castiglia’s blog and book will offer readers a fun overview of horror-comedy films spanning the 1920s through 1966, the year Don Knotts’ “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken” was released. “In my mind, ‘The Ghost and Mr. Chicken’ was the last traditional horror-comedy, devoid of PG elements that would pepper later efforts,” said Castiglia.

Also covered will be horror-comedy entries in famous film series including The Little Rascals and The Bowery Boys, and efforts by comedians wildly popular in their day but less well-known now like Wheeler & Woolsey, Hugh Herbert and Olsen & Johnson. Of note to fans of oddball cinema is the inclusion of Brown & Carney, a team pre-fabricated by RKO to compete with Abbott & Costello and Mitchell & Petrillo, the latter aping Jerry Lewis so well that many viewers thought they were watching the real thing! Like Abbott & Costello, both teams share beloved boogeyman Bela Lugosi as a co-star.

The book will include a foreword by noted film and TV character actor, monster-movie-memorabilia collector and spook-show reenactor Daniel Roebuck. Roebuck is no stranger to horror-comedies, having appeared in the critically acclaimed “Bubba Ho-Tep” with Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis as well as the new hit web series from Crackle.com, “Woke Up Dead” with Jon Heder. As alter-ego Dr. Shocker, Roebuck has performed on-stage in an authentic reenactment of midnight spook shows.

SCARED SILLY doesn’t have a publisher yet, but that’s all part of Castiglia’s plan.

“I’m still writing it, so providing readers with new blog entries on a regular basis keeps the project going. In the process, my goal is to build up a large fan base that will embrace the finished book, which will include additional content. Between the fan base and the involvement of Daniel Roebuck, I ultimately hope to interest the right publisher.”

Paul Castiglia has been writing and editing comic books and pop-culture articles for 20 years, most notably overseeing the ARCHIE AMERICANA paperback series of classic Archie Comics reprints. His past forays into horror-comedy include providing a chapter for the book MIDNIGHT MARQUEE ACTOR SERIES: VINCENT PRICE covering Price’s comedic horror films with Peter Lorre, and writing the comic book based on the animated series ARCHIE'S WEIRD MYSTERIES. Castiglia has also edited the upcoming ARCHIE COMICS HAUNTED HOUSE trade paperback collection of spooky Archie Comics stories.

Daniel Roebuck has spent the last 25 years building an impressive resume chock full of blockbuster films (THE FUGITIVE), kids movies (AGENT CODY BANKS), horror movies (HALLOWEEN 2) and television series (LOST). He has portrayed many people, including famous ones like Jay Leno and Garry Marshall. Although he has fulfilled nearly every dream of his childhood—like appearing in MAD MAGAZINE, becoming a HALLOWEEN MASK and having his mug on a few TRADING CARDS—Roebuck refuses to retire (despite countless threats) and continues to work as one of Hollywood’s busiest character actors! For more information, visit www.danielroebuck.com

Sammy Petrillo, 1934-2009

2009-08-17T10:37:00.000-07:00

SAMMY PETRILLO DIED THIS PAST SATURDAY, AUGUST 15th AT THE AGE OF 74.

THE FOLLOWING WAS WRITTEN IN JANUARY, 2007 AFTER COMIC BOOK WRITER/EDITOR PAUL CASTIGLIA MET ACTOR/COMEDIAN SAMMY PETRILLO AT A NEW YORK COMIC CONVENTION:

Over the weekend, Sammy Petrillo, the infamous Jerry Lewis impersonator who co-starred with Dean Martin-esque partner Duke Mitchell and famous film fiend Bela Lugosi in "Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla" was a guest at the Big Apple Comic Con in NYC.

I was at the con for 2 hours, mostly waiting around for Larry Storch, who never showed up while I was there (but he is supposed to be at a show in March, so I'll try again then). So I kept finding my way back to the "celebrity signings area" to check for Larry Storch, and wound up talking to Sammy Petrillo each time. Here are the highlights of our conversations:

ON BELA LUGOSI: Sammy said Bela was very "grandfatherly" and treated him like what he was - a kid (Sammy was 17 at the time they filmed the movie).

He also said that Bela was the utmost professional, and he never saw him using drugs of any kind. He said when Bela makes the big long speech about evolution and embryonic metamorphosis (which Sammy proceeded to recite a little of for me himself... in Bela's voice!), that Bela did it perfectly and in one take, and everyone on the set applauded afterward.

Sammy also relayed a story about an apartment or annex Bela had built for his son, but I missed the details because there was a lot of surrounding chatter at this point.

ON DIRECTOR WILLIAM BEAUDINE: Sammy asked if I knew what his nickname was, and I said sure, "one-take Beaudine." Sammy said that it wasn't because he was necessarily bad or watching the budget, but that he knew how to set-up stage scenes so well and prep the actors before rolling the cameras that no further takes were necessary.

Sammy also said that "comics loved working with Beaudine" because he would just let the comics go, encouraging ad-libbing. Sammy admitted that they didn't have much of a script on "Brooklyn Gorilla" and most of what you see was ad-libbed. You can see a lot of this ad-libbing in Beaudine's East Side Kids/Bowery Boys films, too.

Speaking of ad-libbing, there is a scene in "Gorilla" where Sammy slaps Bela on the back real hard, and Lugosi looks startled and a bit angry by the slap. I asked Sammy about that, and he said, "I probably ad-libbed that," stating that he was a kid (implying that he hadn't given thought to the fact that it might hurt Lugosi). Of course, the results are on film, because after his initial reaction, Lugosi the pro finishes the scene without missing a beat, so Lugosi probably wrote it off to Petrillo's being an impetuous youth.

ON BEING A NIGHTCLUB COMIC AT AGE 16: Sammy said that kids were allowed in nightclubs as long as they didn't drink. He said that back in those days he was unique because "kid comics" were all but unheard of. In fact, he said most comics were "men," so there weren't even a lot of "young men" comics working the clubs at that point (as opposed to now, where there is a slew of stand-up comics in their '20s). He also said they didn't call it "stand-up comedy" back then... you were just a comic. He said that the men comics were referred to as "funny men," as in "he's a funnyman." He said people would tell him, "You're a funny kid... one day you'll be a 'funnyman!'"

Sammy confessed that he used to steal other comics' jokes and acts (I replied, "Coming from you, that's an understatement," which made his manager laugh heartily). But Sammy went on to say that it backfired a bit, because he'd start telling wife and mother-in-law jokes he'd heard other comics do, until finally someone said to him, "you're 16 - stop with the wife & mother-in-law jokes - it doesn't work!"

ON DVD'S OF "BELA LUGOSI MEETS A BROOKLYN GORILLA": He kept saying how much he liked the Digiview DVD of his movie, and that he couldn't believe it was only a $1! He was also impressed with the printing on the disc itself (on both Digiview and the Alpha release). He mentioned the Image disc that has the interview with him - "it was $20 when it came out but you can probably get it for less now." He signed the paper insert sleeve of my Alpha DVD but accidentally wrote, "To my Paul," instead of "To my pal, Paul," so he wrote a second autograph on one of the sheets he had there as well.

PAUL CASTIGLIA, AUGUST 17, 2009:

I’ll never forget meeting Sammy – he really was a wonderful fellow, very engaging and open to talking about “the old days” and in a way that was really interesting given that he is more “infamous” than “famous.” Sammy seemed to accept his role as a show business anomaly without a hint of bitterness. In fact, I think he rather enjoyed the irony of it all. Everyone in show business should be as nice as Sammy was to me that weekend. He’ll be missed.

High Noonan

2009-07-15T10:27:00.000-07:00

by Nick Santa Maria

OK students, what do Tommy Noonan, George O'Hanlon, Jerry Lester, Joe Besser, Mousie Garner, Frank Mitchell, Vince Barnet, and Doodles Weaver all have in common? Give up? Well, they all had a hand in what has to be one of the worst, and most fascinating "comedies" ever made.

If you haven't seen 1959's The Rookie, do whatever you can to get your maschochistic little hands on it as soon as possible. Directed by George O'Hanlon ("Joe McDoakes" himself), written by O'Hanlon and Noonan, and starring that anemic anachronism of a comedy team, Noonan and Marshall, this military comedy is sure to be a fave rave for all of you Third Bananites. Picture if you will a bumbling page (complete with ill fitting uniform) at a radio station (circa 1945) who gets his draft notice, but not before filling in for the Italian Chef of the airways. Noonan does a routine he previously performed in an earlier Noonan and Marshall appearance (Warner Brothers Starlift in 1951). The routine is about as funny as a colonoscopy done with a plumber's snake. He rants and raves in a bad Italian accent as he prepares a dish made up of every kind of liquor you can imagine. Of course, he gets more and more intoxicated as the routine wears on (...and on, and on) and we find ourselves wishing for Red Skelton to show up and save us with a bottle of Guzzler's Gin.

Now get this.....Noonan is drafted on the day the war ends, but the little schmuck wants to go anyway! Despite protests from his draft board, and complaints from the Pentagon itself, Noonan is granted his right to serve, even though the camp where he is to get basic training is about to close! This means that the entire staff has to forego their own discharges and stay to train Tommy Noonan (This also means that the film company gets to save money on extras dressed in fatigues.)! Some premise, right? Well, the sergeant in charge is none other than that Hollywood Square himself, singing straightman Peter Marshall. Peter is pissed, folks, because he is dying to get back to his girlfriend, starlet Julie Newmar (who has never looked sexier and is worth the price of admission all by her lonesome). Marshall even sings a horrible song about getting back to his baby....complete with vapid "rock and roll" guitars in support. Newmar has an unscrupulous press agent (the aggressively unfunny Jerry Lester) who is trying in the worst way (believe me) to create publicity for his amazonian charge. He decides that he will use the one recruit (who has gained quite a bit of publicity himself) for a contrived romance and marriage. This creates even more conflict between Noonan and Marshall and lots of fun for everyone but the audience.

Why did a major studio like Fox release this piece of garbage? Where they desperate at the time? Did they lose a bet? (I also recently got a hold of another late 50's Fox release, Space Master X-7, directed by Ed Bernds, produced by Norman Maurer, and featuring Moe Howard in a character role!!! Yipes!) The beauty part of the film are the appearances of what I like to refer to as the "desperate comedians". "Desperate Comedians" are those poor souls who'd outlasted the days of real comedy films and waited around for people like Tommy Noonan, or Jerry Lewis to throw them a bone. Frank Mitchell plays a ships' captain and has absolutely nothing comical to do. Mousie Garner is wasted in a bit as a waiter. Doodles Weaver does a very bizarre spoof of Walter Winchell, actually removing Winchell's famous fedora to reveal his head to be shaped that way underneath (It's the best gag in the film). Joe Besser is a sadistic soldier who wants Noonan to be killed so he can be himself can be discharged. At one point the sloppy filmmakers show Besser sitting in his undershirt with the other soldiers as he is smoking a cigarette. Perhaps I'm a purist but "Stinky" does not smoke! He looks like a tough auto mechanic on a break. The image is like seeing Shirley Temple rolling the dice in a crap game. And let us not forget about Jerry Lester. If Harry Ritz and Mickey Rooney had a child it would have been Jerry Lester. Nuff said.

Now to Noonan and Marshall. Apparently, they were a sporadic team in the clubs who would work together, but only when Noonan wasn't doing various film roles. You may have seen him in the Judy Garland version of A Star is Born, or as Marilyn Monroe's nerdy boyfriend in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. He wasn't bad, either. But as the "Jerry" half of this Martin and Lewis wannabe team he is merely pathetic and annoying. The team does routines in a fast talking double act kind of way, but the nightclub routines stand out like a sore thumb. The jokes are ancient and the delivery is soulless and a little too polished to be passed off as actual dialog. To see Noonan and Marshall try to incorporate their "routines" into the film makes me marvel at the seamless way Abbott and Costello did the same thing. To make matters worse, as if there weren't enough Noonan and Marshall, they are introduced as two completely different characters (Gulp) later in the film. They portray two stupid, goggle eyed, buck toothed Japanese soldiers who don't know that the war is over. The American Noonan and Marshall meet the Japanese Noonan and Marshall on a deserted island and when you are not wincing at the depiction of the Japanese stereotypes (Even Jerry Lewis would have been embarrassed.) you are wondering how much longer the film is going to go on before some kind of satisfying ending presents itself. (Did I say "satisfying"?)

There are even jokes about having to go to the bathroom while being forced to stand at attention and salute an officer, lots of wiggling and cleavage from Julie Newmar, and even throwing up on the high seas.....but these only come off as precursors to the gags featured in Noonan's two "smut-fests", Promises, Promises, and Two Nuts in Search of a Bolt (both of which also should be seen to be believed.) a few years later.

Noonan and Marshall made one more film together, Fox's Swingin' Along (1961). Barbara Eden is the bombshell in this one, and it was directed by comedy veteran, Charles Barton (My eyes are peeled for this one, folks.). After that the boys went their separate ways. Noonan wrote, produced, directed, and starred in the afore-mentioned adult films and Marshall went on to become the host of The Hollywood Squares, occasionally appearing as a Vegas singer. Noonan passed away of a brain tumor at the age of 46.

Yes, they're gone folks, but the stench of their movie legacy lives on in the nostrils of comedy buffs everywhere. Thanks Pete and Tommy. You really set the bar and managed to make Brown and Carney look like comic geniuses. For that alone you should be in Ripley.

Anthony Balducci's Journal

2009-02-11T09:39:00.000-08:00

Do yourself a favor and pay a visit to Anthony Balducci's absolutely excellent new blog. Anthony is responsible for the new Lloyd Hamilton bio due out in April (which, frankly, has the full endorsement of The Third Banana just for existing).

1949 Three Stooges TV Pilot

2009-02-09T10:57:00.000-08:00

Courtesy archive.org. One question: what the holy hell is up with Moe's sarcastic mugging in the opening? Utterly bizarre...

Work, Part II

2009-02-03T08:26:00.000-08:00

Work, Part I

2009-02-02T07:51:00.000-08:00

A Jitney Elopement, Part II

2009-01-31T11:32:00.000-08:00

A Jitney Elopement, Part I

2009-01-30T11:45:00.000-08:00

That Fellow With The Feet

2009-01-29T09:52:00.000-08:00

Part of the media blitz following Chaplin's move from Keystone to Essanay in January 1915 was this official studio-sanctioned comic strip, drawn initially by A. C. Carothers and distributed through the Keeley-Handy Syndicate. The Handy of Keeley-Handy was one Jamieson "Jam" Handy, also vice-president in charge of sales of the Chicago Tribune Syndicate. Copyrights on the strip are variously attributed to both Keeley-Handy and the Chicago Tribune during the first year, and, eventually, to J. Keeley alone after Handy departed for more profitable climes, ultimately becoming founder of the famous Jam Handy industrial film studio. Having been previously only familiar with the later E. C. Segar run of Charlie Chaplin's Comic Capers, these initial strips came as a pleasant surprise. Carothers captures remarkably well the freewheeling spirit of Chaplin's Keystone and Essanay shorts, aided by his own decidedly anarchistic sense of humor. Unfortunately, Carothers spent only four months on Comic Capers. Clearly, something was happening behind the scenes towards the end, his signature disappearing from some obviously ghosted strips, and his final signed examples degrading into the kind of inane vaudeville patter that would in time become the strip's hallmark under Segar (that an amateur like Segar was hired at all, especially given the quality of his earliest work, suggests that the syndicate was simply looking for someone cheap and compliant.. which may give us a clue as to why Carothers left). While Charlie Chaplin's Comic Capers would survive for several more years, far outlasting Chaplin's time with Essanay, it would never recapture the quality of these earliest strips.

The Chaplin Cometh

2009-01-28T09:32:00.001-08:00

archy and mehitabel

2009-01-27T10:51:00.000-08:00

Ripped from my lp by Prof. Grewbeard of Magic Carpet Burn and made available at Dr. Forrest's Cheeze Factory comes the very funny, and actually quite moving, archy and mehitabel: a back-alley opera (1950) starring Carol Channing and Eddie Bracken. Unfortunately, the five MP3s aren't labeled so you'll have to piece them together yourself.

The Return of Pat and Patachon

2009-01-13T10:25:00.000-08:00

Kudos to Erik Warming of Denmark for doing his part to reintroduce Pat and Patachon to the world via his new website and his permanent exhibition of memorabilia at the Tvermoesgaard Restaurant in Copenhagen! Can anyone spare me a ticket to Copenhagen?

Merry Christmas From The Third Banana

2008-12-25T08:54:00.000-08:00

Given the general state of the world today, this 1939 Eddie Cantor song sums up my feelings precisely. Happy Holidays, all..

The Olsen and Johnson Files

2008-12-24T07:45:00.000-08:00

Capital Times, 6/5/28

Capital Times, 6/11/28

Capital Times, 5/23/30 A comedy team smorgasbord!

