Tuesday, March 06, 2012
“It’ll get a terrific laugh…”
By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
Beginning in the 1930s and continuing well into the mid-'50s on radio (and for a number of years on television afterward), The Jack Benny Program was a “Sunday night at seven” institution for millions of American households. The titular star of the broadcast, a comedian who was practically unique in his insistence on making certain his writing staff received most of the credit for his success, revolutionized humor by, not putting too fine a point on it, becoming the godfather of the modern American situation comedy. His innovations included self-referentially setting the storyline of each week’s show amongst the background of preparing his broadcast, breaking “the fourth wall” and having his “gang” (the program’s supporting characters) get the lion’s share of the laughs poking fun at the star. Above all, Benny masterfully mined humor from pettiness, vanity and miserliness while simultaneous creating a lovable “everyman” that the listening audience couldn’t help but want to hold to its collective bosom.
Benny tried to duplicate his radio and TV success on the silver screen, and though he made a number of entertaining films, the comedian never really was satisfied with the end result. A lot of this had to do with that many of his movies, such as Love Thy Neighbor (1940), Buck Benny Rides Again (1940) and The Meanest Man in the World (1943), were little more than slight variations of the character he played on radio; Neighbor and Buck Benny in particular featuring many of the regulars from his show (Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, Don Wilson, Phil Harris, Dennis Day). On occasion, Jack would get the opportunity to flex his acting muscles in vehicles such as Charley’s Aunt (1941) and George Washington Slept Here (1942) so it shouldn’t be too surprising that Benny considered these movies among his favorites. But Jack — and many others, including myself — always felt his finest hour on film was in a production released to theaters 70 years ago on this date: Ernst Lubitsch’s black comedy classic To Be or Not to Be (1942).
On the eve of the German invasion of Poland in 1939, a Warsaw theater troupe headed up by “that great, great actor” Josef Tura (Benny) rehearses a new anti-Nazi play entitled Gestapo. The troupe’s producer, Dobosh (Charles Halton), is dissatisfied with what he’s watching, arguing that Bronski (Tom Dugan), the actor playing Adolf Hitler, simply ian't convincing as the Fuehrer. In an effort to prove his authenticity, Bronski steps outside to walk among the Warsaw population…and though he gets a few stunned and anxious stares, his cover is blown when a girl timidly asks for his (Bronski’s) autograph.
Later that evening, as the troupe performs Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Josef’s wife Maria (Carole Lombard) entertains a young Polish pilot named Stanislav Sobinski (Robert Stack) in her dressing room. Sobinski is very much in love with Maria, and has been signaled to pay her a nocturnal visit at the moment when husband Josef starts Hamlet’s famed “To be or not to be” soliloquy (naturally, Josef is dismayed when he spots the young airman leaving in the middle of his performance). Maria loves her husband very much but doesn’t dismiss having an innocent flirtation with Stanislav…an “affair” that ends with the news that Germany has invaded Poland and World War II is underway.
Under the thumb of Nazi terror, Warsaw has been reduced to rubble (the theater has been closed and the troupe thrown out of work due to a curfew and other restrictions) but a vibrant Polish underground is determined to throw off the yoke of their oppressors. In England, Sobinski and his fellow pilots spend an evening of singing and revelry in the company of a Polish resistance leader, Professor Alexander Siletsky (Stanley Ridges), who generously offers to get word to the pilots’ families. Stanislav tells Siletsky that while his own family is safely out of Poland, he would like the professor to deliver a message to Maria: “To be or not to be.” But he is troubled by the fact that Siletsky — who claims to be a lifelong resident of Warsaw — is unfamiliar with Maria Tura, and after the professor starts off for Poland, Sobinski relates the incident to his superiors (Halliwell Hobbes, Miles Mander). Both men, having realized that the information on the pilots’ families would be vital to the Nazis even if Siletsky weren’t a spy, instruct Sobinski to fly to Warsaw immediately and stop the professor.
Shot down over Warsaw, Stanislav sends Maria to rendezvous with his contact, a bookseller, while he recuperates after nearly being shot by Nazi soldiers. Josef returns home and finds the young pilot in his bed (and wearing his pajamas), is naturally curious as to what Stanislav is doing there. He receives a hurried (and incomplete) explanation from Maria, who arrives in time to tell the two men that she was picked up by Nazi soldiers and taken to Siletsky’s hotel. Siletsky arrived in Warsaw before Sobinski, and after having delivered the pilot’s message, approaches Maria about joining the Nazi cause. Despite being confused by the events, Josef realizes that he needs to stop Siletsky (by killing him) before the professor delivers the information to the Nazi command: he may be angry about being cuckolded, but he still ia a patriot at heart.
Maria returns to the professor’s hotel, where she pretends to seduce Siletsky…but they are interrupted by a member of the theater troupe (George Lynn) disguised as a Nazi officer. The faux officer informs Siletsky he has an appointment with the head of the Gestapo — who also is a fake: it’s Josef in disguise. His mission is to wrest the information on the Polish underground away from Siletsky and then dispose of him…but learns during the course of their conversation that the professor has a duplicate copy of the information in a trunk back at his hotel. Stanislav and the theater group frantically try to think of a plan to obtain that extra copy but before they can formulate anything Siletsky concludes that he’s been duped by Tura. In his escape attempt from the theater, he is killed by Sobinski.
Josef must now impersonate Siletsky — and returning to the hotel, he attempts to destroy the duplicate information but is interrupted by the arrival of another Nazi officer. Captain Schulz (Henry Victor), adjutant of the Gestapo head Tura impersonated earlier, takes Tura-as-Siletsky to Colonel Ehrhardt (Sig Ruman), the genuine article. Josef is able to do some fast thinking to avoid spilling any information (identifying men who already have been shot as resistance leaders), and during this conversation he learns that Hitler himself will be visiting Warsaw the next day.
The body of the real Professor Siletsky is found in the theater the next morning…which is unfortunate for Josef, as he still is continuing his impersonation. Arriving at Ehrhardt’s office, he is ushered into a room and asked to wait until Ehrhardt has finished an appointment with two other officers. Inside the room is the corpse of Siletsky, but Tura manages to shave off the dead man’s beard and attach a false one…thus making Ehrhardt and his men think the deceased professor actually was an impostor. But when several theater members, led by hammy actor Rawitch (Lionel Atwill) in disguise, burst in and blow Tura’s cover in order to spirit Josef away from his captors, Tura and company realize it will only be a matter of time before they are rounded up by the Germans.
To escape out of Poland, Josef and his actors concoct a diversion, with Bronski in the part of Hitler and his friend Greenberg (Felix Bressart) as a defiant Jew who interrupts the Fuehrer’s appearance at the theater; the theater company and Stanislav then steal the Nazis’ transportation and head for the airport, stopping off at Maria’s just in time to rescue her from the advances of an amorous Ehrhardt. Our heroes are successful in their flight from Warsaw and land safely in Scotland, where that evening, Josef and his fellow thespians put on a production of Hamlet…and all goes well until “To be or not to be…”
The director of To Be or Not to Be, Ernst Lubitsch, was admired and respected by his peers, critics and audiences both when he was making films and long after his death in 1948. Lubitsch specialized in urbane romantic comedies that reeked of elegance and sophistication with just a touch of the risqué (daring but never smutty) that artfully avoided any complications with the Motion Picture Code, and earned his directorial style the nickname “the Lubitsch touch.” Lubitsch didn’t take a writing credit on To Be (the honor goes to Edwin Justus Mayer, based on a story by Melchior Lengel) but he devised the character of Josef Tura with Jack in mind, joking that every comedian’s dream is “to play Hamlet.” Benny would later reminisce about the experience in saying he worked well with Lubitsch because the director told him to forget everything about acting (“which wasn’t too difficult,” he cracked) and just follow his lead as Ernst acted out every gesture and vocal inflection for Benny’s benefit. “He was a lousy actor, but a great director,” was Jack’s final verdict.