Capital Times, 5/25/30

Evening Huronite, 9/13/30

Wisconsin State Journal, 12/14/30

Wisconsin State Journal, 12/16/30

Syracuse Herald, 3/26/31

Syracuse Herald, 5/5/31

Havre (MT) Daily News, 8/1/31

Wisconsin State Journal, 2/24/35

Charleston Gazette, 5/5/36

Lowell Sun, 11/20/36

North Adams Transcript, 12/5/36

Mansfield News-Journal, 6/14/38

Syracuse Herald, 10/25/38

Reno Evening Gazette, 11/12/38

Evening Independent, 3/16/39

Winona Daily News, 9/9/65

The Wheeler & Woolsey Files

2008-11-18T13:34:00.000-08:00

Ogden Standard-Examiner, July 8, 1930

Galveston Daily News, December 14, 1930

Uniontown Morning Herald, April 30, 1932

Oakland Tribune, February 14, 1932

Florence Morning News, May 24, 1932

Big Spring Daily Herald, January 8, 1933

Waterloo Sunday Courier, February 26, 1933

Lowell Sun, January 20, 1934

Lowell Sun, January 27, 1934

Lowell Sun, January 29, 1934

Oakland Tribune, February 24, 1935

Brownsville Herald, May 19, 1935. BEN WOOLSEY??

Modesto Bee, August 27, 1936. Yep! Ben Woolsey!

Galveston Daily News, November 1, 1938

Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune, November 1, 1938

Tucson Daily Citizen, January 16, 1968

The Terror-ific Third Annual Third Banana Halloween Anniversary Spooktacular Clip-O-Thon... The Third!

2008-10-31T20:58:00.000-07:00

Excerpts from The Paul Lynde Halloween Special! I just think it's amazing that this even exists! KISS! Margaret Hamilton! Tim Conway! Billy Barty! KISS! Betty White! Donny and Marie Osmond! Billie Hayes!! KISS!! Truly one of the last gasps of old-style capital "S" Showbiz.

A rare Bela Lugosi appearance on an even rarer TV show, the 1949 video version of the radio classic Suspense. And check out the 35 year old Ray Walston!

The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet: Halloween Party

Excerpts from Capulina Contra Los Monstruos (1974)

Clavillazo in El Castillo De Los Monstruos (1957)

Eegah! (1962) "Watch out for snakes!"

Popeye in Fright To the Finish (1954). You know, if standard drug store vanishing cream really did make people invisible, I think everyone would be much more cavalier about invisible people..

And take a tip from the fine folks at Centron, kids, and have a safe and paranoid Halloween! Remember homemade Halloween treats? Remember fruit? Too bad there were all those all those poisonings and hidden razor blades and.. what? That didn't happen?

And here's Centron's 1985 edition of Halloween Safety. Ramp up the dread! Pour on the paranoia!! Die, Halloween, die!!! Christ.. by 1985, we even had to worry about carving the damn pumpkin!! "Getting my insides scooped out tickles me!"

The Harry Files, Part III, 1934-1944

2008-10-27T11:24:00.000-07:00

Modesto Bee, 2/23/34

Oakland Tribune, 2/13/34

San Antonio Light, 11/20/34

Brownsville Herald, 11/20/34

San Antonio Light, 4/5/36

Nevada State Journal, 8/18/38. Previously, Harry was rumored to
be a possible replacement for Bert Wheeler during Bert's brief split
with Bob Woolsey. Now here he is filling in for Stan Laurel. If he had
lived past 1944, I'm sure he would have eventually been a rumored
fill-in for Lou Costello.

Titusville Herald, 8/20/38. Was Roach serious or not?

Edwardsville Intelligencer, 8/22/38

Ogden Standard-Examiner, 8/22/38

Kingsport Time, 9/2/38

Lowell Sun, 12/1/38

Oakland Tribune, 12/13/38

Frederick Post, 1/9/39

Helena Daily Independent, 1/10/39

Ironwood Daily Globe, 1/10/39

Olean Times-Herald, 1/10/39

Oakland Herald, 1/10/39

Fresno Bee, 8/22/39

Ogden Standard-Examiner, 11/26/39

Port Arthur News, 11/28/39

?, 12/?/41

Portsmouth NH Herald, 12/17/41. I Cover the Waterfront
is Double Trouble's supporting feature.

News-Palladium, 12/22/44

Amarillo Daily News, 12/23/44

The Harry Files, Part II, 1930-1932

2008-10-25T09:27:00.000-07:00

The "LEAVE HARRY LANGDON ALOOOOONE!!!!!!!!" Years...

Fresno Bee, 6/15/30

Lincoln Star, 6/19/30

Daily Northwestern, 6/20/30

San Antonio Express, 6/20/30

Fresno Bee, 6/21/30

Reno Evening Gazette, 6/21/30

Capital Times, 6/24/30

Nevada State Journal, 6/25/30

Jefferson City Post-Tribune, 6/26/30

Moberly Weekly Monitor, 6/26/30

Nevada State Journal, 6/28/30

Reno Evening Gazette, 6/28/30

Capital Times, 7/1/30

San Antonio Express, 7/1/30

Ogden Standard-Examiner, 7/8/30

San Antonio Light, 7/27/30

Evening Independent, 2/13/31

Lowell Sun, 12/30/31

Monitor Index and Democrat, 12/31/31

Wisconsin State Journal, 4/24/32

Wisconsin State Journal, 5/1/32

Wisconsin State Journal, 5/4/32

Piqua Daily Call, 6/15/32

The Harry Files, Part I, 1923-1928

2008-10-23T08:16:00.000-07:00

Waterloo Evening Courier, 9/23/23. A painful little peek into the substance of Langdon's vaudeville act.

Davenport Democrat and Leader, 11/25/23

Port Arthur News, 8/19/26

Lima News, 11/24/26

Helena Daily Independent, 1/7/27

Davenport Democrat and Leader, 2/20/27

Modesto News-Herald, 8/18/27

Modesto News-Herald, 8/20/27

Lima News, 4/17/28

Capital Times, 4/30/28

Newark Advocate and American Tribune, 8/13/28

No, the Third Banana isn't dead...

2008-10-20T08:20:00.000-07:00

...but it's not feeling at all well. I'm short on time, especially in the wake of Hurricane Ike, and worse, my DVD player has fried itself which is putting the kibosh on new video content (sorry Geoff). Until I can scrape together the cash for a new DVD player, I'd like to draw your attention to some of the new Third Banana-y content now available at archive.org.

Lady of Burlesque (1943). Nothing against Pinky's 50s kidvid, but he's much more fun when playing to adults. He even gets the fade-out here. I can remember when I was willing to shell out good money for a crappy VHS copy of this film just so I could watch Pinky Lee in his burlesque prime and now here it is FREE on the internet. You kids today have it soooo easy.

Poor Daddy (1929). How's this for a rarity; a 1929 silent Chinese comedy feature. Poor Daddy is actually more of a melodrama than a proper comedy. Pretty fascinating but don't expect belly laughs. English and Chinese intertitles.

King Kelly of the USA (1934). In its original incarnation with Trem Carr at the helm, Monogram was easily Hollywood's most daring Poverty Row studio, producing mid-budget adaptations of literary classics such as Jane Eyre and Oliver Twist and slick crowd-pleasing dramas like The Avenger. King Kelly of the USA is probably Monogram's comedy masterpiece and, with its expansive sets, large cast, and clever script, could easily pass as an RKO or Paramount product. The giveaway is that Monogram's stars are the other studios' second-stringers, skilled stalwarts like Edgar Kennedy, Ferdinand Gottschalk, and Franklin Pangborn. A nice fit with other "crazy kingdom" movies of the early 30s (and it seems like Edgar Kennedy is in almost all of them). Probably unique for Monogram, King Kelly also boasts a brief animated sequence (around 20 minutes in) and if limited made-for-TV animation existed in 1934, this is precisely what it would look like. Anyone know who's responsible?

2 minutes and 23 seconds of Pat and Patachon

2008-08-12T18:39:00.000-07:00

Busy day, busy day! Here's some Pat and Patachon for you. It took me awhile to find a clip that a) established their personalities and general appeal and b) doesn't require you to speak German to understand the action, but I finally did. This little sequence is taken from the 1968-9 German TV repackaging of their 1924 Danish feature Lille Lise Letpaataa (The Little Dancer).

"It's done with mirrors!"

2008-07-16T08:14:00.000-07:00

Have I mentioned recently how much I love Flanagan and Allen? A pity that more of their solo films aren't available as they are at a marked disadvantage in the more widely-seen Crazy Gang films. Acknowledged at the time, they're a world apart from the likes of Naughton, Gold, Nervo, and Knox, the true and original Gang, who reportedly considered F&A interlopers, and their rapid-fire exchanges unwelcome interruptions of the worst kind. Their comedy informed more by Bud's experience in American vaudeville than British Panto, Flanagan and Allen as a team are rather squandered in films that rely hugely upon broad clowning and visual gags. Although Bud alone, by dint of his strong and engaging personality, becomes the focal point of the films (and ultimately of the Gang itself), Ches is simply left to waste whenever not called upon for musical numbers or proper F&A routines. On their own, however, Bud and Ches get to stretch out and display the skills that made them, for almost three decades, Britain's most popular comedy team.

A Fire Has Been Arranged was their third film appearance and their second feature. Released in 1935 in the depths of the depression, Flanagan and Allen are cast not as the affable hard-luck tramps of their hit songs, but as out-and-out criminals. They lie, cheat, and steal, and, moreover, they get away with it. At a time when the general public's respect for the Powers That Be must have been at a very low ebb, the sight of Flanagan and Allen directly and unequivocally flouting the law was apparently embraced in much the same way as the Marx Brothers' antisocial antics were stateside. Certainly, they're no less likable for it. The plot, in brief: Bud, Ches, and Hal Walters hide a valise of stolen jewelry in a hole in a field and, when released from prison a decade later, are horrified to find that a department store has been constructed on the spot. Ultimately, they are hired by the store's crooked manager (Alastair Sim in a juicy early role) to burn the place to the ground so he can collect the insurance. Lots of classic Flanagan and Allen here, most notably the much-celebrated "Whistle" routine. Note how much this routine relies upon Chesney as much as it does Bud. Ches's animated interplay with Bud is a far cry from the more understated support that Bud Abbott gave Lou Costello, but is no less skilled and, as far as I'm concerned, more fun to watch. Flanagan's rising sense of victimization is a riot.

Another brilliant moment for the team. Ches gets to display his easy-going yet mildly eccentric charm in this perfectly believable con. I wouldn't be half surprised to learn that F&A pulled this one off in real life. It seems much like the kind of schemes that Bud used to survive while traveling the US (on boxcars, no less) in the 'teens.

Just for the hell of it, here's Bud and Ches singing "Yesterday's Dreams" from the Crazy Gang feature Gasbags (1941). Yes, that's former Will Hay stooge Moore Marriott as the toothless old codger.

Frankly Disgusting

2008-07-14T08:00:00.000-07:00

by Geoff Collins

What could possibly follow The Jitters for sheer comic verve and alcoholic excess? Frank Randle's woozy antics on a staircase make a tidy trilogy with the recently-shown efforts of our other boozed Bananas Sid Field and Leon Errol; but in Frank's case critical opinion has always been a lot harsher. In my native England the local Mancunian comedies of John E. Blakeley are still regarded with almost universal contempt. Dreary, hellishly long and poorly constructed, obviously aimed at the most basic of Northern working-class audiences, they are seen as comedy-for-idiots. To some extent this is true: Blakeley's grasp of film technique was rudimentary and he failed to bring out anything like the best in run-of-the-mill comics like Jewel and Warriss. But with his top star, the criminally-deranged Lancashire maverick Frank Randle, such things hardly mattered. Nobody was going to tell Randle what to do - ever; so if you put him in front of a camera he'd always do exactly what he pleased anyway. The films made a fortune, the audiences fell out of their seats, and everyone was happy. Who needs critics?

We have three extracts for you this time, and in turn they highlight each of feral Frank's basic needs and interests : money, booze, sex. Somewhere On Leave was Randle's third film. By 1942 he'd bludgeoned his way to top billing over chubby Harry Korris, and rightly so. The amiable Korris may have been a hit on radio with his Happidrome show but he was a drone on film, languorously reciting his lines over the top of the camera, and a bit too fond of his catchphrase "Eee, if ever a man suffered!" Frank didn't need him and neither do we. He's accompanied here by squeaky-voiced charmless runt Robby Vincent ("Enoch"), easily the least-talented comedian of all time, and monocled toff Dan Young, probably the least appreciated. In this surprisingly coherent routine, Frank demonstrates exactly how much respect he has for class authority and military discipline!

Our comedic glug-glugs handled their offscreen drinking in different ways. Jimmy James was a teetotaller; Leon Errol was professional enough to negotiate a scarily-busy career involving vaudeville, Broadway, 160 movies and some early television; Sid Field let it take hold and was dead at forty-five. Frank Randle used alcohol as rocket fuel. By all accounts he was the same offstage as on, and by his mid-fifties his stubborn irrationality and outbursts of disproportionate violence had rendered him unemployable. Thank God he still had the comedy inside him, otherwise the managements would never have tolerated him for as long as they did.

Our second clip, and it's time for Frank to have a bath and go to bed, an easy enough activity, one would imagine. Apart from a couple of brief, unnecessary cutaways to comic dude Dan Young - who often seems just as bewildered and pie-eyed as Frank - this is a one-man show worthy of (dare I say it?) the daddy of all drunk-on-a-staircase turns, Charlie Chaplin in One A.M. Part of this sequence appears on the video Jokes That Won the War, in which host Roy Hudd gleefully says of Randle: "He was a Society Entertainer!"

Frank Randle was a pretty good dancer too, as he's willing to demonstrate and describe (!) in our final clip, cheekily belching, spitting and sneaking a direct Anglo-Saxon oath past the censors. He couldn't have cared less; if they cut it out, so what? And they didn't!

We apologise for the jumpy nature of the picture during this sequence. Alan and Jennie did their best in transfering the movie from an ancient videotape every bit as wilful and decrepit as Frank Randle himself, and it just wouldn't behave. Why didn't they invent DVDs in 1895?

Yet in spite of all its inadequacies in terms of script, acting and direction (we've spared you the romantic sub-plot and boy, should you be grateful for this!) we think you'll agree that Somewhere On Leave looks superb, thanks to the luminescent cinematography of Geoffrey Faithfull; and it's the most representative showcase for the jaw-dropping crudities of its star Frank Randle, a drunken lunatic who just happened to be a wonderful comedian.

Leon Errol is Rubberlegs, and Bert Lahr is the Cowardly Lion. To us at the Third Banana, Eddie Cantor (bless him) is the Whiny Bitch; and Frank Randle is the Jitter Bugger.

You realise, of course, not that this means war, but that your devoted team at the Banana could easily just yap on about Stan and Ollie, or the Stooges; but what would that achieve? A lot more readers, undoubtedly, but it's never been our brief to go for - as John Lahr put it (describing Berle and Jerry Lewis) - sloppy, vulgar popularity. So much outstanding comedy is being overlooked as audiences prefer the soft option. I could say the soft and smelly option, and I will. Bill Fields, Keaton, the Marxes, they're all timeless comedians, we all know that. But the same can be said of Joe Cook, Ed Wynn, Sid Field, Arthur Askey... and the Lion, the Bitch and the Jitter Bugger (who's probably sleeping it off in the Wardrobe).

The Forest of Comedy is endless. Please, dear readers, don't restrict yourself to one small part of it.

End of rant. Thank you. BUUURRRPPPP!!!

Whole Thoughts From A Half-Wit

2008-07-11T06:54:00.000-07:00

by Nick Santa Maria

Hello there fellow comedy buffs. It's me, Nick Santa Maria, star of stage, screen, and now, blog. Since Aaron Neathery is a good friend, and since I was originally supposed to be a regular contributor to this blog (although I can't fathom why my bathroom habits would be of anybody's concern), I decided to jump into the fray and put in my 25 cents worth (allowing for inflation). With your indulgence I'm going to supply some recent random thoughts about some of the stuff I've been exposed to of late.

I recently purchased Harry Langdon's Three's a Crowd and The Chaser, now available from KINO. Langdon directed these two features and, in my opinion, did a fine job. There are shots that don't match very well, and there were some harmful cuts made to Three's a Crowd which makes it a bit confusing at moments, but all in all it is much better than I was led to believe. I will say, though, that The Chaser seems more like a bloated two-reeler than a fully fleshed out feature. It resembles Saturday Afternoon in substance, but it veers in that Harry is really a carouser. And he really seems to have some sexual appeal to the women in this film. Regardless of content (these films have been written about to death), I always welcome a chance to watch Harry. At one point he tries to figure out how to get an egg out of a chicken. It sounds simple, and it is, but in Harry's hands it's hilarious. He is absolutely fascinating. There is nothing like him. Nothing. There is a scene in The Chaser where Harry believes he drank a glassful of poison when in actuality he has downed a heaping glass of castor oil. He lays down on the kitchen floor and covers himself in a blanket to await his impending death (he's committing suicide). He waits. And he waits. And he waits. He waits for what seems like a freakin' hour! Then he jumps up with the realization that he desperately needs to be in a bathroom, bolting up the stairs in a panic. I've never seen anything like it. No wonder his audience abandoned him. I can picture a table of silent comedians, who'd made it successfully into the sound era, shaking their heads and saying, "Poor Harry... I told him to play to the audience. But no. He had to have his own way. He was too different!". And that was the trouble. There was nobody like Langdon. And I believe that he confused the hell out of audiences back then. Hell, he confuses them now. What a brave, talented, sad little artist.