What’s wonderful about watching Benny play Tura is that both the character and Jack’s radio persona share some similarities: the vanity, the hamminess (whenever Jack would do a spoof of a current movie on his show he always made sure he got the largest role) and that lovable schlemiel that resides in a world where everything terrible seems to happen to him. And yet there are differences: Tura is way out of his league playing spy, but he’s able to screw up his courage and risk certain death to help Sobinski (the man playing around with his wife) stop a dangerous man who threatens the lives of the people of Warsaw. He’s ready to fight on behalf of his country, and demonstrates tremendous courage in doing so.
The part of Maria Tura was originally conceived as a comeback role for actress Miriam Hopkins — Hopkins had worked with Lubitsch before in the vehicles Trouble in Paradise (1932) and Design for Living (1933), and in the pre-production stages of To Be or Not to Be was anxious to let the director lift her career out of its slump. But Hopkins didn’t want to work with Benny, and so her departure attracted the interest of Carole Lombard…who, despite resistance from Lombard's husband, Clark Gable, wanted very much to work with Lubitsch (and she’d also get to work alongside Robert Stack, who had been a friend of hers for many years since he was a teenager). After completing the film, Lombard would later tell friends that it was the most satisfying experience of her career…and the proof is up on the screen. Her performance as Maria is positively luminous; she simultaneously gives the character both a playful and ethereal quality — a woman deeply in love with her husband and yet naughty enough to stray a little from the fold when opportunity presents itself. Benny had nothing but the utmost affection for his co-star, whom he really got to know during their time on the movie — he later told friends: “She was one of the few gals you could love as a woman, and treasure as a friend.”
Sustaining Benny and Lombard is an outstanding “troupe” of supporting performers that include Stack, Bressart, Atwill, Ridges, Ruman and Dugan — none of these amazing actors hit a false note in their portrayals, and deliver Lubitsch and Mayer’s sparkling dialogue to perfection. Critics at the time of To Be's release lambasted Lubitsch for allowing the heroes to be nothing but a disparate group of actors…but I think it’s a brilliant concept: Josef and his friends are the only ones with ego enough to pull one over on the arrogant Nazis. And that screenplay! So many quotable passages of delicious double entendres that exemplify “the Lubitsch touch”:
MARIA: It's becoming ridiculous the way you grab attention. Whenever I start to tell a story, you finish it. If I go on a diet, you lose the weight. If I have a cold, you cough. And if we should ever have a baby, I'm not so sure I'd be the mother.
JOSEF: I'm satisfied to be the father.
MARIA: Tell me about yourself.
SOBINSKI: Well, there isn't much to tell. I just fly a bomber.
MARIA: Oh, how perfectly thrilling!
SOBINSKI: I don't know about it being thrilling. But it's quite a bomber. You might not believe it, but I can drop three tons of dynamite in two minutes.
MARIA: Really?
SOBINSKI: Does that interest you?
MARIA: It certainly does.
SOBINSKI: You see, sir, the other night Professor Siletsky was addressing us at the camp, and I mentioned the name of Maria Tura…and he never heard of her.
ARMSTONG: Neither have I.
SOBINSKI: Oh, but, he's supposed to be a Pole who lived in Warsaw and she's the most famous actress in Warsaw.
ARMSTONG: Now, look here, young man, there are lots of people who're not interested in the theater. As a matter of fact, there's only one actress I ever heard of…and I certainly hope I'll never hear from her again.
JOSEF: It's unbelievable! Unbelievable! I come home to find a man in the same boat with me and my wife says to me, "What does it matter?"
SOBINSKI: But, Mr. Tura, it's the zero hour!
MARIA: You certainly don't want me to waste a lot of time giving you a long explanation.
JOSEF: No, but I think a husband is entitled to an inkling.
JOSEF: Her husband is that great, great Polish actor, Josef Tura. You've probably heard of him.
EHRHARDT: Oh, yes. As a matter of fact I saw him on the stage when I was in Warsaw once before the war.
JOSEF: Really?
EHRHARDT: What he did to Shakespeare we are doing now to Poland.
That last line caused a little bit of concern among critics, who steadfastly argued that poking fun at a serious situation made Lubitsch guilty of cinematic high crimes and misdemeanors. My favorite line from To Be or Not to Be is one that doesn’t seem particularly funny at first hearing (in fact, it might make some viewers wince): posing as Ehrhardt, Josef responds to flattery from Professor Siletsky with the phrase “So they call me ‘Concentration Camp’ Ehrhardt…?” But as Josef desperately tries to stall for time while Sobinski and the rest of the actors dope out a way to retrieve vital documents from the spy’s hotel room, he begins to nervously repeat the phrase over and over again until it almost becomes a mantra…and it makes me laugh out loud every time I hear it.
With all these elements — solid script, first-rate cast, great director — you’d naturally assume that To Be or Not to Be cleaned up at the box office, correct? Well, it didn’t. Lubitsch’s WW2 satire had the misfortune of being released during World War II, and theatergoers didn’t particularly warm to a film that poked deadpan fun at such a serious conflict. With hindsight, we can see the brilliance of the movie — Lubitsch’s film has witty moments, to be sure, but it also contains sequences of nail-biting suspense (witness Sobinski’s arrival in Warsaw after temporarily escaping his Nazi pursuers, not to mention the tense scenes where Maria is literally being held prisoner in Siletsky’s hotel room). The director’s intention was to satirize both the Nazis and their ideology, but as George S. Kaufman famously observed, “Satire is what closes on Saturday night.” The moviegoing public simply wasn’t ready for a daring film that was able to find humor in a situation that seemed devoid of same — and a prime example of this sort of patron was Jack’s father, Mayer Kubelsky. Kubelsky went to see To Be or Not to Be…and horrified that his son was not only wearing an SS uniform but giving out with a “Heil Hitler!” in the opening scenes; he stormed out of the theater and refused to speak to his Jack. (When Jack finally convinced his father that his character was merely performing in an anti-Nazi play in the movie’s opening and that he was really the film’s hero, Mayer went back to see the movie again and again…and again. Like his famous son, it would become his favorite.)
But theatergoers also found it impossible to laugh when the movie’s female star, Carole Lombard, was killed in a plane crash about two months before the film’s premiere (she was on a World War II bond rally tour with her mother, Bess Peters, and Otto Winkler, husband Clark Gable’s press agent). Co-star Benny was devastated by Lombard’s untimely death, and refused to do his regularly scheduled program that following Sunday, substituting an all-musical half-hour. Because the actress had a line in the film — “What can happen in a plane?” — in response to Stack’s invitation to take a spin in the wild blue with him, the line was cut before the movie’s premiere (it since has been restored).
To Be or Not to Be ranks only behind Twentieth Century (1934) as my favorite Carole Lombard film, but it’s certainly my favorite of Jack Benny’s cinematic output; Jack never got another opportunity to extend his thespic range and after The Horn Blows at Midnight in 1945 (a film that he and his writers lampooned in endless jokes on his radio/TV show despite the fact that it wasn’t that bad) he limited his screen appearances to brief cameos such as It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) and A Guide for the Married Man (1967). (He had planned to return to movies with a substantial part in The Sunshine Boys, but upon his death in 1974 his role was given to his lifelong friend George Burns). To Be is also my favorite Lubitsch film; a work of such maturity and pitch-perfect hilarity that I want to warn you: do not make the same mistake I did in watching the 1983 remake before seeing the Lubitsch version. (In all honesty, I didn’t have a choice — the Lubitsch film rarely got shown in those halcyon days before TCM). The more recent version with Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, heartfelt tribute though it may have been, is much too broad and slapsticky in its burlesque approach (it’s almost like watching a stage play)…and most assuredly lacks the subtlety of “the Lubitsch touch.”