I've become addicted to What's My Line. I set my DVR to record it every night off of the Game Show Network. And as I watch everyday I ask myself the same question, "When did we all get so stupid?". This is sophisticated, witty, and multi-syllabic entertainment at it's best. The people are so polite and nice to one another. It's such a far cry from today's TV world where the comedy comes from the pleasure of humiliating people. Where else can one see Fred Allen on a semi-regular basis on the wasteland he wrote so eloquently about, TV? As a part of the panel (Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, and Dorothy Kilgallen) Allen seems uncomfortable and unable to give full rein to his wit. He begins many a joke but is forced to pull back as if he was interrupting someone at a dinner party. When he does get the spotlight he is very, very funny. This was Allen's last regular gig in a medium that held little use for him. He seems a bit tired and a bit befuddled, but he's always sardonic and funny. And when Fred Allen doesn't assume the number two chair position, Steve Allen is there in his place (no relation, other than the great wit). Watching this ancient game show has led me to re-assess the talented Mr. Allen. Steve Allen was so ubiquitous in my youth that I admit to taking him for granted. Now I see why I was drawn to him in the first place. He's a master wit of the first order. (I had the pleasure of auditioning for him once back in 1983. He was producing a small production of his show, Sammy Glick is Alive and Sick. Coincidentally, I did an imitation of Fred Allen during my piece and made him laugh. I didn't get the job, though, and he hired an upstart by the name of Bill Maher instead.) And let me tell you, the mystery guests alone are worth watching for. I don't think I can remember seeing Herbert Marshall, Ed Wynn, Edgar Bergen, Liz Taylor, and Bob Hope all in one week....on a game show! I've already gotten a few of my friends hooked , and if you start to watch you'll be hooked, too.

I've recently discover Big Hearted Arthur Askey. TCM showed three of his films back to back to back and I'm now a fan. What an irreverent little pain in the arse. He's like a good natured pitbull. His modus operandi in relation to the other characters in the films seems to be, "LOVE ME OR I'LL BADGER YOU INTO THE GROUND!". I thought Groucho, Robert Woolsey, and others of that ilk were brazen and unyielding... well, Arthur gives them all a run for their money. He's tiny, he's kind of feminine and he's a riot. He works with a "partner" who goes by the name of Richard "Stinker" Murdoch. I remember my dear second wife saying to me once, after watching an Abbott and Costello film, "Abbott doesn't do anything. Lou's the whole show.". Well, despite her totally uninformed opinion, it made me realize that if Lou Costello were living in England in the 40's Abbott would have been in the same boat as "Stinky" Murdoch, or Jerry Desmonde (who apparently died penniless and alone). Murdoch is an equal partner to Askey in no uncertain terms. In fact they would have worked beautifully as an official team. Murdoch is tall and handsome where Askey is short and goofy looking... Murdoch can get the girl, play straight, and even act... Askey is more freakish by nature. What was with English comedy performers? Will Hay dumped Moffatt and Marriott and paid dearly. Tony Hancock dumped Sid James and Kenneth Williams and we all know where Mr. Hancock ended. So, it is with slight discomfort that I watch the Askey films, but not enough to consider the films anything but delightful. If you get the chance check out, Band Waggon, The Ghost Train, and Charley's Big Hearted Aunt, by all means do.

I was recently having a meal with the still lovely Ann Jeffries, and knowing full well that she was not only the best Tess Trueheart in the movies, and co-star to Lugosi and Atwill, not mention star of the Topper TV series, but she worked in a few films with those Third Banana wannabes, Brown and Carney! So, being me, they were the first ones I wanted to know about. Well, as expected, she didn't have much to say other than, "They were very nice, and very talented, but they weren't a team. We knew it, they knew it, and the audiences knew it.". It reminded me of the time I approached AMC's long ago host, Bob Dorian (back when AMC almost rivaled TCM as a classic film station). The first thing I asked him was, "Why don't you show more Wheeler and Woolsey movies?". He looked at me like I had just landed from the planet Zoomar, and he said, "You like them?". I answered in the affirmative and he replied, "Then there must be something very wrong with you.". I guess he didn't collect their films.

Oh... and if you dig really hip and intelligent comedy, give a listen to Aaron Neathery's Electromatic Radio. It's brilliantly funny.

That's all for now. I'm going to watch What's My Line. I wonder who the mystery guest will be? Wally Brown, perhaps?

Rubberlegs

2008-07-02T10:36:00.000-07:00

by Geoff Collins

"Never mind who! I know who! You know you can't boombazzle me - I mean, you can't bamboozle me! Huh! I've been boozled before!"

Leon Errol is jealous. His wife's just won a dance contest with the instructor Maurice (pronounced Morr-eece) and Leon's decided to visit the dancing academy and give Maurice a pop on the nose: "You can't drag our good game in the nutter!" During the next fifteen minutes of his definitive 1938 RKO short The Jitters, Leon manages to embrace all known human failings, including drunkenness. Especially drunkenness. He's been boozled before. Bill Robinson may have been "Bojangles", with his wonderful stairway dance, but Leon Errol - "Rubberlegs" - was equally legendary, the inspiration for many a comic drunk on a staircase. We've already seen Sid Field in London Town, and we'll eventually see Frank Randle in Somewhere On Leave; and those fine English top-hatted topers Jimmy James and Freddie Frinton were just as hilariously inaccurate in their attempts to smoke the broken-in-half cigarette. In Germany, the TV recording of Freddie Frinton's "Dinner For One" sketch is transmitted every New Year's Eve, so although he's a footnote in the UK, to the Germans he's an icon. It's worth the trip!

Leon Errol was born in Sydney in 1881, and in his teens he abandoned a medical career for the stage. By 1910 he was in New York, a star of the Ziegfeld Follies with his portrayal of the comprehensively refreshed man-about-town, staggering all over the stage with balletic grace yet speaking with suspiciously precise emphasis in an unconvincing attempt to prove his sobriety. "Leon has not had our good fortune" wrote Bill Fields to Ed Wynn in 1938, and while this may now be true in terms of posterity's opinion, during a long career Leon was always fantastically busy. From 1924 onwards he appeared in over sixty feature films and a hundred starring shorts - as well as running the Black Pussy on Santa Monica Boulevard, a cafe immortalized (in necessarily bowdlerized form) in The Bank Dick. Unlike his fellow Aussies Bevan and Pollard he didn't spend his final years in comical-cockney bit parts, although his Britishness was most useful in his portrayal of Lord Epping in the Mexican Spitfire series. Leon may have been a supporting actor in features, but in two-reelers he was a Star Turn.

In fact the eighteen-minute format was perfect for him. Most of his shorts were made at RKO, economical but classy-looking little farces in which shifty-eyed Leon runs around trying to cover up some indiscretion involving alcoholic excess and a blonde or two. Inevitably, despite his hypocritical blusterings, he comes unstuck and the truth is revealed, which serves him right as he's invariably dead guilty.

With such a rigorous schedule, inspiration must have flagged occasionally, which is probably why Leon's team decided to build a two-reeler around one of his old Follies routines. Leon lurches into the dancing school and is mistaken for their top instructor, resulting in a roomful of lovely young women slavishly following his every step. Contrived? Absolutely. But there's so much to enjoy here. The supporting cast: dizzy Vivian Tobin as Leon's wife; "Edgar Kennedy's lazy brother-in-law" Jack Rice as the maitre d'; Bobby Barber in a tiny part as the waiter; and especially Richard Lane, that incisive straightman for so many comedians. He feeds Leon beautifully and he's clearly enjoying every minute.

But above all, we can see the daddy of all stage and screen drunks, Leon Errol, showing us absolutely everything he did best within the space of eighteen minutes. It's a master class in comedy.

Readers, it gives me great pleasure to say, on behalf of the Third Banana team: we give you The Jitters!

Time out for some shameless self-promotion from your erstwhile Third Banana blogmaster!

2008-06-20T11:06:00.000-07:00

WHAT IS ELECTROMATIC RADIO?

In a way, this is..

Or this..

Some say that Electromatic Radio is the warm summer breeze that catches your back as you walk through the park. Others say that Electromatic Radio is the morning dew on the lawn that you mowed only the day before. Still others say that Electromatic Radio is the threatening message scrawled across your bathroom mirror in lipstick. All of these answers are correct...

.. if profoundly unhelpful. The following is less so:

WHAT IS ELECTROMATIC RADIO?

Electromatic Radio is a science fiction comedy and music program written, produced, and performed by Aaron Neathery. Each program tells a complete story in three skits with two musical interludes. The ratio of original material to music varies as you can see in the following graphs:

WHAT IS IT ABOUT?

Somewhere in an alternate America, on the far side of a small town called Drakesville, is the world's first fully-automated atomic radio station. Once the flagship of a coast-to-coast chain of nuclear-powered radiomats, it has long since fallen out of public favor. Inside the musty, labyrinthine Electromatic Building, hallways which once bustled with activity are now quiet and strange things scuttle in the shadows. Rooms which have remained sealed for decades, their contents forgotten, lie silently as if in wait. But the building is far from abandoned. Throughout the complex, a vastly complicated electromechanical network still guides the station's day-to-day activities just as it has without stop for almost eight decades. The station also continues to employ a small crew consisting of an on-air host and a technician in order to keep Electromatic Radio on the air.

THE ELECTROMATIC CREW

Grey Grimwald, host of Electromatic Radio. A bellicose, short-tempered, hard-drinking, middle-aged veteran of the New York radio scene, although in what capacity is unknown as he seems to have little aptitude for announcing or anything else. Grey is a man utterly out of his element, helpless in the face of the bizarre and unexplainable, and emotionally unequipped to cope with the strange behavior of his only human co-worker, Matt Appleyard. But as much as his job and co-worker may drive him up the wall, he knows that he has nowhere to go but down and therefore tries very, very hard to reconcile himself to his new life. He's also a huge Mets fan.

Matt Appleyard, Electromatic technician. Chipper, bright, playful, energetic, and unspeakably irritating, Matt is the heart of Electromatic Radio. His days are spent tinkering with electronics, maintaining the station's supercomputer, munching on Necco wafers, and making his co-worker Grey's life a waking nightmare. What Matt does not do is his primary job of monitoring the broadcast, something he considers redundant as the broadcast is automated. This usually leaves the technically inept Grey in the position of not even knowing if he's on the air. Matt, a lifetime citizen of Drakesville, is several decades Grey's junior and formerly worked at the Sack-N-Carry, a local grocery store.

Evie (ElectroVac I). A huge analog computer designed to edit, compile, and broadcast 24 hours of programming a day. Powered, like the transmitter, by the station's small scale nuclear reactor, Evie is essentially the Electromatic Building's "brain", her "nerves" extending throughout the building in the form of sensors, cameras, and hidden microphones. Extensions of Evie include automated studios, a huge automated record library, and "broadcast control" booths for technicians to monitor her broadcasts. Evie is sentient and has a mercurial, mischievous, and rather insecure personality. Although capable of speaking limited pre-programmed phrases, she communicates with Matt primarily through a series of electronic tonalities which only Matt seems to understand. She absolutely does not like Grey.

Mr. Osborne, owner of Electromatic Radio. Never heard but frequently mentioned, Mr. Osborne is an extremely old man with, like Grey, a taste for the hootch. He has an office in the building but is almost always away.

THE RIVALS

As insignificant as it may be, Electromatic Radio has a rival station, the better-funded and organized Autotronic Radio, with which it competes for its tiny share of the Drakesville radio market. Autotronic's employees are unscrupulous cutthroats who will stop at nothing, even murder, to see Electromatic Radio eliminated. While there may be many more Autotronic employees, we are concerned with only three.

Cyrus Filtch, host of Autotronic Radio. A vicious, weaselly, abusive little Brooklynite with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Newton Dimbleby, Autotronic Radio technician. Cyrus's dimwitted lackey. An oafish stuffed shirt with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Professor Cassius Klatch, head of Autotronic R&D. A former coworker of Matt's from his days at the Sack-N-Carry. Neurotic and crazed, the Professor's deep-seated lust for revenge stems from his being passed over for employment at Electromatic Radio in favor of Matt. Hugely intelligent and deeply unhinged with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

WHAT BROUGHT *THIS* ON?

Electromatic Radio began life in late 2005 as Videomatic Electrovue, an experiment in television deconstruction; an anti-TV show with fictional limitations designed to inspire creative solutions as well as expose the mechanics of a medium that we all tend to take at face value. The visuals were pared down to a test pattern and video effects with audio carrying the bulk of the narrative. On paper, the concept for the program was also to involve a camera, locked in place, with a performance space of no more than a few feet, allowing for nothing more than hands, heads, small props, drawings, and puppets much like the earliest mechanical television experiments of the 1920s. For the audio, I would perform all of the characters and edit the dialog together line by line, saving the need for scheduling, rehearsing and directing a full cast. Two pilots were produced with my friend Lee Wilson as video editor and co-director but, unfortunately, the show turned out to be too complicated to produce on a steady basis and, worse, I couldn't find a venue for it. Left with an established production method for the audio, a concept, characters, and a handful of prepared scripts, I decided to convert the show into a radio program. The groundwork already laid, I quickly recorded three new pilot episodes and paid a visit to KPFT, Houston's Pacifica station, to see if it had a chance to air. Happily, program director Ernesto Aguilar felt it did and Electromatic Radio was added to the lineup of the station's new HD channel with a second station, KRFP in Moscow, ID, beating them to the punch.

WHAT IS THE POINT OF IT ALL, YOU WEIRD MAN?

Electromatic Radio is largely an exploration into a number of things that I find personally compelling; the feeling of wandering the abandoned hallways of your school after hours on the last day before graduating.. The eerie wonder of an abandoned building.. The comfort in the seeming permanence of that neighborhood business that holds its own against the big box stores.. The elegant simplicity of radio itself.. It's about independence, the joy of invention, of stewardship, friendship, paranoia, and dread. Electromatic Radio is about all of these things, but mostly it's about yelling.

WHERE CAN I HEAR IT?

If you're affiliated with a Pacifica affiliate station, the complete series can be accessed at www.audioport.org. If not, Electromatic Radio can be heard in Houston, TX, Monday afternoons at 3:30 on KPFT, 90.1 FM HD-2. It will be airing again in the Fall on KRFP 92.5 FM in Moscow, ID, new time to be announced, and will be webcast as well. An EMR podcast is being considered but, until then, here's a sample episode and three of the KPFT promos. Stay tuned!

Electromatic Radio 1.01 - "Disorientation"

KPFT Electromatic Radio Spot #1

KPFT Electromatic Radio Spot #2

KPFT Electromatic Radio Spot #3

A NOTE TO LISTENERS, ASSORTED PROGRAM DIRECTORS AND MEDIA MOGULS WHO MAY BE READING

In my bid for global radio domination, I'm eager to add stations to the Electromatic client list. If you know of a station near you for whom you believe EMR would be a good fit, let them know about EMR or let me know about them. Better yet, if you happen to work in radio, especially for a college, community, or Part 15 station, and you have an interest in adding EMR to your lineup, contact me at electromaticradio@gmail.com. The first person to help me reach my goal of 18 million stations wins an Electromatic Radio T-shirt.

Very Good Eddie : Belt in the Back Revisited

2008-06-15T11:08:00.000-07:00

by Geoff Collins

It's about time we took another look at little "Banjo Eyes" Eddie Cantor. Like him or not, he just won't go away - and if he does go away, he'll be right back. Actually he wasn't that little - probably about five feet eight - but like Chaplin he surrounded himself with taller people in order to play, in Gilbert Seldes' phrase, "the lamb led to the slaughter", the hapless victim pursued and pummelled by gangsters, psychopaths and osteopaths.

Verbally, Eddie was no victim. Although somewhat prone to overstating his ailments to anyone within earshot, Eddie's neurotic, edgy New Yorker persona was always ready with a perfectly-timed one-liner, usually followed by "that look": open-faced, eye-rolling innocence thinly veiling the secret joy of his own native wit. A bit like this:

Eddie would fit comfortably into many of Woody Allen's movies. Imagine him - if he'd lived long enough - as Woody's grandfather; and I'm convinced that Kermit the Frog owes a lot to "master of ceremonies Eddie" of the 'fifties.

Twenty years earlier, "Jewish Broadway star Eddie" was a huge success in the early-talkie version of Whoopee. His five subsequent Goldwyn extravaganzas are still the most frequently shown Cantor movies. During this period he gradually became "less Jewish" as a performer - and consequently less effective, a bit watered-down - but the increasing blandness of his on-screen character gave him a wider appeal; he was a box-office name for a much longer period than his contemporaries such as Ed Wynn and Benny Rubin. Let's not forget that he was also very Cantor-minded, a ferocious self-publicist. Commendably he played "himself" as an unpleasantly pushy egotist in Thank Your Lucky Stars, to such an extent that the WB shield at the beginning of this picture could stand for Whiny Bitch; but his relentless drive paid off. In 1933 he was the top comedy star in the entire world. He was the hottest thing on radio and it's no exaggeration to say that Roman Scandals is absolutely breathtaking in every way. (What a pity that it's still circulating in dreary washed-out prints with inappropriate "reissue" title cards.) Yet despite his astonishing fame at the time, he's never been much more than a footnote whenever "classic comedy" is covered in those glossy coffee-table books. Chaplin, Keaton, Fields, the Marxes, Stan and Ollie, all the usual suspects are always there... but Eddie Cantor? Posterity's pushed him aside.