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Labels: 40s, Bancroft, Gable, Jack Benny, Lombard, Lubitsch, Mel Brooks, Movie Tributes, Remakes, Shakespeare
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Monday, October 03, 2011
“Oh, Rob…”
BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post is our contribution to The Dick Van Dyke Show Blogathon being hosted by Ivan himself over at his home base at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear.
By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
It’s been observed by many boob tube historians that during the era fondly referred to as The Golden Age of Television “comedy was king”…in 1950, for example, audiences could catch The Colgate Comedy Hour on Sunday nights, with Tuesdays reserved for the wacky shenanigans of “Mr. Television” himself, Milton Berle and his Texaco Star Theater. Sprinkled throughout the week were radio sitcom holdovers such as The Aldrich Family, Beulah and The Goldbergs not to mention the early offerings from veterans Burns and Allen and Jack Benny. It all came to a boil on Saturdays with the 90 minute Your Show of Shows — which also presented music, opera and ballet in addition to the hilarity and made TV icons out of stars Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, the headliners of its earlier incarnation, The Admiral Broadway Revue.
Caesar and Coca’s co-stars on Your Show of Shows included two other funny men, Howard Morris and Carl Reiner, the latter versatile enough to play any sort of role from villainous cad to roving reporter (he usually was Caesar’s straight man in Sid’s “Professor” sketches). Although billed as a performer (Reiner would win two Emmy Awards as outstanding supporting actor on Sid Caesar’s follow-up series, Caesar’s Hour and Sid Caesar Invites You), Carl also was an uncredited writer and it was the atmosphere of “the writer’s room” on Your Show of Shows (described by Reiner as “the most interesting room I’ve ever been in”) that inspired him to create a pilot about a television comedy writer and his experiences both at work and at home. The show would be titled Head of the Family and despite a favorable response from many, it went nowhere quickly. Fate intervened to give the busted pilot a second chance, and when Reiner allowed himself to be talked out of starring in it on the second go-round, he laid the groundwork for a series that premiered on this date 50 years ago that in my opinion is the gold standard by which all situation comedies should be measured: The Dick Van Dyke Show.
In Head of the Family, Carl Reiner played Robert Petrie, the head writer of the popular TV comedy show The Alan Sturdy Show — with Reiner’s pilot focused on Rob’s workplace, staffed with his fellow scribes Buddy Sorrell (Morty Gunty) and Sally Rogers (Sylvia Miles). Previous sitcoms did show their characters working their jobs on occasion, but Family was one of the first to concentrate chiefly in that area. Rob Petrie’s home life wasn’t neglected, however; there was plenty of action on the homefront (the pilot had a subplot in which Rob’s son is a little embarrassed that his dad is but a mere comedy writer) with wife Laura (Barbara Britton) and son Richie (Gary Morgan). What made Family such a unique TV pilot was that Reiner wasn’t content to write just one script while waiting to see if the series would get sold — he pounded out an additional 12 episodes on his typewriter in order to obtain a better feel for the show and its characters. The July 19, 1960 premiere of Head of the Family on CBS’ The Comedy Spot was extremely well-received by potential sponsors and yet Reiner was unable to get any of them to bite — it was a time in the industry when Westerns rode herd over the airwaves and in the end the sponsors decided to, in Carl’s words, “go with horses and guns.”
Reiner’s pilot was considered too good to just die prematurely on the vine, and his agent Harry Kalcheim continued to shop the show around until actor-turned-producer Sheldon Leonard was convinced to look at Family. Leonard, whose partnership with comedian Danny Thomas had not only made Thomas’ own show (Make Room for Daddy, which by that time had been renamed The Danny Thomas Show) a monster hit but also struck gold with The Real McCoys and The Andy Griffith Show, had a consistently high batting average in the business in that he had never produced a pilot that hadn’t sold and that he possessed an amazing knack for being able to salvage the best elements from pilots that didn’t work. After screening Head of the Family, Leonard told Reiner that the show could succeed — provided that Carl recast the lead role with someone other than himself.
As we are well aware, the entire cast of Head of the Family was eventually replaced, but finding the right person to headline the series was Leonard and Reiner’s top priority. The two candidates for the role of Rob Petrie were Johnny Carson and Dick Van Dyke — Carson was better-known at the time, and had he taken the job the course of TV history would have been changed remarkably — but Leonard liked Van Dyke and the fact that his unconventional leading man looks were more in keeping with the show’s main character (he had an aversion to stars such as William Powell and Robert Taylor, who were “too glamorous to be sharing your living room”); he convinced Reiner to see Van Dyke in the current Broadway hit Bye Bye Birdie, and Carl agreed that Sheldon’s instincts were right on the money.
For the part of Sally Rogers, a female comedy writer that Reiner based by combining Your Show of Shows’ Lucille Kallen and Selma Diamond, Leonard hired Rose Marie on the spot — he had been promising her for years that he’d find something for her in one of his series and he was good as his word. The former child star (known in her youth as “Baby Rose Marie”) had previous sitcom experience with roles on The Bob Cummings Show (aka Love That Bob) and My Sister Eileen, and when she learned that Leonard and Reiner hadn’t chosen an actor for the part of Buddy Sorrell, she suggested Morey Amsterdam whom she had first met when she was 12-years-old on radio’s Al Pearce and His Gang. Amsterdam had a reputation in the business as “a human joke machine,” and since the Buddy Sorrell character had been inspired by Reiner’s friendship and association with Mel Brooks (both on the Caesar shows and their popular “The 2000 Year Old Man” sketches) Morey was the next best thing to having Mel himself.
While I'm on the subject of Mels, Reiner tabbed Richard Deacon (who at this point in his career was familiar to TV audiences as Leave it to Beaver's overbearing Fred Rutherford, father of Wally Cleaver’s pal Clarence “Lumpy” Rutherford) for the part of Mel Cooley, the toadying producer of what would be re-named on the new series “The Alan Brady Show” (both Sheldon Leonard and Morey Amsterdam observed that the original “Alan Sturdy” sounded too much like “Alan’s dirty”). The Cooley character was originally called “Cal” (as in “Calvin”) on Head of the Family; the change was suggested by Leonard (who pointed out that the handle was awfully similar to “Calvin Coolidge”) though Deacon later went on record as saying he wished Leonard had stuck with the original. Cast in the role of Richie Petrie was a young child actor named Larry Mazzeo, who also was a victim of a name change, only it was his real-life surname (he became “Larry Matthews”) because as he later admitted “Ethnic wasn’t in at the time.”
The new cast members were chosen with relative ease save for the role of Laura Petrie, Rob’s charming, supportive wife. Leonard and Reiner auditioned close to 60 actresses but just couldn’t seem to find the perfect fit; it was only after the two men had a conversation with Danny Thomas that Danny remembered an actress who had once auditioned on his sitcom for the part of his daughter. The only problem was Thomas couldn’t remember her name, only that she had three of them. So a little detective work was in order and oddly enough, a TV detective show figured in the search for their Laura Petrie in that Leonard remembered the actress to which Thomas was referring had a role as the sexy secretary “Sam” to boob tube shamus Richard Diamond…even though all audiences ever saw of Mary Tyler Moore was her legs (though you did hear her voice). Moore almost didn’t get the part because she seriously considered not showing up for the audition when her agent called and told her Carl Reiner wished to see her, but she was a fan of Reiner’s from the Caesar shows and agreed to go anyway. She barely got out the first line in her audition (“Hello Rob, are you home?”) before Reiner grabbed her and marched her down to Sheldon Leonard’s office. “She says ‘hello’ like a real person!” Reiner shouted enthusiastically, and once Leonard heard Mary read he agreed that the final puzzle piece had fallen into place.
Rather than re-shoot the original Head of the Family script, Reiner decided that one of the other scripts he had written, “The Sick Boy and the Sitter” would work better as a pilot for the new series, which he renamed The Dick Van Dyke Show. Leonard already was producing The Danny Thomas Show and The Andy Griffith Show, so it seemed like a good idea that the new show follow suit even though people would ask him in the beginning “What’s a Dick Van Dyke?” In the premiere, Rob and Laura go out for the evening to attend a party being thrown by Rob’s boss, Alan Brady, despite Laura’s reservations since son Richie’s slightly elevated temperature indicates he might be sick. The choice of “Sick Boy” was considered an excellent one because of several comedy and musical numbers in a party sequence that allowed Van Dyke, Rose Marie and Morey Amsterdam to demonstrate their talents and versatility as Rob, Sally and Buddy.
Procter & Gamble loved the pilot and agreed to sponsor the show — and CBS premiered it on Tuesday nights at 8 p.m., sandwiched between half-hour reruns of Gunsmoke (retitled Marshal Dillon) and the hit sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Despite rave reviews from critics praising the quality of the series and tepid competition from NBC (the last half of the Western series Laramie) and ABC (Bachelor Father), the early scheduling of the show did not work in its favor: on the West Coast, The Dick Van Dyke Show aired during the “dinner hour” and the response was extremely disappointing. A move to Wednesday nights at 9:30 p.m. at mid-season proved even more disastrous; the series was killed by its NBC competition, Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall. The Dick Van Dyke Show was cancelled at the end of the 1961-62 season by CBS.
Both Carl Reiner and Sheldon Leonard were stunned by CBS’ decision…though the catalyst for the show’s cancellation actually was the decision by Procter & Gamble to bail on the series, at a time when the sponsor still called the shots. Leonard simply wasn't content to let the show die so with the help of Lee Rich, an executive with ad agency Benton & Bowles, the two men lobbied P&G’s head of television, “Havvy” Halverstadt, into signing on for a second season despite the objections of CBS’ president of programming, James “The Smiling Cobra” Aubrey. Halverstadt would eventually agree to pay the bills for a second year of Dick Van Dyke, but only for half of the sponsorship. (Leonard lucked out in that he was able to crash a board meeting of P. Lorillard & Co. — better known for making Kent cigarettes — and talk Kent into picking up the tab for the second half.)
While Sheldon schmoozed with corporate America, Carl Reiner cajoled CBS into rerunning The Dick Van Dyke Show during their summer schedule — a risky gambit at the time, since it was believed the best possible way to ladle dirt over a show already in its grave was to further remind TV audiences via reruns what a flop it was in the first place, but the show soon garnered a renewed following, and coupled with Reiner’s Emmy Award win for outstanding chievement in comedy writing, The Dick Van Dyke Show vaulted into the Nielsen’s Top 10 the following season. The fact that the most-watched series that same year, The Beverly Hillbillies, was its lead-in also was a tremendous help.
The Dick Van Dyke Show shuttled back-and-forth between two worlds: first, there was the work “bullpen” where writers Rob, Sally and Buddy would craft scripts for their talented but autocratic boss, television comedian Alan Brady. But viewers also got the opportunity to see Rob announce “Honey, I’m home!” in that many of the show’s stories revolved around the domestic bliss shared by Rob and Laura at their home at 448 Bonnie Meadow Road. Rob and Laura’s marriage (and in flashbacks, the circumstances surrounding their courtship) took precedent in most of the stories; audiences only got an occasional glimpse into the personal lives of Rob’s co-workers. Buddy was married to an ex-showgirl named “Pickles” who turned up on the program on only a handful of occasions before the show’s writers realized that Pickles was funnier when just talked about and Sally was a “professional spinster” who, despite her intelligence and sense of humor, always had difficulty keeping a boyfriend. (The closest she got to a regular beau on the show was mama’s boy Herman Glimscher played by Billy Idelson, who finally ended up tying the knot with Sal by the time the reunion special The Dick Van Dyke Show Revisited was telecast in 2004. Just between you, me and the lamppost — everybody knew that Buddy and Sally were married to each other, just not in the legal sense.)
The nature of Rob’s job made the antics at his place of business positively delightful; unlike other sitcom characters, you just knew that Rob Petrie enjoyed getting up and going to work in the morning. Rob’s occupation and The Dick Van Dyke Show itself made the notion of writing for television attractive and had a huge influence on a future generation who aspired to write comedy for a living; Saturday Night Live scribe and "It’s Garry Shandling’s Show." co-creator Alan Zweibel acknowledged this to be this case when he had the opportunity to meet Dick Van Dyke one time in a Hollywood elevator (he pointed out the similarities between the two men’s lives and broke down when Van Dyke brought up the painful memory that he had also become an alcoholic). The workplace atmosphere of The Dick Van Dyke Show, with its “second family” setting, would find itself adopted later by Mary Tyler Moore’s self-titled sitcom (the WJM-TV newsroom) not to mention WKRP in Cincinnati, Taxi, Cheers and scores of other TV sitcom hits.
But The Dick Van Dyke Show also broke new ground in its portrait of domestic life on television; moving away from the established bland, white-bread, middle-class nature of most families into something that could very well be called a television “Camelot” (referring to
the nickname given to the Kennedy White House). Rob and Laura were an attractive couple, possessing poise and a terrific chemistry; sure, they slept in twin beds but seemed to be, as producer Leonard once remarked, “the first pair (on TV) that may be having some fun in the hay.” Laura Petrie established herself as a wife and mother unlike those seen previously on TV; she was not only incredible sexy (especially decked out in her trademark Capri pants, which raised quite a ruckus when they first introduced on the program) but also demonstrated an independence in that while she was generally supportive of her husband she wasn’t afraid to speak her mind if she had a difference of opinion. (In other words, they had great fights and they undoubtedly had great make-up sex.) Thanks to Rob’s show business connections, she also threw tremendous parties…something I always chuckle about when I consider that the running gag on The Mary Tyler Moore Show was that Mary Richards’ shindigs usually were a bust. The character of Laura also was tempered with an endearing wackiness that had her occasionally venturing in Lucy Ricardo-like territory (such as dying her hair half-blonde and half-brunette or getting her toe stuck in the faucet of a hotel bathroom), which just made her that much more human.Rob Petrie was TV’s first neurotic father, complete with foibles and an uncertainty as to whether he was always pursuing the wisest course of action. He wasn’t ineffectual or bumbling like Chester Riley or Ozzie Nelson, but he’d be the first to admit that he didn’t always have all the answers and often found himself learning about parenting from a hands-on, first-time-out approach. He was engagingly goofy and elastic (like human Silly Putty) yet without being cartoonish, and as played by Van Dyke displayed some of the most hilarious physical comedy in the history of the television sitcom. Crazy things often happened to Rob (he’d find himself mistakenly arrested for assault or he had to solve the problem of what to do when a bird attacked his son without reason) but he’d usually find a solution before the half-hour was out in a fashion that was only slightly exaggerated for comic effect, rarely delving into anything too foolish.
It seems like I haven’t paid much attention to the character of Alan Brady in this essay, and that might be because Carl Reiner’s intention on The Dick Van Dyke Show was to have Alan talked about and occasionally heard from but never seen on the show, because Reiner originally wanted a BIG star for the part. (Though many of the characters on The Dick Van Dyke Show were based on people Reiner knew or was acquainted with, he was always adamant that “Alan Brady” was not modeled after his former “boss,” Sid Caesar…suggesting that Alan was closer in spirit to Jackie Gleason and Milton Berle than anybody else.) In the first season of Dick Van Dyke, only Alan’s voice was heard; he didn’t make an onscreen appearance until “The Sleeping Brother” (in an easy chair with his back to the audience). As the series progressed, Reiner consented to turning up more frequently as the tyrannical Brady (but only sparingly, and only, as Reiner put it, “when we had a great idea for him”) — his best showcase is unquestionably the classic outing “Coast-to-Coast Big Mouth,” in which Laura inadvertently reveals to a nationwide TV audience (she’s a contestant on a game show) that Alan Brady wears a rug. (For the record, this is my very favorite of all Dick Van Dyke Show episodes.) Alan Brady was one of those characters whose personality was so strong it seemed like he was in every episode; he later took on a life of his own, appearing as “himself” on a classic episode of Mad About You and an animated special on TV Land.