What was Eddie Cantor really like, deep down inside? Again, like Chaplin, he was incredibly complex, and for similar reasons. Orphaned during infancy, his energetic performing style can easily be seen as a cry for affection. In his autobiography Take My Life he portays himself - at inordinate length - as a loving husband and father; but there was usually a girlfriend in the background. For most of the 'forties his secret squeeze was the lanky and oddly appealing Joan Davis. If you watch Eddie and Joan in Show Business, forget about "acting"; you can see a real-life affair going on. Joy is all around.

Eddie also yaps on about the dangers of filming the bullfight sequence in The Kid From Spain, bull being the appropriate word. Eddie and the bull are never in the same shot; I don't think they were ever introduced. [You'll hear this line again later!] With this in mind, we must be wary of his claim for authorship of the "Jewish tailor" routine "Belt in the Back". Oh no, not that again. Yes I know we mentioned it before (it's in our Archive for January 2006) but this time we've got the movie clip, so please be patient!

An article in Variety, May 11, 1949, reveals Eddie as ruthless enough to use litigation to prove that he alone was the author of this ancient skit, the ultimate cost being the loss of his friendship with fellow vaudevillian Lew Hearn. Gilbert Seldes' The Seven Lively Arts (1924) supports Cantor's assertion that the sketch was first used in one of the Shuberts' shows - actually the touring version of The Midnight Rounders.

We'll probably never know who wrote this - I suspect it's a joint effort that "grew" gradually - but the recovery of the film clip lets us see "1920 vaudeville Eddie", ebullient, unstoppable and very Jewish, before the Production Code put the lid on him. Thirty-seven years old when this was shot in 1929, he's at the top of his form, undoubtedly overjoyed to be getting $20,000 for a twelve-minute guest appearance that was filmed in.... well, twelve minutes, in a continuous take with three or four cameras. It finishes very abruptly; I suspect the film ran out!

We apologise for the flaw about halfway through this; typically the rest of our copy of Glorifying the American Girl, an hour-and-three-quarters of relentless misery, is blip-free. Louis Sorin is Eddie's assistant, but who's the browbeaten little man who plays the customer? (As Eddie's not the Victim here, he can work with a smaller actor.) The answer's in The Inspector General, three or four minutes in. Lew Hearn and his brother Sam ("Schlepperman" from the Jack Benny show) play twin postmen Izzick and Gizzick. They are frustratingly alike (the joy of seeing the Hearn brothers together, in Technicolor, nearly makes this Kaye-fest worthwhile) but my money's on Lew. He was the older brother, 47 at the time - and he looks it - and he'd been in the routine from the beginning. The Variety article also states that Eddie dipped into his twenty grand to pay Lew $1,500. Most generous. Eddie's tireless work for many charities was well-publicized (he made sure of that!) but as we've discussed, he was a complex human being: nasty and nice, mean and generous, hot and cold - a bit like all of us. As an entertainer, though, he was one of a kind.

Eddie Cantor's still not as well-appreciated as he should be, but at least most people have heard of him. So I'd like to dedicate this article to LEW HEARN, 1882-1965, vaudeville comedian, author (possibly of this sketch!), the original singer, in London, of "Hitchy-Koo"; and a definite candidate for Third Bananadom. Eddie's the star of "Belt in the Back"; but it wouldn't be as good without Lou and Lew.

Sid's Spivvy Skit

2008-06-05T19:18:00.000-07:00

by Geoff Collins

The impresario Charles B. Cochran was in the First Night audience for Sid Field's West End debut in March 1943. In a letter to the Times he described Sid as "a Comedian with charm and great originality who caused the greatest laughter I have heard in a theatre for many years". Fortunately for us, some of the best sketches from Strike a New Note - and its successor Strike It Again - were rammed unimaginatively into Sid's 1946 movie musical London Town, a prize turkey so disastrous in every possible way that it sank like a concrete lifeboat and harmed the lives and careers of everyone associated with it.

London Town, full-length (don't even think about it) runs for over two hours. It seems like two years; and yet at the preview it was even longer, so the producers felt it necessary to discard the wonderful opening sketch of Sid as a Professor of Music, playing the Tubercular Bells at a provincial music hall. (This scene still exists, in a mutilated, monochrome form, in the compilation "To See Such Fun"; hopefully we'll eventually locate it.) The last time London Town emerged from its deep dungeon, on Channel Four in 1986, about a quarter of it was missing. What a relief, I hear you say, but unfortunately the cut portion included Sid as "Slasher Green", his opening sketch from Strike a New Note. A truncated version of this important routine turned up some years ago on the video Jokes That Won the War, and this appears to be the clip currently floating around on YouTube. (Whoever had the good taste to set this up, you have our sincere thanks.) On stage this sketch could run for up to eighteen minutes, so our little two-minute excerpt can only hint at the flavour of a much tastier feast. Still, it's better than nothing.

For the benefit of our younger readers, in 1940s Britain, when most things were rationed or in short supply, "spivs" or "wide boys" were those flamboyantly-dressed but shady characters, mysteriously exempt from military service, who could get you anything, at a price. Just don't ask no questions, and yer won't get told no lies, see? James Beck's rascally Private Walker in Dad's Army is a direct descendant of Slasher. Beck always acknowledged his debt to Sid Field and it was his intention to portray Sid in a stage production; sadly this never happened as Beck was the victim of an uncannily Sid-like alcohol-related early death. Postwar star Arthur English ("the Prince of the Wide Boys") was more fortunate and used his version of the spiv as his stage persona for most of the 40s and 50s, eventually maturing into a "lovable old rogue" character actor.

But let's get back to our hero. In a 1940s version of Britain's Got Talent, insecure cockney blowhard Slasher charges onto the stage and announces that he is a Discovery, somebody who's been "sorted aht o' people what want to go on, see?" His pathetic attempts to entertain us are hampered by unctuous master-of-ceremonies Jerry Desmonde, raucous heckler Alfie Dean ("thirty bob" is £1:50 in today's currency), and the spectacular length of his own overcoat. Slasher thinks - hopes - that he has it all: the hat, the coat, the natty little moustache, the sheer courage... but what he hasn't got is the talent, so ultimately he achieves nothing. It's a situation we know only too well.

This is a briefer glimpse than usual of the cherishable Sid, but at least, and at last, we can see part of the routine that made him an Overnight Success - after thirty years in the business. So let's welcome onstage our friend from the Elephant and Castle: Mr. Slasher Green!

RIP Harvey Korman, 1927-2008

2008-05-30T22:11:00.000-07:00

George Wallace?

2008-05-09T12:00:00.000-07:00

And the obscure classic comedians just keep a-coming! Meet George Wallace, reportedly Australia's most popular depression-era comic. He's rather like an Aussie proto-Costello. I'd love to see more, but these clips are all I've found thus far.

His Royal Highness (1932) George is no slouch when it comes to storytelling, pratfalls, and dancing. The material may be weak, but he knows how to sell it.

His Royal Highness (1932) Wadayaknow.. An Australian "crazy kingdom" social satire released between Cracked Nuts and Duck Soup. Shades of Hugh Herbert.

His Royal Highness (1932) "Daddy smack!"

Absolutely excellent interplay between Wallace and a straightman in this clip from Harmony Row (1933).

Harmony Row (1933) Wow.. Just.. Wow. Pathos? Comedy? Both? Neither? The little boy is Bill Kerr, later a regular on Hancock's Half Hour in the 50s.

Harmony Row (1933) George does a seemingly partially improvised comedy boxing routine before a highly appreciative audience.

Stanley, Roddy and Syd

2008-05-05T05:09:00.000-07:00

by Geoff Collins

Pay attention, readers! We're delighted to present the Third Banana-est clip of all time, a sequence from a long-forgotten movie, featuring long-forgotten people; but it's dazzling. Cheer Up is a 1936 Quota Quickie, one of those cheap little British "fillers" churned out by the hundred in order to fulfill the terms of the Cinematograph Films Act, 1927, section 19. Most of these undemanding pictures are, it goes without saying, absolute rubbish - and Cheer Up is no classic - but we at the Banana are just about sad enough to wade through all that porridge to get to the juicy jammy bits.

We've met Stanley Lupino before. An entry in our Archive (December 2006) gives a bit of background information, as well as the Lupino Family Tree; but we now know that this Punch-like little West End star, Ida's dad, was born in 1893 and not '94; his impressive memorial in Lambeth Cemetery, Tooting, states that he was 49 when he died in 1942. I didn't need to make the Pilgrimage - although I still intend to do so - because there are some useful images on www.findagrave.com. Stanley's final resting place looks somewhat neglected and the Lupino Family Tree appears to be growing right through the middle of it. Are there no Lupinos around today who could tidy up this hallowed spot? Sixty years ago there were dozens of 'em!

Stanley was frequently partnered on stage - but sadly only three times on film - by another small, quirky West End entertainer, Laddie Cliff. They worked so well together that when Laddie was unavailable, Stanley needed to find a Laddie-substitute, a bespectacled Second Banana to play his best friend. Here it's chubby Welsh character actor Roddy Hughes, a former Marlborough House schoolteacher who left his chosen profession for the joys of (amongst many other things) three years on tour as Hard-Boiled Herman in Rose Marie.

The cafe proprietor is played by the appropriately-named Syd Crossley. Syd always looked aggrieved and it's no wonder: in Hollywood he'd been cast opposite Stan Laurel as one of the tramps in the 1926 Duck Soup. We'll never know the full story but at the last minute he was replaced by Oliver Hardy. Syd plays bit parts in many American silents - he's the bartender in West of Hot Dog and the taxi driver in the chase sequence of Speedy - but he's most frequently to be found scowling his way through British talkies as exasperated waiters or policemen - or cafe proprietors. Maybe he was contemplating What Might Have Been: Laurel and Crossley. Here's a fascinating exercise: imagine all the great Laurel and Hardy scenes with Syd playing Ollie's part. No, forget it; it's just too sad and it's not actually that fascinating.

This scene from Cheer Up gives us one of Syd's rare beatific smiles, and it's a genuine one. He's supposed to be playing a gruff, unsympathetic character but he's obviously having a great time with Stanley and Roddy, and it shows.

Readers, we hope this will make you smile. It should do; this is what the Third Banana is all about. We give you: The Steak and Kidney Pudding Song.

As a postscript I would like to thank Alan and Jennie Clarke for their invaluable help in making this and many other rare clips available for your enjoyment.

Sid's Technicolor Turkey

2008-04-16T19:46:00.000-07:00

by Geoff Collins

Sid Field? Haven't we mentioned him before? Well, yes, and it's about time we mentioned him again. If you'd care to take a little dip into our Archive for December 2005 you'll find an article in which I attempted to explain why this beloved but shamefully neglected mobile-faced buffoon was so influential; but in 2005 we didn't have the film clips....

Exactly why is such an important and talented comedian so obscure? For a start, he died when he was 45; that doesn't help. Neither does the sad fact that dear old Sid only made three movies and they're all deeply buried in various vaults. Since 2005 there's been no news at all of his first effort That's the Ticket, reportedly a rare survivor of the Doodlebug attack on the Warner studio at Teddington. After a frustrating evening on Google (I have many such evenings) I could find no trace of its whereabouts, not even a production still. Readers: Helllpppp! We need to find this film!!!!

London Town hasn't been shown anywhere since its almost apologetic appearance in an afternoon slot on Channel Four in the summer of 1986, in a much-edited version. This is why That's the Ticket would be such a welcome find; it would be a short, cheap, sharply-edited little quota-quickie, whereas London Town is a vast, lumbering behemoth. The full version runs 126 minutes. Channel Four discarded about a quarter of this, including Sid's "spiv" sketch (think of James Beck as Private Walker in Dad's Army and you'll get some idea of it) but at least lucky viewers were able to watch him as the Photographer, the Golfer and the Drunk. So how does London Town hold up after all these years in the wilderness?

Frankly, it still stinks. England's finest comedian (yes, at the time, this was demonstrably true) flounders for two hours because nobody gave him anything funny to do. Sid's a very appealing actor and the intentions are surely honourable but the whole premise is just so wrong. It's loosely based on the real Sid Field Story - our hero is trapped in provincial obscurity for decades and finally becomes a star in middle-age - but it's depressingly weighed down with dreary plot scenes and truly horrific musical numbers. Nearly an hour into the film, frustrated understudy Sid finally gets his Big Chance in the Big West End Show. With the immortal - and uncredited - Jerry Desmonde as his straightman, this is what he does:

That was "Portrait Study" from the 1944 stage show Strike It Again, and it was written by "Martin Lane", a pseudonym for the Punch contributor J. B. Boothroyd; hence Sid's name in the sketch. There's a BBC airtake of this material, with a live audience, in which Sid and Jerry take it much more slowly, to far greater effect. Many of the lines, including one or two not in the movie ("Ohhh...hasn't it been cold?!!") get huge laughs. In the film, presumably because Sid's supposed to be "nervous", he races through it, and the lack of audience laughter make it seem as if he's dying out there.

Anyway, as we've now established that Sid's been a success, the audience can relax and enjoy/endure approximately fifty-two more musical numbers - during which they will become morose and suicidal - until at last, more than an hour and three-quarters into this mess, Sid and Jerry take the stage again for the Golf Sketch. Not the greatest script in the world, but this was one of the routines that made Sid a star after all those years trudging around the grim towns of 'thirties Britain. (Readers, they're still grim towns.) Before we look at the sketch, here's a rare article from the June 1943 Theatre World, in which we meet Sid at the time of his first West End breakthrough:

In order for this to work at all, you'll have to take yourself back to the Prince of Wales Theatre in 1943 and imagine Sid in full flight, playing the audience like a Stradivarius. The art direction here is by Ernst Fegte, who also worked on The Golf Specialist; so this was Ernst's second stagey golf routine. What a difference, though, between Bill Fields and Sid Field:

Let's make one thing quite clear: arguably the most insulting invention in the world is Canned Laughter ("Look, something funny's happening! Let's all laugh!") but in this instance it might actually help. Sid goes through his full range - and what a range! - but the effect is spooky and a bit chilly, like Chaplin's routines in Limelight. Presumably they thought that the audiences in the cinemas would provide the laughter; but this rarely happened. London Town was such a flop that it was taken off after a couple of days in many cinemas. The smell of turkey spreads quickly.

Fortunately, your introduction to the elusive Sidney Arthur Field needn't cause you chronic indigestion. If you watch those sketches again - and please, do so very soon - you'll see how he influenced so many notable postwar British comedians (and Jimmy Jewel). Aaron's even pointed out Sid's physical and stylistic resemblance to Terry Jones - something I hadn't even considered, but it's quite valid - thus providing an unlikely but legitimate link between a lovable old-time Variety comic and the Pythons. But for me it's not so much what Sid says or does, it's just how he is. He had beautiful precision and repose yet was able to take off and roam freely around the stage like an English Bert Lahr. This is no exaggeration; Sid could have easily played the Cowardly Lion's English cousin. The American servicemen who saw his London shows in '43-'45 never forgot. Neither did Bob Hope, or Danny Kaye; and neither should we. Unfortunately Sid was like Bert in other ways: he was an insecure worrier. John Fisher's affectionate biography What a Performance charitably doesn't mention the booze, but it was a major problem; Sid looks a lot older than forty-one in those sketches. The result was that it all caught up with him, on February 3 1950. He didn't grow old, and he didn't do any television, so he's a rare one, but undeniably a great one. Thankfully he got some of his gentle art on film. Let's enjoy what we have.

One more clip? Okay, then: "something appealing, something appalling". We'll leave you - for the time being - with this item, which mysteriously falls into both categories. It's so obviously an attempt by two Hollywood songwriters to duplicate "The Lambeth Walk" yet it only succeeded in offending Londoners all over the world. Kay Kendall is radiantly lovely, even with her original nose; Two-Ton Tessie O'Shea bludgeons everybody else off the screen; singing drummer Jack Parnell does his laconic Ray McKinley impression; and Sid gives us his version of the Loose-Limbed Drunk on a Staircase, borrowed from Leon Errol and subsequently borrowed yet again by Freddie Frinton. This is "The 'Ampstead Way". Gor blimey! It's Jaw-Dropping Time!

Did I mention Sid's third film, Cardboard Cavalier? To be continued....

BAMBOUK!!