Besides, Carl Reiner was much too busy writing and producing the series to squeeze in a weekly appearance as Alan Brady; in the first season alone he wrote 19 of the show’s first 30 episodes, and penned an additional 21 in season two. The addition of Bill Persky and Sam Denoff in the show’s third season — the team wrote the season opener, “That’s My Boy?”, a classic in which Rob relates how he was convinced he and Laura brought home the wrong baby from the hospital (and an episode whose “surprise twist” generated more than its fair share of controversy at the time) — was a godsend for Reiner, who noted “If I hadn’t found Persky and Denoff in the third year, I think I would have had a heart attack!” Garry Marshall and Jerry Belson, long before they adapted The Odd Couple to TV screens, also were prolific contributors to The Dick Van Dyke Show, as were Carl Kleinschmitt and Dale McRaven. “That’s My Boy?” was directed by John Rich, who helmed many of the series’ episodes, but not nearly as many as Jerry Paris, who not only played director behind-the-scenes but also appeared on camera as Rob’s best friend and next-door neighbor, dentist Jerry Helper (with his wife Millie played by Ann Morgan Guilbert).
In its final season on CBS, The Dick Van Dyke Show was still a Top 20 ratings contender, but the decision was made by creator Reiner that the series would not go beyond a fifth season. There have been various explanations for this: many of the cast members wanted to pursue other projects (Dick Van Dyke actively chased a film career before returning with Reiner to TV in 1971 to work on another sitcom titled The New Dick Van Dyke Show); Reiner himself always has been adamant that he was going to close up shop after five years, wanting to leave “while we’re still proud of it.” Fortunately for fans of classic television, there are 158 episodes with which to be pleased — all available on DVD (in five box sets that some have called one of the best example of TV-on-DVD collections ever released) and on many cable outlets, notably (as of this post) weeknights at 8:30 on Me-TV. OK, maybe saying they can be proud of all 158 episodes is a slight exaggeration (“The Twizzle”…call your office)…but the majority of the shows hold up extremely well and don’t embarrass to the degree that other comedy shows do from its era, due to Reiner’s insistence on character-based humor (he also was careful about avoiding any slang that might “date” the episodes).
As a kid, I was such a big fan of Dick Van Dyke that I would practice — in the tradition of the show’s opening, which alternated from week to week between Van Dyke tripping and falling over the ottoman, stumbling on it and sidestepping it completely — falling over the hassock in our living room, as my mother’s eyes rolled helplessly heavenward. I wanted my Dad and Mom to be just like Rob and Laura Petrie (they were more like Herbert and Winifred Gillis, to be honest) and for them to throw cool parties with singing and dancing…and it even got to a point where I schemed to have something tragic befall young Richie (whom I pictured floundering in a well without a Lassie to save him) so I could volunteer to take his place. I watch the shows over and over again and marvel at how they sparkle; how witty the dialogue is and how even when the lines aren’t so funny I laugh because I’m so in tune with the show’s characters. Carl Reiner adopted the first rule of writing — “Write what you know” — in creating The Dick Van Dyke Show, the series I consider without question the greatest situation comedy of all time. I would deem it an honor to raise a glass and toast its 50th anniversary, with the hopes of many more to continue.
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Labels: 60s, Awards, Blog-a-thons, C. Reiner, Carson, Jack Benny, Mel Brooks, Musicals, Shandling, Sid Caesar, Theater, TV Tribute, William Powell
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Tuesday, February 08, 2011
“This is Duke Mantee, the world-famous killer…and he’s hungry!”
By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
As the star of the hit Broadway play The Petrified Forest, Leslie Howard also had in his possession (as co-producer) the production rights to Robert E. Sherwood’s stage smash…and Warner Bros., was quite keen on bringing Howard’s triumph to the big screen. The studio wanted the actor to reprise his stage role as Alan Squier alongside contractee Bette Davis, with whom Howard had previously worked on Of Human Bondage (1934); a critically and financially successful vehicle that cemented Davis’ future success in the movie business.
For the role of mobster Duke Mantee, the antagonist of the play, Warners wanted their resident gangster thespian Edward G. Robinson — but Howard insisted that the studio cast the performer that originated the part on stage; an actor who had previously worked at the studio in films and answered to the name of Humphrey Bogart. The studio bosses were hesitant…but relented when Howard informed them that without Bogie he wouldn’t be doing the film either. Seventy-five years ago on this date, Howard proved to the studio his instincts about Bogart were on the money when Petrified Forest was released to movie screens and ignited the film career of one of moviedom’s best-known tough guys.
Bogart’s foray into movies began six years before the release of Forest with an appearance in a Vitaphone short entitled Broadway’s Like That (1930), and that same year he signed a contract with Fox that provided him his first feature film exposure alongside Spencer Tracy in the John Ford-directed comedy-drama Up the River. By and large, however, Bogie didn’t make too much of a stir in films, and often found himself shuttling back-and-forth between the picture business and the stage, on which he had been an active participant since 1922. Bogart had become frustrated with moviemaking by 1934, feeling that his ambition to become a leading man onscreen was destined to wither and die on the vine. He could, when not unemployed, fall back on stage work and after appearing in a production of Invitation to a Murder producer Arthur Hopkins hired Bogie for the part of on-the-lam gangster Duke Mantee in the production of Robert Sherwood’s new play, The Petrified Forest.
Hopkins had reservations about Bogart at first: Bogie’s stage rep was, in Hopkins’ words, “as an antiquated juvenile who spent most of his stage life in white pants swinging a tennis racquet.” Author Sherwood had based the character of Mantee on 1934’s “Public Enemy No. 1,” John Dillinger — and because of his physical similarity to Dillinger, Bogart was a natural for the part. Bogie upped the ante in portraying the role by studying film footage of the gangster and mimicking Dillinger’s mannerisms. Forest won Bogart the best reviews of his career at that time, and after the movie version came out the actor himself remarked that Forest “marked my deliverance from the ranks of the sleek, sybaritic, stiff-shirted, swallow-tailed ‘smoothies’ to which I seemed condemned to life.”
The Petrified Forest takes place inside the Black Mesa Diner in a remote area in northern Arizona, a garage/eatery run by Jason Maple (Porter Hall), his daughter Gabrielle (Davis) and “Gabby’s” curmudgeonly grandfather “Gramp” (Charley Grapewin), who proudly tells all and sundry of the time Billy the Kid shot at him…and missed. Gabrielle’s mother, whom Jason married during the First World War, lives in France but still corresponds with her daughter, sending her books of poetry on her birthday. Gabby’s mother grew weary of life on the desert and her husband (calling him “a dull defeated man”), which is why she retreated back to the land of her birth; Gabrielle herself has inherited her mother’s free spirit, painting in her spare time and fending off the advances of the unimaginative males who seem to populate the diner, notably former gridiron hero and now gas pump jockey Boze Hertzlinger (Dick Foran).