2008-04-14T21:01:00.000-07:00

The Third Banana heartily endorses this without reservation:

Internationally Acclaimed Theatrical Clown Show

"BAMBOUK"

Bald Comedy. In Tails.

comes to New York City April 16, 2008

at the American Theatre of Actors

New York - Award-winning American theatrical clown show "Bambouk" has toured internationally since 2003, and now they bring their vaudeville-inspired silent comedy to New York City for a limited run. Called "Pioneers in the new face of clown" and "Inspiring and Amazing" by audiences from Alaska to China, San Juan to Japan, this intimate theatrical silent spectacle recalls Samuel Beckett, Buster Keaton and Bugs Bunny. Magic, music and manipulation are woven into a seamless blend of character comedy and theatrics not to be missed by lovers of physical theatre, silent film comedies and Warner Brothers Cartoons. Bambouk opens on April 16, 2007 at American Theatre of Actors' Chernuchin Theatre (314 West 54th Street, Second Floor).

Bambouk is the creation of two American theatre clowns, Matthew Duncan and Brian Foley. Masters of the variety arts, Matthew and Brian juggle plates, flip hats, ride a six-foot unicycle, play the accordion, ukulele and musical saw, even make an audience member float in mid-air! Wearing no makeup, just red noses and tuxedos, Bambouk is THE clown show for people afraid of clowns!

BAMBOUK has opened for the Drifters, the Platters and Charo, and shared the stage with award-winning circus artists from the Moscow Circus, Nanjing Acrobatic Troupe, Big Apple Circus and Cirque du Soleil. Together and individually they have been the featured physical comedians in stage productions, ice shows, cruise ships and theme parks since 1990. BAMBOUK has been seen multiple times in China, Japan, Alaska, Mexico, the Caribbean islands, and throughout the contintental U.S.

BAMBOUK

Bald Comedy. In Tails.

Opens April 16 - April 27, 2008

American Theatre of Actors located at 314 West 54th Street, 2nd Floor

Performance Schedule: Tuesday-Friday at 8pm; Saturday 2pm and 8pm;

Sunday 2pm and 7pm

Tickets are $30 for Adults, $20 for Children aged 8 to 13

Not suitable for children under 8. Recommended for Adults.

Call SmartTix at 212-868-4444 or visit www.smarttix.com

Running time is 1 hour, 45 minutes with one intermission

For more information, please visit: www.bambouk.com

EXTRA! Robert Woolsey's Sluggish Bowel Complications Cured By Patent Medicine!

2008-04-11T11:28:00.000-07:00

Bob Woolsey was a brave, brave man. 9/24/36

Buffoon Of Joy

2008-04-09T18:54:00.000-07:00

Bob Woolsey's only solo feature may be a cheap Poppy knockoff, but at least Al Boasberg was trying to deliver a vehicle properly suited to Bob Woolsey's talents. The same can't be said for Bert Wheeler's contemporary Too Many Cooks, a patience-straining timewaster which features no songs, no dancing, no action, and Roscoe Ates as comic relief. It's altogether odd considering that RKO was banking on Bert, not Bob, as the big solo success. Here are some fun newspaper ads from July 25-August 18, 1931.

Comedy Feuds

2008-04-01T12:06:00.000-07:00

From The Evening Huronite, August 26th, 1941. Dorothy Kilgallen relates yet another tale of Joe E. Brown's nasty character-pilfering habit. This is also the first and only time I've ever heard it suggested that there was some kind of rivalry between Bobby Clark and, of all people, Bob Woolsey. If Clark and Woolsey got into a fight, who would win? My money's on Clark.

Medium Rare

2008-03-31T11:36:00.000-07:00

The Old Time Radio Researchers have, via archive.org, bestowed upon us a marvelous bounty; their much coveted Singles and Doubles Collection, an Astonishingly Ample Aggregation of Audio Aberrations.. a collection of radio programs for which only one or two episodes remain. While this isn't entirely accurate (a glance at J. David Goldin's indispensable radiogoldindex.com will show that there are many shows in the SADC for which more episodes exist), it's more often true than not, and who the hell am I to nitpick? SHAME ON ME! We're talking about some museum-worthy material here: a joint radio interview with Orson Welles and H. G. Wells (Orson is clearly in awe, and H. G. gives him a pitch for the yet to be released Citizen Kane!), radio broadcasts from the 1920s, etc. etc.. I've uploaded a sampling of the available programs to my box.net account for you (see sidebar), concentrating on comedies for The Gazeeka Box and comic strip-themed shows for the "limited-edition" Four Color OTR player. Box.net limits files to 10 MB for cheapskates like myself so (for now) I had to leave out such gems as The George O' Hanlon Show (!!!!!) and Bert Wheeler starring on The Fresh Up Show (!!!!!!!!!), but there are still plenty of goodies left. Of particular interest (to me) are Tim and Irene Ryan's appearances on Circus Night in Silvertown (1935), and subbing for Jack Benny on the Jell-O Program (1936). Tim Ryan's Ted Healy-isms are much more pronounced here than in his later appearances in Monogram musicals, helping him to rise above some pretty godawful material, but Irene is just as much an unlikable cross between Gracie Allen and Cass Daley as she ever was before her Beverly Hillbillies days. Also of note is the closed-circuit broadcast of the first episode of The Morey Amsterdam Show with Morey in excellent form. This series would go on to become an early television hit on CBS and DuMont, giving a young Art Carney a solid start to his TV career. His future comedy partner is represented here by a 1944 episode of The Jackie Gleason-Les Tremayne Show, much funnier than you'd except (Les Tremayne??). Less successful by far is a 1946 starring vehicle for Phil Silvers, "20th Century-Fox's Brilliant Comedian", that foreshadows not even faintly the later brilliance of Sgt. Bilko. And perhaps most fascinating of the lot is an episode of Living 1949 in which Fred Allen examines American humor ("The average radio comedian is a mouth that speaks the words of others' brains.") and the hellish grind of his own career. As for the comic-themed shows:

Smilin' Jack, 12/18/39 or 2/13/39. The only complete surviving episode of this Mutual series based on Zack Mosley's bizarro aviation strip. Features the beloved shirt-button-popping Fat Stuff, and precious little of Jack himself. An on-air audition, the announcer invites listeners to write in and tell them what they like and don't like about the show. I imagine that a key complaint from kids would have been that virtually nothing happens in the show.

Dan Dunn, Secret Operative #48. Two episodes are all that remains of this syndicated 1930s series adapted from Norman Marsh's incredibly poorly drawn Dick Tracy knockoff. Not a bad show, but unremarkable.

That's My Pop, 7/29/45, based on one of Milt Gross's many brilliant strips. It's a crime that this is the sole surviving episode. While devoid of Yiddish, it's Milt Gross through and through. Shiftless Pop makes a few bucks for himself by turning the house into a sleazy dive while his family is away on vacation. One surprising, and very Gross (literally), gag involves Pop's mother-in-law stomping a giant mosquito to death. The wonderfully wet crunch that results is hilarious. The audience audibly squirms. Beautiful stuff. Aired on CBS.

Moon Mullins, 1/31/47, CBS. Frank Willard's classic strip isn't particularly well-served by this somewhat plodding audition, a pity as the strip and its colorful cast lends itself well to radio. While the material here is weak, Sheldon Leonard is perfectly cast as the scheming lowbrow Moonshine. Another audition for this series exists, dating from 1940.

Bringing Up Father. The date on this file is dead wrong. From the sound of it, and the quarter-hour runtime, I'll bet that this brisk, charming adaptation of George McManus's strip was recorded no later than 1932. It's pretty nifty hearing Maggie and Jiggs speak with their appropriate Irish brogues. This particular episode is, I believe, based directly on a McManus Sunday page. Syndicated by King Features. I wonder if they gave any of their other strips the quarter-hour treatment.

For the flipside, a comic strip based on a radio comedy success, check out the wonderful Charlie McCarthy strips over at Allan Holtz's Stripper's Guide.

Bill and Ben, the Taxi Men

2008-03-23T08:42:00.000-07:00

by Geoff Collins

"All in all, The Taxi Boys was a disaster," writes Bishop Len Maltin in The Great Movie Shorts. Elsewhere, he calls this 1932-33 Hal Roach series "one of the greatest catastrophes in Roach's history". Hang on a minute, Len, we're only talking about some two-reel comedies here; nothing exploded or hit an iceberg. But we must be fair to the Bishop; he was only in his early twenties when he wrote this judgment, and his book is a superb work, surely the starting point for all students of neglected comedy. We owe him a huge debt. Thank you, your Grace.

Unfortunately though, Mr. Maltin's appraisal of the Taxi Boys has become the Standard Opinion, giving subsequent researchers the misguided notion that the entire series is a horrendous shambles, with the inevitable consequence that these films are still scratchy, unloved and unrestored. But they were made by the Hal Roach studio, the Lot of Fun, at its peak. Sure, Roach was mostly interested in getting the Product out, but he was willing to try new styles of comedy - and occasionally revisited old styles in order to give them a fresh approach.

This wasn't always easy. To appreciate the desperation of the Roach crew as they struggled to find a winning formula, it's necessary to watch the shorts in chronological order; and www.theluckycorner.com, if we can ignore the webmaster's strange fixation with Our Gang, is most useful with its complete Roachography which includes many exact production dates.

The first short in the series, Thundering Taxis, was held back for a year before release. [The available print, a Film Classics reissue, is titled "Thundering Taxi". Was this an in-joke at Film Classics, reducing plural titles to singular? They did it with "Chicken Come Home" and "Man O'War"; I'm surprised we didn't get "That Thar Hill" and "Once One".] Thundering Taxis is a hybrid, a '26 Sennett disguised as a '32 Roach. Despite the reassuring presence of the familiar Roach background music, most of it is obviously shot silent or dubbed, and there are many unRoachy cartoon gags. Why? Because Roach was giving employment to a whole bunch of redundant ex-Sennett veterans. Del Lord had directed the Taxi Driver series at Sennett in '28 and this is an obvious retread. Bud Jamison is the irascible "Chief" - couldn't they get Ford Sterling? - and one of the drivers is Billy Bevan, clean-shaven but still recognizably squat and partridge-like. I have a soft spot for Billy Bevan; he was so ubiquitous in those Robert Youngson compilations, and things like Comedy Capers and Mad Movies, that many people of my generation grew up thinking he was one of the major players. He wasn't; but I'm always glad to see him.

There's no attempt at characterization in this movie, and the ridiculous gags are just rammed in, Sennett-like, any old how. To prove it, the film stops dead halfway for the "oyster soup" routine from Bevan's 1926 Wandering Willies. Most of us have seen Billy or Curly or Lou or Shemp perform this material; here the honour goes to Clyde Cook.

This sort of thing clearly wouldn't do at all, so for the next short, What Price Taxi, Bevan was out, replaced by - of all people - Franklin Pangborn, who's first seen in bed with Cook! Billy Gilbert, in his ugly, nasty mode - as in The Chimp - makes his first appearance as a brutish rival taxi driver, but this film is still a pseudo-Sennett, all crazy stunts and chases. You couldn't care less about any of the people in it. Consequently, Strange Innertube introduces us to the "new recruits", Gilbert (far more pleasant now, as a big, naive bumbler, Ollie Hardy's sneezy cousin) and Ben Blue. I have to admit that for a while I just didn't "get" Ben Blue, with his unfocussed eyes, giggling, failed attempts at folding his arms, and odd exclamations such as "Well, I'm a tippetywitchet!"; but Aaron has patiently explained to me that Ben is an Alien Life Form, an extraterrestrial pretending to be a nightclub comic pretending to be a taxi driver. You see, it all makes sense; "Blue" isn't his surname, it's a nickname based on his actual skin colour. He's a genuine tippetywitchet; it's not his catchphrase, it's his excuse!

These changes are most welcome but it's still all a bit Sennetty. For some reason Cook has now vanished (didn't he like being in bed with Pangborn?); and he's been replaced by Charley Rogers as Cook - same moustache, same accent, bit more of a chin. But the Roach boys were still tinkering, and in Hot Spot we finally see Blue and Gilbert as a team, although as Len M. has pointed out, each man is out to get his own laughs. Ben's a "titter titter" and a "rat-a-tat" and Billy's a tad over-fond of his beloved ex-vaudeville sneezing routine. Who cares? It's funny. So in it goes.

Just when you thought it was safe to relax, the series throws us something genuinely unsettling: Ben Blue in drag. A Martian pretending to be a comic pretending to be a taxi driver pretending to be a woman; once seen, never forgotten. This is Bring 'Em Back a Wife (and didn't they love those punny titles?); Gilbert has to pretend to be married in order to keep his job. This is how he deals with the problem.

By now the series had peaked. Wreckety Wrecks has Ben and Billy attempting to bury a "body" (actually a dummy) which eventually gets switched with a sleeping woman; and apart from Ben's great sequence with the slowly-awakening "corpse", where he gradually realizes he's "got three hands" (yes, Stan Laurel refined this in A Chump At Oxford) it's all rather depressing.

December 1932, and Taxi Barons. Gilbert is now "Dutchy" and this characterisation, similar to his persona in The Music Box, gives him a chance to spoof Jack Pearl's Baron Munchausen, as "Baron Von Hasenfeffer" (and Ben is "General Motors"!) It's most notable for a sequence in which Billy accidentally gives a cop the Finger, followed, not quite so accidentally, by Ben. No, Ben, please, don't do it!

That's all, folks. The final "official" Taxi Boys short, Call Her Sausage, has Gus Meins as director instead of Lord, no background music and no taxis. It's about Gilbert's efforts to open his new deli, with Blue as his annoyingly useless assistant, prompting Gilbert to implore "Pleeeease! Don't help me!" Was Mel Brooks taking notes? It's one of Nathan Lane's big laughs in The Producers, but there aren't many laughs here. After this one, they quietly slipped Thundering Taxis into release and moved on to the All-Stars series.

That's not all, folks. We'll leave you on a high note: Taxi For Two. The best! This one has everything: Billy's sneezing, Ben's exclamations ("Well, I'm a snipper snapper!"), Jamison as an intolerant cop, Charlie Hall as a drunk waiting for a streetcar, boomy-voiced shrimp Billy Bletcher, probably the earliest fragment of "Who's On First", beautiful location photography and even a crowd of people watching the filming. A sunny day in Los Angeles, mid-September 1932, captured forever. This is what the Third Banana is all about, a perfect matching of the Sennett-Lord slapstick with the more relaxed character-based Roach approach - and that background music! It's all there, and more. "The Taxi Boys" a disaster? Never!

The Bag's Out of the Cat: Additional Comments from Aaron Neathery

Who would have thunk it? Much like everyone else raised on a steady diet of vitamin-enriched Maltin, I'd fully expected The Taxi Boys to be a calamity, an indelible stain on Roach's supposedly pristine 30s record (which, of course, gave me every reason to track these down and watch them). Instead, this much-maligned little series turned out to be a one-of-a-kind comedy crossroads, fascinating in the extreme for its unique meeting of talents, and much, much funnier than such well-regarded Roach series of the time as, say, the Todd and Pitts shorts. Almost 80 years ago, before sound largely segregated comedians according to their roots as performers, a comedy series that featured nightclub comics, vaudevillians, and silent clowns rubbing shoulders would not have seemed so remarkable. In hindsight, The Taxi Boys is a sound comedy Pangea, bringing together performance and writing/directing styles that would never truly meet again. It's not that they see exactly eye to eye here, but what's not to cherish about the sight of Franklin Pangborn co-starring with Clyde Cook or the very idea of Billy Bevan working sans mustache at The Lot of Fun while the soundtrack plays that glorious Roy Shield music? Just seeing Del Lord's name on a Hal Roach comedy is enough to bend the brain! While the series undeniably has its low points, it's certainly nothing to be ashamed of. And it ain't no disaster!

How it all came about is still a mystery I'd love to uncover. It has long been suggested that the central purpose of the series was to duplicate the success of Laurel and Hardy with Gilbert and Blue, but it seems to me that The Taxi Boys began foremost as a large-scale experiment to develop a new brand of Hal Roach comedy, and something of a works program for recently-canned Sennett vets. That it ultimately became a Ben Blue and Billy Gilbert showcase appears to have been a result of Ben's popularity and the fact that Roach saw an opportunity to groom perpetual supporting player Billy for stardom. While it was obviously in the minds of the writers early on to develop Blue and Gilbert as proper comedy team (as opposed to Cook and Pangborn or Cook and Bevan or Gilbert and Cook), they didn't try to go so far as to actually turn them into Laurel and Hardy. Over the course of the series, Billy Gilbert goes through all of his stock characterizations in an effort to find one that would click; the stuttering oaf, the Dutch oaf, the bullying oaf, the Dutch stuttering oaf, the Dutch bullying sneezing oaf. Meanwhile, Ben Blue goes through varying shades of bizarre. His mannerisms are much more intense and strange in some shorts than in others. In a few, he's almost lucid, and in others he can barely even speak (or stop moving his arms). If Blue resembles Stan Laurel at all, it's due to his, to put it mildly, "otherworldiness".. but unlike Stan's innocent, silent comedy elf, Blue belongs firmly to the Depression-era breed of Broadway and nightclub extraterrestrials whose outsized, impossible personalities were very much in vogue. Also quite unlike Laurel and Hardy, Gilbert and Blue, hams to the bone, consistently perform past each other rather than off each other, and as the series never slows down long enough to develop their team dynamic, it's small wonder their partnership never quite gels (although it comes damn close at times). In any case, I'd be hard-pressed to call the series a "disaster" on any level. Certainly, if The Taxi Boys had been produced by Mack Sennett, I imagine the shorts would be considered late classics from that studio... but as they're Roach shorts that bear only faintly the stamp of that studio, the Taxi Boys are criticized more for what they aren't rather than what they are. I likes 'em. So sue me.