Into Gabrielle’s life walks Alan Squier (Howard), a failed author-turned-alcoholic drifter who stops by the Black Mesa for a meal and soon finds himself captivated by Gabby’s independent and artistic temperament. His attention paid to Gabrielle arouses Boze’s jealousy, but he assures Boze that he’ll be moving on and manages to cadge a ride to a destination in Phoenix with a wealthy couple, the Chisholms (Paul Harvey, Genevieve Tobin) and their chauffeur Joseph (John Alexander). The Chisholms’ automobile is stopped en route by Duke Mantee and his gang, who are fleeing the police after a shootout in Oklahoma City. Mantee and his boys commandeer the car in which Squier and the Chisholms were traveling, and while Chisholm and his chauffeur futilely attempt to start the automobile abandoned by the Mantee gang, Alan takes off on foot for help.
Squier arrives back at the diner to warn Gabrielle of his encounter with Mantee and Company but learns that the gang has already arrived and Mantee will be holding the diner’s denizens hostage until a second car with three other members of his gang and his girlfriend arrives to rendezvous. The group are eventually re-joined by Mr. and Mrs. Chisholm and Joseph, who have made their way back to the establishment through a snowstorm, and a tense situation grows more so when Boze’s attempt to overpower Mantee earns him a slug in his shoulder.
As Gabrielle attends to Boze’s wound, Alan makes a proposal to Mantee: he asks Duke to shoot and kill him before he leaves, since he’s planning to sign over his insurance policy to Gabrielle (with the Chisholms as witnesses) so that she will have the funds needed to leave Black Mesa and travel to France to be reunited with her mother and live out her dream as an artist. Mantee agrees to Alan’s request, and as the police begin to close in the gangster shoots Alan before being gunned down himself. Alan expires in Gabrielle’s arms, and she vows to bury him in an area where old redwoods have ossified into stone — the “petrified forest” of the film’s title.
The Petrified Forest, with its themes of crime and social realism, was an ideal property for Warner Bros. to adapt to film, as the studio had made its reputation as a producer of gritty actioners tinged with the social commentary of the day. It was a big success for the studio…and for Bogart as well — but despite such a prominent part in an “A” picture he would soon find himself typecast as snarling, sneering gangsters in a variety of programmers and B-pictures. Bogart’s now-iconic image as a cynical, wise-cracking hero would not take hold until the early 1940s with legendary productions such as The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Casablanca (1942).
Though he was never shy about complaining on being typecast in bad-guy roles, Bogart had an exceptional deference for Forest and his performance as Duke Mantee — a shining example of this was demonstrated when the actor agreed to reprise the role in a May 30, 1955 television adaptation of the play on the series Producers’ Showcase. (Playing the Leslie Howard role was Henry Fonda, and the part of Bette Davis’ character was essayed by Mrs. Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall.) This performance and a guest appearance on The Jack Benny Show (from Oct. 25, 1953) would be the only two TV projects in which the actor participated before his passing in 1957. 1955 was also the year that Bogart appeared in what would be his penultimate film, The Desperate Hours — his character in that movie, Glenn Griffin, also holds people hostage (this time a suburban family) while on the lam from the long arm of the law. (Bogart was quoted as saying that Griffin was “Duke Mantee grown up.”)
Because of its dark subject matter and characters whose destinies seemingly cannot escape the heavy hand of fate (Mantee’s last words to Alan before shooting him are: “So long, pal…I’ll be seein’ ya soon”), Petrified Forest is considered by some critics to be an early example of what would later be known as film noir. These facets of the film and Bogart’s mesmerizing performance as Mantee immeasurably help a movie that sadly hasn’t held up as well as one would like — though I’m certainly not shy about admitting a bit of guilt by pointing out that I never particularly cottoned to Howard’s work as an actor and that I’m disappointed that Bogart doesn’t shoot him from the get-go to avoid all of Leslie’s irritating speechifying. (Then again, I get a tremendous amount of pleasure out of seeing the two men reunited in the following year’s Stand-In, so there may be another explanation for my lack of enthusiasm.) For a Bogart fan, however, Forest is must viewing — from the moment Duke Mantee is introduced onscreen, there can be no doubt that 75 years ago “a star is born.”
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Labels: 30s, Bacall, Bette, Bogart, Edward G., H. Fonda, Jack Benny, John Ford, Theater, Tracy
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Tuesday, October 19, 2010
“Say goodnight, Gracie…”
By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
Even those individuals who’ve never experienced the delight of listening to or seeing the immortal Jack Benny are familiar with his name — the comedian’s celebrity flame continues to burn bright some 35 years after his passing, and the reason for this is probably due to the fact that he was a fixture on television from 1950 to 1965 (with several TV ‘specials” telecast after that) even though his reign on radio lasted longer. His contemporary, Fred Allen, wasn’t quite as lucky — ill health kept Allen from gaining a toe hold in the visual medium, and so outside of a an old-time radio buff or two, his name just isn’t an instantly recognizable as his one-time "feuding partner."
The comedy team of George Burns and Gracie Allen are remembered today for primarily the same reason — radio may have brought them their greatest fame, but 60 years ago on this date we were asked to spend the first of many television visits with the Burnses. The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show would be a fixture on CBS for eight seasons; a remarkable achievement for a duo who didn’t necessarily do funny things…but said them.
When radio was first in its infancy, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone famous who’d have anything to do with the new medium — vaudeville was still the main attraction for future radio stars like George and Gracie, in addition to the aforementioned Mr. Benny and Mr. Allen. Occasionally, a star of the magnitude of Will Rogers or Ed Wynn or Eddie Cantor might agree to a guest appearance…but as far as radio was concerned, it was strictly amateur night when it came to the content of its entertainment. (Later, as radio gained prominence in the 1930s, all three men would approach the aural medium with ferocity; as Rogers himself was once quoted as saying: “Radio is too big a thing to be out of.”)
Burns and Allen had become popular vaudeville headliners on the success of their “double act,” which consisted of straight-man George asking girlfriend Gracie questions and getting patently screwball answers, or what Burns dubbed “illogical logic.” But the husband-and-wife team (though they wouldn’t acknowledge being married on the air until the 1940s) were actually among the first big radio stars…though not necessarily in this country. On a vaudeville tour of the United Kingdom in 1929, the duo were so beloved by the British that they made a series of appearances over the BBC, doing routines from the various venues at which they were booked, and though George and Gracie were turned away by NBC the following year (an agency executive for Grape Nuts thought Ms. Allen’s voice was “too squeaky”) they finally landed a radio gig in February 1932 with The Robert Burns Panatella Program (hosted by New Year’s Ever perennial Guy Lombardo) on CBS.
In their radio salad days, Burns and Allen basically soldiered on with the act that had made them famous on stage and in films — with Gracie the “Dumb Dora” character and George the boyfriend constantly driven to distraction by his “girlfriend’s” antics. But because their ratings had begun to take a spectacular dip around the early 1940s, Burns and his writers revamped the show into a domestic situation comedy, with the couple playing a slightly exaggerated version of themselves as husband and wife living in Beverly Hills. Burns and Allen bounced around between CBS and NBC during the 1940s, with their greatest radio success occurring between 1945 and 1949 as the stars of Maxwell House Coffee Time. In the fall of 1949, the duo had been lured back to their original network as a result of CBS chairman William S. Paley’s “talent raids,” and from that point on, the Tiffany network would remain their permanent home, particularly with their decision to abandon their radio program in favor of that newfangled fad called television.
Much has been said of Paley’s celebrated luring of NBC stars to CBS in the late 1940s — many media historians have dubbed him a “visionary” in that he was able to establish the network as a leader in television early on because of stars like Benny, Red Skelton and Freeman Gosden & Charles Correll (Amos ‘n’ Andy). The truth is, Paley honestly wasn’t looking toward the future — he simply wanted to shore up the network’s radio ratings, and found a novel way to do it in stealing his competitor’s thunder. But the unintended consequence of being able to draw upon that talent — not to mention the services of stars such as Lucille Ball (whose My Favorite Husband would be transformed into I Love Lucy), Eve Arden (Our Miss Brooks) and Marie Wilson (My Friend Irma) — put the network in good stead when competing with NBC, who had luminaries such as Milton Berle and Groucho Marx on hand.
George and Gracie’s television show was pretty much an extension of their established radio format: Gracie was the scatterbrained wife who gravitated to wacky situations involving the simplest of domestic circumstances while George was the patient, ever-understanding husband amused by it all. Aiding and abetting Gracie was the Burnses’ friend (and the show’s announcer for Carnation Milk, the program’s sponsor in the early seasons) Bill Goodwin, who had been with the couple during their radio run for Maxwell House (and before that, Swan Soap), Goodwin was with the TV show for just one season before longtime radio veteran Harry Von Zell took his place; Harry not only became Gracie’s accomplice but also a foil for George — who usually ending up “firing” his announcer at least once a week.
George and Gracie also had the prerequisite next-door neighbors in Blanche and Harry Morton, a pair of characters also brought over from the radio show. Bea Benaderet had played Blanche (though the role was also essayed by other actresses) and as Gracie’s confidante and sidekick would achieve her greatest television fame until Petticoat Junction thrust her into the role of star in 1963. Future game show emcee Hal March played husband to Bea in the early George and Gracie TV installments before he quit and passed it off to another radio veteran, John Brown; Brown’s blacklist troubles then led to character actor Fred Clark’s taking on the role of Harry.
When Burns replaced Clark with a fourth actor in the role of Harry Morton in the fall of 1953 — character actor Larry Keating, who would finish out the show’s run in the part — he introduced the “changing of the guard” in a particularly novel fashion for the time; according to legend, the set-up required for Harry to be hit on the head with a vase by wife Blanche, and at the moment Clark was about to be crowned Burns stopped the proceedings, announced to the audience that Keating would be taking over the role and introduced the actor to those watching and the cast, then continued on with Keating being beaned with the vase. The viewing audience must have watched all this with an interesting degree of jadedness, because Burns later remarked that he never received one single letter about how he handled the switch.
For the first two seasons it was on television, The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show was telecast live every other Thursday night, alternating such series as Starlight Theatre and Star of the Family. But George, an astute businessman in his own right, realized that it would be more efficient to film the series and made the decision to do so in the fall of 1952. As financially lucrative as this switch turned out to be, it sort of robbed Burns of the pleasure of performing for a live audience — something he enjoyed very much doing in both vaudeville and on radio. On TV, George would often stand off to one side in the show’s early episodes, wryly commenting on the action in a method that has since come to be known as “breaking the fourth wall;” on one occasion, he told the audience he was too busy to talk to them but that he would wave to them from the next scene (and he did). In the later filmed episodes, Burns would keep tabs on his show via a television set that allowed him to eavesdrop on what Gracie and her chums were up to. The “fourth wall” gags would later get a workout on shows as varied as Green Acres and Moonlighting, and would reach a culmination on It’s Garry Shandling’s Show. (Modestly, Burns would always maintain he swiped the concept from his lifelong friend Jack Benny.)
The Burnses were a childless couple in real life, but had adopted a son (Ronnie) and daughter (Sandy)…and in 1955, both kids started to appear on the series (though Sandy only did a handful of episodes, as she was a bit show business-shy). The presence of son Ronnie added an admittedly puzzling aspect to the show’s proceedings — it was kind of off-putting to see Gracie as a mother, and in fact sometimes Ronnie appeared to be older than his folks. But Ronnie was utilized in many of the show’s plots, with a heavy concentration in the series’ final season, in which a girlfriend in the form of aspiring starlet Bonnie Sue McAfee (Judi Meredith) was also added to the series.
Although The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show was never a phenomenal hit on CBS’ schedule (its highest ranking was #20 among all shows in the 1953-54 season), the program was popular enough that it probably could have continued on for even longer that it did had it not been for Gracie’s insistence to call it quits at the end of the 1957-58 season. Year after year, George was able to cajole “Googie” (his pet name for his wife) into signing on for another go-round but she was insistent about the eighth season being the last. Burns took a stab at doing the show as a single with The George Burns Show in the fall of 1958 (with Benaderet, Keating, Von Zell, Meredith and Ronnie all making the transition) but the show came and went in a single season. (Gracie was often referred to on the new series but was never seen.) George tried again in 1964 with a sitcom entitled Wendy and Me, which featured an ersatz Gracie in Connie Stevens (Allen having passed away in 1961) but, that, too, fizzled. It would take an Oscar-winning performance in The Sunshine Boys (1975) to make audiences realize that George Burns — the architect of he and his wife’s successful act — was more than just a straight man, a fiction he himself long maintained.
The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show was a program I was quite fond of as a kid (though admittedly I saw it the way a lot of folks from my generation viewed it, in perpetual reruns) but over at my weblog, Thrilling Days of Yesteryear, I have long insisted that George and Gracie’s radio show was superior to the TV version for many reasons — chiefly among them the presence of big-name guest stars, which the TV show wasn’t quite able to capitalize on. The other explanation is that Burns and Allen were more a verbal than visual comedy team — they said funny things rather than did them. And yet, when I think about George and Gracie’s TV show, the one thing that always comes to mind is that hall closet in their house where, inside, there was a collection of hats — each one designated with the name of its owner, because many of the visitors to the Burnses home had left without them after being thoroughly gobsmacked from their encounters with Gracie. That’s something they never could have accomplished on radio.
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Labels: 50s, blacklist, Eve Arden, Jack Benny, L. Ball, Shandling, TV Tribute
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Thursday, September 30, 2010
Yabba Dabba Doo!
By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
If William “Bill” Hanna and Joseph “Joe” Barbera had done little else in animation but direct a cat-and-mouse team that answered to Tom and Jerry, that alone would insure their place in The Cartoon Hall of Fame. Teamed together at MGM’s cartoon studio in 1939 and directing their first short, Puss Gets the Boot, a year later — the duo would go on to win for the studio seven Oscars in the field of Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoon) between 1943 and 1953. MGM was the Tiffany’s of motion picture studios, and having Bill and Joe in their animation stable was merely the icing on an already prestigious cinematic cake.
So how did “Tiffany” reward their valued employees after 17 years of devoted service? They closed the cartoon studio in 1957, and for a while it appeared that Hanna and Barbera would have to find honest work. The only medium that was still open to animation was that upstart known as television, so Bill and Joe worked out a system that allowed them to produce cartoons for TV without necessitating the lofty expense required for full, theatrical-style animation (a stylized format first practiced by animation studio pioneer U.P.A.). Their first boob tube success was The Ruff and Reddy Show, and following that they would introduce iconic characters such as Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear and Quick Draw McGraw to boob tube audiences young and old.
Fifty years ago on this date, Hanna-Barbera premiered their biggest project to date on a Friday evening at 8:30 p.m. Eastern time — the first prime-time animated situation comedy. And until a certain jaundice-colored family from the town of Springfield set up shop on TV 29 years later, The Flintstones’ six seasons in prime-time would be the longest — a page right out of (television) history.
Bill Hanna made no bones about it — The Flintstones was essentially a cartoon version of Jackie Gleason’s classic sitcom The Honeymooners with, as the Wikipedia entry notes, “rock puns thrown in.” But his partner Joe disavowed this in a separate interview — though he did confess that he would be flattered if people compared it to the legendary Gleason half-hour — and most of the special feature documentaries in any of the show’s DVD releases are careful not to mention the connection between the two programs. But they’re not fooling anyone: the Flintstones’ main character, Prehistoric caveman Fred Flintstone, was an animated Ralph Kramden and his sidekick, Barney Rubble, was Ed Norton (Art Carney) in cartoon form. (Their wives, Wilma Flintstone and Betty Rubble, completed the quartet in the roles established by Audrey Meadows as Alice Kramden and Joyce Randolph as Trixie Norton.) In fact, The Great One himself gave serious thought to hauling Bill and Joe into court for copyright infringement until one of his associates asked him if he wanted to be remembered as “the man who killed Fred Flintstone.”