Oh, Mr. Gallagher!

2008-02-27T06:37:00.000-08:00

Via WFMU's Antique Phonograph Music Program comes this recording of "Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Shean", sung by Ed and Al themselves. I've heard more than a few recordings of this song, including another from the team, but this one is completely new to me, and so are the (definitely of their time) lyrics!

A Visit To The Movie Comedy Museum

2008-02-21T17:55:00.000-08:00

by Paul F. Etcheverry

Want a mind-bending experience? Jumping out of airplanes? For amateurs. Trendy designer chemical amusement? Strictly for pikers. Try spending three days in the bizarro universe of prehistoric film comedy. I just willingly did this for the third year in a row, and trust me, my mind is bent. I wax only somewhat poetically in describing the Mid-Winter Comedy Festival that transpires annually during the Presidents' Day weekend at the Niles/Essanay Silent Film Museum, a wonderful and historic venue that shows silent movies every Saturday night. The museum's Edison Theatre served as the town nickelodeon way back in 1913, when "Broncho Billy" Anderson was cranking out westerns down the block. The festival has become the Northern California variant on the summer Slapsticon, as well as the ultimate meeting of “The Dead Comedians’ Society”. The program runs the gamut from the iconic (Chaplin, Keaton) to the amazingly obscure (Eddie Boland). While not the cup o’ tea for those who are only interested in well-known stuff that everyone likes, it's a bonanza for students of comedy. The festival tended to reinforce several conclusions on my part:

The Hal Roach Studio rules. Sorry, Mack Sennett. Sorry, Jack White.

No silent comedy short is more than one degree of separation from The Three Stooges, even if Bud Jamison or Vernon Dent does not appear in it.

Subtle acting seals the deal, even in slapstick. Watch how Laurel & Hardy, Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon, Lloyd Hamilton, Max Davidson and other skilled comedians get laughs with beautifully timed expressions before and after the joke.

If, well into the comedy short, you hear audience members asking who the star of the film is. . . it features one of the most forgotten of comics.

If a brazen fur-bearing scene stealer is way more memorable than the star (hey, dogs got a lot of work in silent movies), the featured comic is only known by historians.

Real lions and elephants are way funnier than CGI lions and elephants.

Since comedy, like romance, is highly subjective, don't take any review seriously, even by the most reputable writers. Watch the film instead!

Among the rarities screened:

The wonderful Charley Chase's last film, His Bridal Fright, in which Charley is ardently pursued by a bevy of international mail-order brides.

A silent feature starring two cinema legends: W.C. Fields - and a pre-G. W. Pabst but always fetching Louise Brooks!

Too Many Highballs, the fifth Mack Sennett comedy short designed specifically for the delightfully misanthropic Fields, only. . . he didn't star in the finished film. Lloyd Hamilton did - and it turned out to his last starring two-reel comedy. Fields and co-writer Clyde Bruckman would subsequently remake this, verbatim, in the 1935 Paramount feature The Man On The Flying Trapeze.

Breezing Along, a hilarious short starring the aforementioned "Ham" Hamilton, the courtly and world-weary sourpuss himself, as a beleaguered butler.

Two shorts starring over-the-top "fat comic" Hughie Mack, the Chris Farley of nearly a century ago.

An Elephant On His Hands, the frantic pilot film for a wacky comedy series, directed by the wackier Vin Moore. The stars? The 367 pound Mack, a wild-eyed Dot Farley and the comparatively sedate Selig Elephants. The series lasted two films.

One of Harry Langdon’s indescribably bizarre early talkies, The Head Guy, which reflects his uncanny ability to be brilliantly original, irritating, uniquely funny, fearless and wildly flailing within the same five minutes.

A slew of Hal Roach comedies representing the studio's lesser-known series (Eddie Boland, Snub Pollard, Max Davidson, Taxi Boys, Thelma Todd & Zasu Pitts), as well as the last Stan Laurel solo comedy.

Edward Everett Horton brings his original spin to the world of silent comedy, in Dad's Choice (1928), a very funny short along the lines of Harold Lloyd’s last ‘glasses character’ two-reelers (small wonder, it was produced by Lloyd’s Hollywood Productions for Paramount).

Both The Mid-Winter Comedy Festival and Slapsticon offer an off-kilter nirvana for film historians and third banana aficionados - and there were lots of them in the house for all three days of this event.

Lost Jewels

2008-02-20T17:30:00.000-08:00

by Geoff Collins

You can't always believe what you read in the papers - or even in books. This is from The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini by Ruth Brandon:

They arrived in London after a crossing during which Houdini was so seasick that Bess had to tie him to his bunk during the brief periods when she left him, for fear he would try to throw himself overboard.

The World's Greatest Escapologist!!! This remarkable man who could break free from manacles, prison cells and underwater torture chambers was immobilised when his wife tied him to the bed. Yeah, sure. Which brings us, by the World's Most Tenuous Link, to the following...

Lor lumme, Miry Poppins! All us Cockney geezers ennarf gettin' in a roight two-an'-eight abaaaht this new book wot James Maguire's wrote abaaaaaht Ed Sullivan. Impre-bleedin'-sario or summink, Oi fink it's called. Gorrr bloimey, it's made me feel so tom-an'dick Oi've gorn roight orft me singin' an' darncin', so Oi 'ave. An' anuvver fing...

That's about enough of that, I think. More on the subject of comical Cockneys later. But for now, let me state that Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (published by Billboard Books) is a superb job, meticulously researched and highly entertaining in its evocation of Sullivan's career and the twenty-three-year run of his really big big show. Naturally, there are those annoying, niggling little errors; for example, the photo on page 73 is printed the wrong way around - or did tough-guy Ed sometimes wear women's jackets? You could almost excuse Mr. Maguire for misspelling the name of Frank Shuster, as Wayne and Shuster are comparatively if undeservedly obscure (I say "undeservedly" because of their scholarly "affectionate look" 1960s television documentaries on Benny, Hope and Crosby, Bill Fields, the Marxes and the Universal monsters) but Fredric March? And Bud Abbott? A & C are American icons despite the variable quality of their vast output - but it's worth buying this book just for the account of the man in Long Island who watched Bud and Lou on The Colgate Comedy Hour and then shot his television set. Give that man a medal!

Fortunately Mr. Maguire didn't mention Jimmy Jewel and Ben Warriss. Nobody, even in their native country, spells their names correctly, not even Columbia Pictures (in the credit sequence of their 1943 movie Rhythm Serenade) or the dedicated but often sloppy Northern Comedy website www.itsahotun.com. The gang at itsahotun want to pretend that Rhythm Serenade doesn't exist, but it does, and I've seen it. Don't be jealous, readers; it might contain a Jewel but it's no gem. Jimmy (would-be comical idiot) and Ben (pop-eyed straight-man, perversely funnier-looking than Jimmy) devote their few scenes as "comic relief" to Northern-accented rip-offs of Abbott and Costello material, including a near-verbatim rendering of the Mustard routine. Even when Jimmy and Ben starred in their groan-inducing pair of Mancunian cheapies in '49 and '50 they were still at it. Here's their take on "Pack and Unpack", from Stick 'Em Up, which is a truncated reissue of Let's Have a Murder:

Stick 'Em Up (which is almost what Jewel and Warriss should have told their writers to do with their scripts) is a 1959 reissue, a 97-minute feature cut down to under fifty minutes; so to enable the audience to follow the plot - as if they'd want to - many of the comedy scenes had to go. And they've gone forever, as there's only one surviving print. (What a Carry On has even more plot and even less comedy, in a really battered old copy.) Here are Jimmy and Ben in action again, in a brief routine that's slightly more original despite its resemblance to "Jonah and the Whale" and Jimmy's obvious wish to be the English Lou Costello. How many times did these boys watch One Night in the Tropics?

Do these Third Banana clips constitute America's first-ever glimpse of Jewel and Warriss? No; for they appeared on the Ed Sullivan show during its early Toast of the Town period, episode #5.9, November 4, 1951. I wonder what American audiences made of this road-show Bud-&-Lou with their weak comedy and their strong regional accents. (In an incredible example of British comedic diversity, Michael Bentine was also a guest on that same programme, and his autobiography hints at the fact that they, like himself, had a tough time.) Maybe America thought they were Cockneys. Unlikely? Here's another quote, this time from James Maguire's Sullivan book, describing the Beatles' second appearance on the show:

To end their set, Paul said hello in his charming cockney accent and promoted the band's new album, then sang lead vocal on the up-tempo "All My Loving" with sweet harmonies by John and George.

Charming cockney accent? The Beatles are from Liverpool, two hundred miles north of London. To be a genuine Cockney you must be "born within the sound of Bow Bells" which narrows it down a bit and even excludes Charlie Chaplin, unless there was a particularly strong north wind blowing that day. The four Sullivan shows featuring the Beatles are all generally available on DVD in their entirety, and for Third Banana fans their interest lies not especially in the Fab Four, but in the other acts on the bill. Ed's show was a television version of vaudeville, the latest trends rubbing shoulders, not always too comfortably, with the most ancient acts in the business. As an Englishman - and 150 miles more of a Cockney than Paul McCartney - it pleases me greatly to know that the complete archive of a thousand Sullivan shows in the Library of Congress includes performances by vent Arthur Worsley (a classic turn; he looked glum and "said nothing" while the dummy subjected him to a tirade of abuse), Charlie Drake, Norman Wisdom, Tommy Cooper, Morecambe and Wise, and - bless 'em - Jewel and Warriss, as well as the American legends such as Eddie Cantor and Smith and Dale.

Speaking of legends - and until I can prove it, we'll bypass the one about Ed introducing Jimmy and Ben as "Jewel and his Walrus" - urban mythology insists that the artists who shared Sullivan's stage with the Beatles didn't do too well due to the impatient intolerance of screaming teenagers, but this isn't generally the case. Morecambe and Wise (not announced as Morrow, Camby and Wise, after which Ed reportedly looked around to see where Camby was) are far from their best, but this was before their new scriptwriter Eddie Braben transformed Ernie Wise from the dullish straightman to "a real person", the pompous "trendy playwright" who's actually mundane, conventional and dimmer than Eric. And the Beatle-obsessed audiences are quite kind to veteran Welsh powerhouse Tessie O'Shea and sly old charmer Myron Cohen and his Jewish shaggy-dog stories. The incident in Mr. Saturday Night in which Billy Crystal's character gets booed offstage seems to be based on the experience of McCall and Brill. They get away with it but their terror is there for all to see, like two rabbits caught in the headlights. They were so traumatised that they ran off to Florida and didn't work again for many months.

In my country, far too much early television has been wiped or dumped due to lack of foresight or inadequate storage facilities, so it's reassuring to know that many acts still exist in the Sullivan archive. All we have of Jewel and Warriss' thirty-year career are three inept movies, two of which only exist by accident in shabby chopped-up reissues. A 1951 New York clip with a live audience must surely reveal a lot more about this forgotten duo. My advice is: watch any Sullivan shows you can. You're bound to see something rare and surprising. And especially, read James Maguire's book. It's really really good.

Poodles!

2008-02-06T07:49:00.000-08:00

Kit Parker Film's Weiss-O-Rama has to be about the most Third Banana-y DVD set I've ever purchased; a collection of late-era silent comedy shorts from the low-budget Weiss Brothers' studio starring Ben Turpin (his last series), Snub Pollard (likewise), Jimmy Aubrey, Bud Duncan, circus clown Poodles Hanneford, and others. Three of the Hairbreadth Harry shorts are also included, letter-perfect adaptations of C. W. Kahles' wonderful comic strip, although, sadly, little is made on the DVD of the series' funny page origins. Of particular interest to me are Poodles Hanneford's comedies. Poodles was primarily famous for his uncanny equestrian act and holds a Guinness record to this day for for performing a running leap onto a galloping horse, and then stepping off, twenty-six times in quick succession. Each of the DVD's three Hanneford shorts include at least a few of Poodles' circus routines, most notably Circus Daze (1928) which features much of his equestrian act, albeit modestly (and unnecessarily) tricked-up. The severely disjointed Fare Enough (1928) stars Poodles in a much more traditional vein as an inventive Keatonesque underdog (and is that an uncredited Arthur Housman as one of the drunks?). While not possessing any great depth of character as a film comic, he's certainly engaging and, frankly, a more impressive and promising all-round talent than more famous names like Ben Turpin and Snub Pollard!

The Mancunian Candidate

2008-01-26T12:42:00.000-08:00

by Geoff Collins

Can you handle any more of Randle? To illustrate my previous article on the wily Lancastrian comedian Frank Randle, our own wily Texan blogmeister Aaron managed to unearth a couple of appropriate clips. Now we're pleased to announce that he has the whole of It's a Grand Life to play with. This 1953 epic is of epic length - nearly two hours - and it was Randle's last film, the one which reveals him as a man on the brink, just before he allowed his personal demons to ruin his career and his life. For as we have discussed before, Randle's comic persona of barely coherent insolence was fuelled by real-life psychosis, depression and alcoholism. On a good day, he could be generous and kind; at other times he made Lou Costello look like Little Bo Peep.

Most of Randle's pictures were made by Mancunian, a provincial unit specializing in cheap comedies for Northern audiences. They're overlong, dreary and unbelievably inept as examples of film-making, and many only survive in heavily-cut reissue versions, which, perversely, sharpens them up and improves their quality as movies. The advantage of producer/director John Blakeley's "put it in front of a camera and shoot it" method is that we're left with a lot of long, uninterrupted comedy routines. Good!

You may recall that I attempted (!) to transcribe one of Randle's routines from this film, the sequence in which he's being forced to explain why he allowed the deserter Barnes to escape. What his superior officers fail to realize is that you don't force Frank Randle to do anything, any more than you would attempt to do so with Frank Sinatra. While remaining outwardly subservient and apologetic - after all, he IS getting an almighty telling-off - Randle shows these mundane inhabitants of Planet Army that it doesn't bother him one little bit. Like Jeff Nuttall in King Twist, I didn't manage to transcribe this scene with full accuracy and missed the brief gallstones-slop stones gag, which seems to have been a favorite: Duggie Wakefield uses it in The Penny Pool. Anyway, for the benefit of America and anyone else reading and watching, this is Frank Randle at full speed.

A bit later in the movie there's another scene which I found impossible to transcribe due to all the overlapping dialogue, although I suspect every last syllable was worked out in advance. You may be familiar with the films of Will Hay (check out our archive): incompetent blowhard Hay failing to maintain any kind of order while constantly bickering with disrespectful teenage chubster Graham Moffatt and crafty codger Moore Marriott. This scene from It's a Grand Life brings the concept to a new level - and you must decide for yourself whether the level is higher or lower. It's well documented that John E. Blakeley disparagingly dismissed any kind of witty dialogue as "London comedy"; he personally preferred slapstick, or anything that involved people falling over. In this provincial variation on the Hay-Moffatt-Marriott setup, Randle, although absolutely basic as a human being, is still sharp enough to rob the gullible rookie twice.

One of the most beloved of all comedy situations on both sides of the Atlantic in the forties and fifties was the Drill Routine. Abbott and Costello performed it beautifully in Buck Privates, Jewel and Warriss copied it very badly in What a Carry On (Mancunian, 1949) and there's a peculiar early version in which soppy Jack Haley mysteriously attempts to behave like one of the Bowery Boys (Saltwater Daffy, Vitaphone 1933; don't fret, readers, we'll get to it). Any number of comedians have portrayed the hapless new recruit at the mercy of a bullying drill sergeant; Randle's variation was to make his character anarchic and disruptive while apparently attempting to be helpful. All Sergeant Michael Brennan can do is stand back and let it all happen. Technical query: after Randle belches and complains of "a touch of wind", does he fart as well? Or is that (a) a buzz on the sound track or (b) wishful thinking on my part?

And finally, Impersonating an Officer, in which Randle delivers a long lecture while managing to explain absolutely nothing at all and trying to interest the gorgeous Diana Dors in his bazooka. I don't blame him. You'll notice that the "romantic lead", for possibly the only time in a Mancunian film, isn't a complete wimp and gets quite energetically involved in the comedy. Bravo John Blythe!

We've attempted to pick the best scenes from It's a Grand Life - which is a far from perfect movie - in order to give you a flavour of what this erratic and willful comedian was all about. Love him or loathe him, Frank Randle was unique. He played his part in extending the bounds of comedy - and also, very likely, the bounds of good taste. Enjoy these glimpses of the disgraceful old rascal at his very best.

Dead Old Comedians

2008-01-13T19:29:00.001-08:00

by Geoff Collins

The dreaded IRS strikes again! Fear not - this has nothing to do with taxation. I refer to Insufficient Research Syndrome, that embarrassing condition that banishes even the most diligent writers and researchers to Outer Gaffe-Land, due to their reliance on previously-published misinformation. In an article on the deliciously perverse Houston Sisters (see our Archive) I stated that Billie died in 1955, purely because I trusted an earlier researcher. It turns out that the poor lady lingered on, in poor health, for another eighteen years, so 1973 would be a more likely date, based on page 156 of Don't Fence Me In, by Renee Houston (Pan Books, 1974). But don't quote me!

Speaking of quotes, this is from Tom Hickman's excellent book about BBC radio during World War Two, What Did you Do in the War, Auntie? (BBC Books, 1995), page 54:

"Wartime broadcasting revived the careers of a number of fading troopers like Marie Lloyd, Little Titch [sic] and Dan Leno."

Wow! They must have needed some reviving. By mid-WW2 Tich had been dead for about fifteen years, Marie for twenty and Dan for forty. At least he's right about the "fading". I sent an e-mail to Mr. Hickman along the above lines but received no reply. Hopefully by now he's not in need of the same kind of reviving.

Here's my guess at what happened: in the course of his research Mr. Hickman must have waded through endless copies of Radio Times. He probably found details of one of Leslie Baily's Scrapbook programmes and didn't realise that the list of historic names were on old records instead of the real thing. It's true that some of the old music hall stars did get a brief shot at a comeback, notably the ebullient Cockney singing comedian Harry Champion (1865-1942; dates double-checked!) All movie clips of Mr. Champion seem to have been lost. He's nowhere to be found on www.britishpathe.com, and the portions of his act that he filmed for British Lion seem to have vanished along with most 'thirties British Lion material. (Readers, now's your chance to prove me wrong again - and while you're at it, find Sandy Powell's feature films!) At least Mr. Champion made around a hundred and sixty recordings, all of which capture his breathless energy as he rattles off songs about food and drink. One of my favourite quotes of all time comes from Kindly Leave the Stage! by Roger Wilmut (Methuen, 1985), page 139, and it gives us a flavour of what's been lost by the absence of film of Harry Champion. This is acrobat Bob Konyot describing Harry's appearance at the Shepherd's Bush Empire in the early part of the war:

"Gracie Fields was supposed to get £500 a week - she was the highest paid star; our springboard act was getting around £75 a week; and some of these old-timers like Harry Champion were lucky if they could pick up £40. I went down to see his act; they played his signature tune - and no Harry Champion. They played it a second time - no Harry Champion. They played it a third time - still no Harry Champion; the boss of the show said, "All these old-timers do that, to create an atmosphere before they go on." And it was true that Harry Champion went on that stage - and Whoomph! - you know, that man couldn't sing, that man couldn't dance, he looked like a cabbie and he danced like Donald Duck... he couldn't do nothing; but he had the audience in the palm of his hand, and they loved him every minute of his act. He didn't do anything, but he was one of the greatest performers I've ever seen."

For an idea of Harry in action, his 1940 record of Any Old Iron can be heard on www.britishmusichallcds.com.

Sorry, readers, no bells and whistles this time. The recently-recovered clip of Dan Leno - "An Obstinate Cork" - in the form of a Kinora flip-book, has yet to be issued to the public. (Why??? By "recently", I'm talking about seventeen years) Two of Dan's records can be enjoyed on rfwilmut.clara.net, and there's a fascinating and thorough biography on billgreenwell.com. The glorious Marie Lloyd is sadly under-represented by nineteen scratchy 78s and a short silent clip of about 1920 (from the Topical Budget newsreel?) in which she looks frankly decrepit, totally worn-out at fifty. Little Tich's thirty 78s are mostly thudders. Unlike his contemporary Dan Leno, he comes across as self-conscious and a bit smug; but his immortal Big Boots dance was filmed twice, the most easily-accessible version being on www.britishpathe.com (clip number 2845.04). The 1900 version Little Tich et ses Big Boots, filmed in Paris by the photographer Clement Maurice, has been cited by Jacques Tati as "a foundation for everything that has been realised in comedy on the screen". Praise indeed!

(In case any Will Hay fans are reading this, the Big Boots dance in Those Were the Days is performed by Sammy Curtis. He's a bit too tall but at least he was still alive!)

By now you may be wondering "what's the purpose of all this?" but to elaborate on Tati's point, all styles of comedy have to start somewhere. It's all about influence: in the baggy-trousered grace of Little Tich we can see Charlie Chaplin; Harry Champion's chirpy optimism is discernible in Tommy Trinder and that spectacular peacock Max Miller; Marie Lloyd has been portrayed with consummate ease by Barbara Windsor and, most recently, Jessie Wallace; and Dan Leno's plaintive London-Irish surrealist patter, decades ahead of its time, is a direct forerunner of the grotesquerie of Max Wall and the Goonery of Spike Milligan. I'd happily trade any number of 1940s Columbias by Certain Psychopaths Who Shall Remain Brainless, for more - or indeed any - film clips of Leno, Marie Lloyd, Tich or Harry Champion, or the other early stars who departed too early or left us too little. But even if their work only exists in rare bits and pieces, let's enjoy what we have.

Elf Esteem

2007-12-23T21:19:00.000-08:00

Just in time for Christmas Eve Eve, a very special Christmas Biffle and Shooster short; Elf Esteem by Nick Santa Maria... in glorious VitroColor! Enjoy!

Click!

Merry Christmas from The Third Banana

2007-12-19T07:07:00.000-08:00

Five vintage trailers for Christmas-themed childrens' movies: Santa Claus (1959), The Magic Christmas Tree (1964), Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964), The Christmas That Almost Wasn't (1966), and Santa's Magic Fountain (aka The Magic Fountain) (1961).

Bizarre yet perfunctory, The Magic Christmas Tree was shot in New York (Oswego?) for the then-booming kiddie matinée circuit, where standards didn't matter. In this clip, Mark, the least imaginative and most self-limiting child in the history of the universe, is given the powers of a god by a bitchy magical Christmas tree and immediately uses his limitless gift to make people chase after their own runaway vehicles and throw pies at one another. Ho ho! Ha ha! Hee hee! The very definition of "Funtastic".

Imagine yourself, 9 years old, dropped off at the Cinema Theater in the Vineland shopping center to watch something called Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny while your mother goes hunting for last-minute Christmas items. The poster you saw in the lobby depicted Santa and a huge rabbit riding around in a vintage fire truck, but it has now been well over an hour and you've had to endure endless shots of a skinny, sweat-stained Santa, sitting in a sleigh, muttering about the heat in Florida as well as a wrenchingly boring movie about Thumbelina that was sprung on you from out of nowhere and you have yet to see any sign of this so-called Ice Cream Bunny. Anticipation builds. Against your better judgment, you force yourself to believe that there must be something truly awe-inspiring about the Ice Cream Bunny's ultimate appearance. At this stage, nothing less than a titanic rabbit GOD dispensing gallon after gallon of soft serve ice cream from a fire hose would justify the tedium you've endured. And then...

This! THIS!!!! This winking, prancing, wrinkly freak! This saggy refugee from a costume shop bargain bin! THIS is your precious ICE CREAM BUNNY!!!! And not a single trace of ice cream!!! You've been DUPED!!!! USED!! And if you hadn't fully realized it before, you certainly do now; adults can and will do terrible things to unsuspecting kids.. and you will never, ever forget it.

Have some more saccharine with that sugar as you watch A Present for Santa Claus, a 1947 home movie produced by Official Films. Ann and Dickie thoughtfully leave their hot chocolate out for Santa and he therefore gives them everything on their Christmas lists, including a comatose puppy. If I were a parent on a tight budget in 1947, wouldn't I be on the spot after screening this for my kids.

The Opera-tives

2007-12-14T06:40:00.000-08:00

Just in time for Friday the 14th, another brand-new vintage Biffle and Shooster comedy written by Nick Santa Maria. Enjoy!

click?

The Gazeeka Box!

2007-12-09T19:55:00.000-08:00

Perhaps you've already noticed the obtrusive white widget midway down the sidebar but, if not, let me introduce the Third Banana's "Gazeeka Box", a new feature that will allow us to more easily share music and OTR with you. All of the files listed therein can be downloaded to your desktop (click the blue arrow on each file listing) or can be played through the widget itself. As a Yuletide gift to you, the box is currently full of holiday-themed goodies from Jerry Lewis, Abbott and Costello, Ed and Keenan Wynn (and many others on the Blue Network Christmas special), Phil Harris and Alice Faye, Jack Benny, Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, Eddie Cantor, The Three Stooges, as well as a few ancient 78s. Enjoy!

Springtime For Duggie

2007-12-03T08:10:00.000-08:00

by Geoff Collins

Oh to be in England. A while ago (January 2006; check out our Archive) we lamented the scarcity of information on Duggie Wakefield and the apparent unavailability of any of his films, despite the fact that the intrepid little Yorkshireman had made the trip to Hollywood in 1933 and worked briefly for Hal Roach, no less. Now, at last, at long last, one of Duggie's movies, The Penny Pool, has been released on DVD in Great Britain by Odeon Entertainment - and it's a beauty.

.... unlike Duggie, bless his little cloth cap. Having finally studied him in action I have to say he's one of the oddest-looking comedians I've ever seen, and, I'm pleased to announce, one of the greatest. Duggie Wakefield - almost always billed as Douglas - is the physical and comedic missing link between George Formby and Frank Randle. At face value he's a gormless, snub-nosed twerp with a penchant for invading the space of his superiors by fixing them with a close-range open-mouthed stare from slightly below eye-level, like a Cocker Spaniel waiting for the stick to be thrown. But Duggie's gormlessness is by choice; there's a manipulative, disruptive force at work. He's all things to all men. With his betters he can assume a Wisdom-like helplessness, but this apparent vulnerability is an act, purely for his own benefit; he's actually subversive, gleefully messing up the system from the inside. He's adept at sarcastic one-liners, and he's not averse to slapping his stooges around.

Stooges? Yes, readers, it gets better. The best news ever: Duggie Wakefield works with stooges. The most effective member of Duggie's "Gang", apart from our hero himself, of course, is chubby little Billy Nelson. Billy is "Curly" to Duggie's "Healy" and receives most of the slaps; he also appears to have been the closest to Duggie as he accompanied him to Hollywood. Photos reproduced in our earlier article show him with the American version of Duggie's Gang (the All-Star Trio) and on the set of Sons of the Desert (although he's not actually in the movie - and I had to sit through it again just to make sure. Not a problem!) Billy's an appealing little knockabout Second Banana.

As for Duggie's other stooges: Chuck O'Neil is a tall, skinny, quiet bowler-hatted oaf with glasses; and little Jack Butler is almost the invisible man, not memorable at all apart from the awful foghorny voice he produces when the Gang do their turn as singing waiters.

More good news: The Penny Pool has its own little gang of self-contained funny routines, most of them gems of knockabout and verbal comedy. If there is any bad news, it's this: the film was made by cheapo Northern unit Mancunian and it's their usual meandering mixed bag of romantic sub-plot and comedy scenes. You could almost call it A Day At the Factory, as the running time is filled out with some of the worst variety acts I've ever encountered. The worst. As you listen to the ungodly fart-like cacophony that is Macari and His Dutch Serenaders, you ask yourself: how did these people make a living? Did audiences at some point think this was good? It's all accordions and patchy baggy pants and whistling and, ohhh God, yodelling. Please don't ask me to elaborate further. And yes, there are some awful singers too. Yet, after some barely-endurable musical horror, Duggie and the Gang get the film back on track with a piece of inspired comedy - and miraculously, it all works, almost like a 1930s Max Bialystock production that's deliberately bad but ultimately a triumph because it's hugely enjoyable in all the wrong ways.

In the earlier article we also commented on the lack of biographical information about Duggie. This situation hasn't changed much, but by trawling Google and specifically itsahotun.com, we can ascertain that he was born on August 28, 1899 and died on April 14, 1951. Far too young, Duggie. What happened? And indeed, what was he doing after about 1940? So far the trail is still cold. His other Mancunian, Calling All Crooks, is a Lost Film (a big fire in 1960 wiped out most of the studio's archive) but as we've mentioned he's in at least four 1933-34 Roach two-reelers, and, no doubt partly due to the fact that he married Gracie Fields' sister, he's quite prominent in two of Gracie's pictures, This Week of Grace and Look Up and Laugh. This latter film is one I'd love to see, even though Gracie herself gives me the shivers; apart from an early ingenue role for Vivien Leigh it's packed with great music-hall stars like Harry Tate, Robb Wilton, and Gracie's brother Tommy Fields. May I use the word nepotism at this point? Gracie, Tommy, Duggie and Billy perform a quartet in the movie that was considered worthy of issue on a commercial 78 record: "Anna From Annacapresi". Readers: find us a copy!

Back to the good news: Tommy Fields is the "romantic lead" in The Penny Pool and he's not bad at all. Commendably he plays it fairly straight but with a twinkle. Tall, slim and good-looking, he's like the Northern cousin of Richard "Stinker" Murdoch - and actually the resemblance is quite striking. He has the same rapport with Duggie that Stinker has with Arthur Askey, a mix of superiority and affection. After all, Duggie was his brother-in-law. What was that word again? Nepotism?

Duggie's first appearance in The Penny Pool is startling. In a faithful re-creation of their "New Garage" stage sketch, as featured in the 1931 Royal Variety Performance, Duggie's Gang are loafing about in the garage forecourt, reading the sports pages and hoping that no work will come their way. Duggie's in the office and Billy calls him: "Duggie! Duggie! Come 'ere!" First shock: a close-up of Duggie's smiling face at the office window, like Chaney's Phantom in a cloth cap and overalls. Second shock: his smile changes to a frown as he says to Billy "Stand up!" Billy obeys and gets a resounding slap from Duggie: "Mister Duggie to you! [and addressing the others] And you. And you!" So much for audience sympathy! Ted Healy would have been proud of him - or furious if he'd written all this first.

The Gang go on to discuss their football pools and then treat an increasingly irascible elderly customer to a studied display of ignorance and indifference. Then Duggie, tiring of his "victim" role, turns it around. "Pardon me sir - have you read the notice?" Close-up of big sign: POSITIVELY NO-SMOKING [sic]. The old gent, suddenly humbled, says "Sorry" and throws his cigarette-end on the floor. All four of the Gang leap on it and Duggie gets it. "Huh - I should say so!" he mutters - after all, he's their "leader" - then he says to the old boy "Have you a match?" The old geezer provides a match and lights his own discarded dog-end, which Duggie nonchalently smokes as he carries on with the conversation. It's a perfect example of Duggie's irreverent persona, insolent total awareness and control disguised as cheerful innocence. As the sketch progresses, Billy pipes up with some advice: "Yer big end's gone!" only to receive another wallop from Duggie: "So will yours if yer don't shut up!" Sounds familiar? Will Hay and Moore Marriott: one fool in charge of another.

Other sketches in the film involve the boys performing horribly yet hilariously as singing waiters, undergoing an army medical that develops into a mock-ballet, and playing in a brass band, a messy slapstick routine culminating in Duggie singing with great panache: "What Lancashire thinks today, all England thinks tomorrow!!!" A local worthy congratulates him: "Champion! Which part of Lancashire do you come from?" to which Duggie replies with beaming menace: "Yorkshire!" Some of our rarer Third Bananas have been fortunate enough to display their full range within the framework of just one movie: Soup To Nuts, Follow the Leader, Rain Or Shine, Whoopee. To this impressive list we can now add a modest little British effort: The Penny Pool. Find it!

Trivia Point No. 1: the Comedy Notes Booklet for The Penny Pool DVD was written by Professor C. P. Lee of www.itsahotun. He insists that the man on the trampoline during the "Keep Fit" number is "a young Frank Randle making his filmic debut". While we respect Professor Lee, his superb website, his devotion to Randle (quite justified) and his efforts in putting these fascinating films back into circulation, I'm afraid it's a case of wishful thinking, because (a) by early 1937 Randle was a big star, on tour in his own show, so why would he come all the way down south to little Highbury Studios for a bit part? and (b) the man on the trampoline doesn't look anything like Frank Randle. I'm guilty of this sort of thing too, "wishing" Dan Leno into The Big Swallow; but the truth must be faced. That wasn't Dan and this isn't Frank!

Trivia Point No. 2: there's a bonus film on the DVD; and it's the recently-recovered, chopped-up, retitled (Stick 'Em Up) reissue version of Let's Have a Murder, starring Jimmy Jewel and Ben Warriss. It stinks and so do they. Historical interest only.

Clearly the intention of Mancunian boss John E Blakeley was to build Duggie into another George Formby. Blakeley had produced George's first two movies but then lost him to Basil Dean at Ealing Studios. History repeated itself; having proved his worth in his two Mancunian quickies, Duggie went on to play his only starring role in a mainstream feature film: Spy For a Day, directed by Mario Zampi. Rumour has it that this is a slick and very funny movie, but it was another dead-end for Duggie. While World War Two audiences were devouring silly knockabout comedy - including the three ageing double-acts who constituted the Crazy Gang - Duggie's movie career just stopped. And why didn't he make the most of his time in Hollywood? Billy Nelson went back a few years later and stayed. I suspect there were family reasons for Duggie's return home - he was probably just happier in England - but in "comedy legend" terms, it's a pity. Having seen just one of his movies, I'd quite easily place him in the Third Banana all-time Top Ten. He really is that good.

The Penny Pool (1937), excerpt one

The Penny Pool, excerpt two

Return to Buggleskelly

2007-11-28T07:31:00.000-08:00

Somewhat vaguely not quite entirely in the spirit of John Bengston's Silent Echoes is this little micro-documentary from Jan Manthey and Vic Pratt in which they visit the site of the railway station used in Will Hay's Oh, Mr. Porter! (1937). "What more could you do with your life than this?"

Duck Soup: Take One

2007-11-20T05:42:00.000-08:00

by Kevin Kusinitz

Aaron’s recent posting of the early Duck Soup advertisement is a necessary reminder that great works go through many phases before their completion. An even better example – if I may modestly say – is one I’ve had in my possession since purchasing it at auction for $25 many years ago: an original copy of Bert Kalmar & Harry Ruby’s first treatment of Duck Soup. Running 27, double-spaced typed pages, it features the same framework of the movie we all know, while containing several wildly different details.

Let’s start with the cover. The typewritten title, in caps, reads FIRE CRACKERS. That’s been crossed out, replaced by the handwritten Cracked Ice. Above this, in turn, is its handwritten replacement Duck Soup, underlined in red. It seems Kalmar & Ruby themselves were unsure of the title while they were writing it, for Cracked Ice is typed inside on the first title page. But turn to the character page and we’re back to Firecrackers (now one word), which someone has crossed out and re-written as Cracked Ice. Turn to yet another title page and we see Fire Crackers (now two words again). They say when a movie goes through several title changes it’s in trouble. What if the title goes through different spellings as well?

And it’s not just the title that was different, either. Groucho was, as presented on the title page, Rufus T. Firestone; Harpo was Skippy; and Zeppo was Bob Firestone (son of Rufus). Only Chico’s Chicolini remained unchanged. Ambassador Trentino of Sylvania here is Ambassador Felix Frankenstein of Amnesia. And while Gloria Teasdale is the same, Vera Marcal was originally Gloria’s niece, June Parker. Throughout the treatment, the Marxes tend to be referred to by their “real” names rather than their characters (although, near the end, Zeppo’s suddenly becomes Bob Hemingway. I suspect by then Kalmar & Ruby were already deciding that the father/son relationship was going to change).

Speaking of Zeppo, his part appears to have been bigger than we see in the final release. His romance with June Parker plays a key part in this story, fueling Ambassador Frankenstein’s jealousy. In fact, the declaration of war hinges on June’s willingness to marry Frankenstein. Kalmar & Ruby write:

This develops into a burlesque melodramatic scene where Bob, in mock-heroics, says he will give up June for the love of his country. June refuses to be given up, and says she’d rather die than marry Frankenstein, and throws her arms around Bob.

It’s here – in the middle of the story, rather near the end – that the “Freedonia’s Going to War” number takes place. A brief dialogue exchange during the number:

ZEPPO: Father – if we win the war can I marry June Parker?

GROUCHO: Son – if we win the war we’ll all marry June Parker.

Another, greater loss was the elimination of yet another production number on the eve of war, honoring Groucho before he goes off to war:

This scene is done entirely to music from beginning to end, with dialogue in lyric form by Groucho and the guests.

In his book “Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo,” Joe Adamson featured the same lyrics provided in the treatment:

“Of course you’re all aware
A king must have an heir
A son who’ll pass the family name along
Will some one tell me where
I’ll ever get an heir
If the king can do no wrong…”

Like I said, Kalmar & Ruby were already forgetting the father/son business.

Chico’s still the peanut salesman-turned-secretary of war, although here he and Groucho decide to recruit women to spy on Amnesia. Harpo applies in drag, using balloons to pad his chest and rear. (Someone’s put an X next to the section where the balloons pop, perhaps to avoid incurring the wrath of the Hays office.) There’s no sign of Harpo’s battle with Edgar Kennedy’s lemonade salesman here, either. His running gag with Groucho involving the motorcycle is compressed into one early scene, with the twist coming several pages later. The tattoo with the barking dog here is an outhouse featuring an angry man:

His lips move, inaudibly swearing for being disturbed. (This is done in animated cartoons).

Groucho’s romance with Margaret Dumont contains different jokes:

They don’t come any better than you – well, they may come better they don’t come any bigger – and the bigger the better. The bigger the betta you got on a horse the more you lose. And speaking about horses, why don’t you marry me? Say yes and I’ll do everything within my power to get out of it. I’ll go away if it means your happiness.

Lines like that remind us that this was a first draft. (Pointing to cabinet members, Groucho tells Zeppo, “Get rid of these microbes, if you have to use violence.” You can almost hear the writers say to the production staff, “We’ll think of something else.”) An unfinished gag involves Harpo hanging a portrait of himself in June Parker’s bedroom. After he leaves,

June starts to remove her negligee, and is left in her silken undies. As she starts to remove those and her stockings – there is some trick business with the picture of Harpo. (This will have to be explained.)

I’ll say it does – like how did they expect to get away with this actress taking off her underwear?

The war climax is considerably longer here, involving gags that never made the final cut. (Groucho looking through binoculars and seeing a different sight each time – army warfare, navy warfare, a football game, soldiers in the time of King Arthur…) Harpo, riding in an enemy blimp, drops a hook onto Groucho’s headquarters and carries it away. This is followed by “an airplane stunt designed for comedy and thrills, with Groucho and Zeppo in one plane and Harpo and Chico in another.” When the planes crash, Groucho and Zeppo carry on a conversation as they fall to the ground: “Groucho wants to know what time the parachute is due to arrive, and complains that these things are never on time.” When they land at Mrs. Teasdale’s house, they discover that the war ended a month earlier.

Zeppo suggests a double wedding. Harpo and Chico land in the garden and the story will be concluded here among the four boys and the two women.

And that’s where it ends.

As I read the treatment, echoes of the Marxes earlier movies reverberated throughout. The father/son relationship from Horsefeathers. A Groucho/Zeppo letter dictation scene from Animal Crackers. Groucho/Chico double-talk from all their movies, probably going back to the dialogue cards from their silent movie Humor Risk. Groucho calling the fight scene like a radio announcer in Monkey Business is transferred here to Harpo racing his motorcycle around the palace. Even though many of these elements were dropped from the final draft, I have a feeling that audiences of the time still picked up on them by osmosis. And I believe it’s that sense of been-there done-that, rather than the political satire, that caused Duck Soup’s box-office loss. (One amateur Marx Bros. scholar figures that 40% of Duck Soup’s dialogue is lifted from Groucho and Chico’s radio show Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel. That would explain the “additional dialogue” credit to Nat Perrin and Arthur Sheekman. It would also explain a further sense of déjà vu on the audience’s part.)

I have no idea how the treatment – according to the notes, prepared for a staff meeting on Monday, December 5, 1932 – wound up at an auction at the Puck Building in New York over 60 years later. I’m just grateful that it did, and that the fellow bidding against me dropped out after I topped his $20 bid. Even without having it appraised, I think it’s the most valuable piece of memorabilia in my collection. I’m not necessarily referring to a dollar amount, but rather what it means to me as a Marx Brothers fan. The Fire Crackers/Firecrackers/Cracked Ice/Duck Soup treatment is akin to a complete master tape of the “Sgt. Pepper” demos. You can see how it evolved to greatness, but marvel at the work of everyone involved. Even Zeppo and Ringo.

Stuff and Nonsense, Part III

2007-11-09T21:53:00.000-08:00

Many thanks to reader Billie T. for sending along these beautiful high-res scans!

"The Four Horsemen of Mirth". This advance ad for Duck Soup from Paramount's 1932 exhibitors' yearbook hints at what the early drafts of the screenplay might have looked like. Poor Zeppo's role as Bob Firefly, President of the International Beauty Conference, was whittled away to practically nothing by the time the film was actually shot. Harpo's "Snoopy" was apparently the story's only spy. Note that Paramount considered the film's breathless barrage of gags a selling point in that it required multiple viewings for a patron to catch all of the lines. Irving Thalberg certainly didn't feel the same way and therefore vast chasms of silence follow the Boys' gags in the MGM pictures, presumably meticulously timed with stopwatches. BAH! The Paramounts are better.. period.

French poster for A Day at the Races (1936). Um, excuse me, but what the HELL is going on here?? Something unspeakably horrible, I suspect.

Beautiful one-sheet for Hips Hips Hooray! (1934). Only problem is that all of the women's faces are completely indistinguishable from one another. Is that supposed to be Thelma Todd or Dorothy Lee between Bert and Bob?

".. wanna shake your tree." Poster for Harry Langdon's first Sennett comedy, Picking Peaches (1924). Sennett's confidence in Langdon was apparently absolute.

The Terror-ific Second Annual Third Banana Halloween Anniversary Spooktacular Clip-O-Thon!

2007-10-31T13:01:00.000-07:00

Two years, 212 posts and counting, folks, and we ain't dead yet! Here are a few ghost-tastic ghoul-clips for your vampire-joyment. Boo!

Bela Lugosi performs the "Vampire Bat Illusion" with Shirley Patterson in this 1953 episode of You Asked For It. At the end, Bela references a couple of never-to-be projects: The Phantom Ghoul (in 3-D!) and a TV series, Dr. Acula ("Dracula?" asks host Art Baker. "Dracula??" replies Bela, shocked. "For heaven's sake no! Just.. Dr. Acula!").

Germán Valdés 'Tin-Tan' and his brother Manuel 'Loco' Valdés perform a spirited (ho ho!) number entitled "Un Sueño Es Solo Un Sueño" in Los Fantasmas burlones (1965). Antonio Espino 'Clavillazo' and Adalberto Martínez 'Resortes' watch from the audience. Mexicomics and in-camera effects galore! God, I love this film!

Sid Noel's Morgus the Magnificent was, in my opinion, the cleverest of the 50s-60s TV horror hosts (perhaps I should say is as Dr. Morgus is reportedly still in the game). As much as I like Ghoulardi and Zacherly, Dr. Momus Alexander Morgus tops them all thanks to Noel's wonderfully dry delivery, clever physical comedy, and his insistence on backing his character up with a performance philosophy. Based out of New Orleans, Dr. Morgus was the first horror host to star in his own regional feature, The Wacky World of Doctor Morgus, in 1962. In all, it's not a particularly good movie, but whenever the silly plot is shoved out of the way long enough for one of Dr. Morgus's lab-based set-pieces, it shines. Some of the best early-60s "sick" humor I've seen.

Atlanta TV horror host Bestoink Dooley (George Ellis) also starred in his own regional film, The Legend of Blood Mountain, in 1965. It's a jaw-dropper. Some of the boldest, most in-your-face padding in the history of film, bargain monster, awkward comedy sequences, and Groucho's girlfriend/secretary/live-in tormentor Erin Fleming in her first motion picture! It's much less a comedy than The Wacky World of Doctor Morgus, and not just because most of the comedy falls flat. They went for more scares than laughs and, unfortunately, failed to deliver either.

Here's a little stretch of padding I like to call... Bestoink Dooley Goes to Sleep!

Nighty-night! IF YOU DARE!!

Remembering Jack Benny

2007-10-25T05:40:00.000-07:00

by Paul F. Etcheverry

"I can't work fast - I have to wait for laughs." - Jack Benny

Hugely popular in his day, Jack Benny (1894-1974) seems under-rated and somewhat forgotten now, primarily because his comedy doesn't even show up on cable TV any more. So Jack Benny, for decades a king of show business, is, given the short-attention span of our current pop culture, soon on his way to becoming about as well-known as Joe Cook and Lloyd Hamilton.

To refresh those short-attention-span memories, here's a clip that demonstrates Jack's ability to get big laughs with a motion, stance or expression - or sometimes by doing nothing - with Groucho Marx on You Bet Your Life, from April 3, 1955.

The Jack Benny Program, which ran for 244 episodes, from 1950 through the 1964-65 season, has braved the test of time wear quite well. The best episodes are hilarious, the equal of the great silent and early talkie short comedies from Hal Roach and RKO.

By the time Benny's popular radio show hit television, his characterization - vain, self-obsessed, foppish, insecure and above all, cheap - was very well established. Among the carryovers from the radio shows are his wonderfully appalled reactions to the supporting comics, such true 'third bananas' as Frank Nelson.

The series differs from Benny's radio work or later TV specials in featuring some wonderful way-out sight gags, enhanced by Benny's reactions. In this sense, they recall later generations of comics - Ernie Kovacs, Peter Sellers - and such cartoonists as Tex Avery more than Benny's contemporaries.

Paramount among the way-out gags were the show's willingness to 'break the fourth wall' and toy with the pop culture images of Jack and his guest stars. While George Burns and Bob Hope also enjoyed revealing that it's all make believe and watched by an audience out there in movie/TV land, Jack and his writers break that fourth wall constantly. Some of the funniest shows in the series combine both elements, such as the November 5, 1961 episode where Raymond Burr, representing Jack as uber-lawyer Perry Mason, is both inarticulate and inept; Perry explains the gross discrepancy by snapping to Jack, 'my writers are better than yours!' The January 22, 1963 episode featuring Peter Lorre opens with Jack assuring all that Peter only plays a sicko onscreen, but is a nice guy off-screen. Peter subsequently sings 'I Want A Girl Just Like The Girl That Buried Dear Old Dad' and spends the rest of the show playing the bad guy - but all the while trying to appear normal - to the hilt.

An overdue reevaluation and revival can begin with Jack Benny's prolific TV/radio work and his witty performance in Ernst Lubitsch's To Be Or Not To Be.

Yoo-Hoo! It's Me!!

2007-10-11T11:37:00.000-07:00

Sure.. I like thoughtful, understated comedy as much as the next guy, but I reserve a special place in my heart for comics like Pinky Lee. Was there ever a harder working entertainer? He wasn't exactly clever, nor was he original, but he was completely genuine. Even the lisp was his own, albeit exaggerated for effect. He was a cyclone, more hyperkinetic than Jerry Lewis, yet still amazingly controlled thanks to loads of talent and decades of experience in burlesque. Kids loved him, adults reviled him. Milton Berle spitefully quipped at a star-studded dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria that "if a bomb hit this joint, Pinky Lee would be a big hit", an odd comment considering that Pinky was a big hit at the time, with kids, at least, and Pinky seemed quite content with that.

Pinky Lee's Circus Time, aka The Pinky Lee Show (1954)

The legend persists that Pinky's uncanny gusto finally caught up with him, resulting in an on-air stroke. Not true, of course, but his tireless show-must-go-on attitude did cause him to ignore a nasal drip that was gradually poisoning him. In 1955, as a result of the infection, Pinky collapsed on live TV during one of his songs, an unimaginably shocking sight for millions of his young fans. His schedule of six shows a week plus personal appearances couldn't have helped his condition much. As a result of his collapse and absence from the air as he recuperated, the story arose that Pinky had died. The networks apparently felt that he might as well have. In their books, Pinky had become a Grade A "risk". In 1957, NBC pressed Pinky into service as the host of The Gumby Show.. for a fraction of what he had been earning before (Pinky claimed a take-home pay of approximately $34 a week). It was a smaller, more intimate program, and Pinky reasonably scaled back his style, but only by degrees. In this final episode of The Gumby Show, Pinky plays the xylophone, sings, tap dances, and is still giving every bit of business 200%. A professional to the end.

And that was more or less the end for Pinky Lee on TV. In 1965, he starred in a weekday revival of The Pinky Lee Show on ABC, but the 7:30 AM timeslot doomed it to a short run. Pinky also complained that he had no creative control, although it must have been becoming increasingly difficult to determine exactly who he was trying to reach even if the show had been ideal. It was now a decade since his heyday. The curtain was coming down fast, not just on Pinky, but on the entire breed of performer that he exemplified. He had survived longer than most because he had taken refuge in children's television where his style could still be appreciated for what it was, but now even that was changing beyond recognition. I can barely imagine a still-popular Pinky Lee on TV in the latter-half of the 60s, doing stock gags about hippies and rock n' roll, but I'm just as sure that he'd have given it the same old 200% had he the opportunity. But when it was over, it was over.

22 minutes and 54 seconds of Tootsie Roll commercials from The Pinky Lee Show and Winchell-Mahoney Time.

Pinky Lee appeals to the least jaded part of me, the part that can still enjoy terrible puns and the sight of a man playing the xylophone while tap dancing. Say what you will about him and his over-the-top style, the guy was the real thing, something his postmodern progeny Paul "Pee-Wee" Reubens certainly wasn't (nothing against Paul Reubens, mind you. He wasn't Pee-Wee and it was the cognitive dissonance in the wake of the scandal that wrecked his career as a pseudo-children's entertainer). I find something deeply disturbing in the idea that a Pinky Lee couldn't survive a second on today's network or cable TV without adopting the requisite degree of pre-packaged, thoroughly dishonest cynicism that has become de rigueur even for children's entertainment. Have we really gone too far down the road? In an age where snark passes for wit and unthinking skeptical posturing has supplanted genuine critical thought, an entertainer as skilled, as driven, and as basic as Pinky Lee would be a breath of fresh air.. to me, anyway.