Fred and Barney were blue collar slobs who toiled at a rock quarry owned by the autocratic Nate Slate — though his first and last names varied throughout the show’s run. Many of the Flintstones’ plots were lifted right out of Honeymooners 101 — in fact, the premiere episode, “The Flintstone Flyer,” finds our two heroes faking illness to get out of taking their wives to the opera and going bowling instead, taking advantage of Barney’s newest invention, a primitive helicopter. If the pair weren’t sneaking out to go bowling or to the fights or some other leisure activity frowned upon by their spouses, they would be attending meetings at their lodge, The Loyal Order of Water Buffalos. Now, belonging to a fraternal organization was certainly not a novelty on television at that time — but it was certainly suspect when Messrs. Kramden and Norton were members in good standing in The Loyal Order of Raccoons.
In its early stages, The Flintstones originally was called “The Flagstones” — and in fact, a two-minute pilot for the series was discovered a few years ago with this appellation. (The legend has it that the creators of the comic strip "Hi and Lois" weren’t as bashful as Jackie Gleason and did threaten to take Hanna-Barbera to court because the comic strip family’s last name was Flagstone.) The surname of the modern Stone Age family was then changed to Gladstone, and finally Flintstone — though there are some surviving character sheets that have “The Gladstones” printed on them and then, marked out with a red pencil, the final and eventual choice.
One huge benefit provided by The Flintstones was that it provided a lot of work for acting veterans who spent most of their time in radio — Mel Blanc, the voice of Barney Rubble (and the Flintstones’ pet, Dino), was of course no vocal stranger to the public having appeared on practically every popular radio comedy show at the time (most notably Jack Benny’s) and also voicing most of the players in the Warner Bros. cartoon stables such as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig. Bea Benaderet, another Benny vet, was a familiar face to television viewers as next-door neighbor Blanche Morton on George Burns & Gracie Allen’s television series; she would voice Betty Rubble until the 1964-65 season, when the role was taken over by Gerry Johnson (Benaderet’s starring duties on Petticoat Junction by that time kept her fairly busy).
As for Alan Reed, Fred Flintstone would make him a household name — as Teddy Bergman, he had headlined his own comedy series on radio back in the 1930s and would become a prominent character actor on radio sitcoms such as Duffy’s Tavern, My Friend Irma and Life with Luigi. Only Jean VanderPyl was a relatively unknown quality (her best-known radio gig was playing Robert Anderson’s wife on the radio version of Father Knows Best); but that would no longer be the case upon taking on the role of Wilma Flintstone (and also the addition to the family in the series’ third season, baby Pebbles). (Interestingly, VanderPyl would be the only performer from the “Flagstones” pilot to be retained for the series; the other voices were done by Hanna-Barbera utility man Daws Butler and June Foray, the voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel.) Other actors who appeared on The Flintstones in a regular capacity were Don Messick, Howard Morris, Hal Smith, Allan Melvin and Henry Corden; radio veterans who lent their speaking voices included John Stephenson, Janet Waldo, Frank Nelson, Paula Winslowe, Verna Felton, Howard McNear, Sandra Gould, Herb Vigran and Dick Beals.
The Flintstones was struck by misfortune in its sophomore year when actor Blanc came close to saying “Th-Th-That’s all folks!” as a result of a near-fatal automobile crash. Hanna-Barbera’s Butler came to the rescue by voicing Barney Rubble for five Flintstones shows, but Blanc’s recuperation was speedier than expected and he was able to continue on as Rubble — with the remaining cast and sometimes up to 16 people at a time crowded around in Blanc’s bedroom, where he was on the mend in a full body cast. This also explained why the Barney Rubble voice changed from a sort of nasal whine in the series' first year into the more familiar (and deeper) “hee hee hee” register sometime in the second season.
Years of reruns, series permutations and Pebbles Cereals commercials tend to overshadow how groundbreaking The Flintstones’ debut really was. The prohibitive cost of producing theatrical cartoons was taking a toll on those studios still making them, which is why it was necessary to adopt, adapt and improve for television. But even by “limited animation” standards, production of Flintstones was a daunting task — it required 24-25 minutes of animation per week, whereas the adventures of Huck, Yogi and Quick Draw usually only required six minutes at a time. It was a huge gamble, but it paid off — The Flintstones ranked at No. 18 among all television shows in its debut season, giving the still-struggling ABC a much-needed hit (only My Three Sons, which also debuted the same year, ranked higher). (Unfortunately, the network’s other prime-time cartoon experiment, The Bugs Bunny Show, didn’t do quite as well…and would leave the airways after its second season to toil in the lush orchards of Saturday morning programming for the next three decades.) The success of Flintstones also blossomed into a real cash cow for those companies fortunate enough to get in on the ground floor merchandising games, dolls, puzzles, comic books, coloring books and other kid-like swag.
During its six-year-run on ABC (for a total of 166 episodes), The Flintstones established many television animation “firsts.” The most prominent of these occurred in the third season (in fact, Flintstones became the first prime-time cartoon series to last more than two seasons), when Fred learns from Wilma in an episode entitled “The Surprise” that she is great with child, making her the first pregnant cartoon character. (Fred and Wilma were also the first cartoon couple to sleep in the same bed, though they also kept separate accommodations in some episodes.) Wilma’s pregnancy became a major story arc during Season Three —
making Flintstones the first series to use a continuing plotline, whereas earlier the show utilized stand-alone episodes, and in Season Four, when Barney and Betty adopted a young son named Bamm-Bamm they became the first cartoon couple unable to conceive (though this was conveyed subtly; it would have been a bit untoward to have one of the show’s many cartoon prehistoric animal appliances remark: “Betty’s insides are a rocky place where Barney’s seed can find no purchase...RAWWK!!!”).
Again, because of its pervasive presence on Saturday mornings and in syndication it’s often easy to forget that The Flintstones was geared primarily toward adult audiences (although children could certainly enjoy the show, too) — which is why a casual surfing of YouTube will occasionally turn up the now infamous commercial of Fred and Barney relaxing in flavor country smoking a pack of Winston cigarettes. The Winston people sponsored the series in its first two seasons and featured the denizens of Bedrock in integrated commercials…but the tobacco company pulled out in season three when Wilma was enceinte, letting Welch’s (grape juice and jelly) pay the bills; the switch in sponsor and arrival of Pebbles also shifted the show toward a more family-friendly direction. Miles Laboratories (makers of One-a-Day Vitamins and Alka-Seltzer) was also one of the series’ original sponsors, and after the show’s network run introduced a brand of vitamins called Flintstones Chewables that remain popular to this day. (Post Cereals followed Miles’ lead in the 1970s by manufacturing a line of breakfast foods to capitalize on the Flintstones’ fame, dubbed Fruity and Cocoa Pebbles.)
The success of The Flintstones ushered in several other attempts to capture its prime-time magic; Hanna-Barbera adapted The Phil Silvers Show into the series Top Cat in the 1961-62 season, and even copied their own Flintstones formula with The Jetsons in 1962-63, only this time with a "modern Space Age" family. The Alvin Show, The Bullwinkle Show, Calvin and the Colonel, The Famous Adventures of Mister Magoo and The Adventures of Jonny Quest (another H-B entry) all followed, and for a while it was not at all strange to see cartoons mingling with sitcoms, dramas and variety shows in the evening hours. But none of them managed to last the length of Flintstones; a show whose prime-time longevity would be broken with the debut of The Simpsons in 1989…a show that still soldiers on as of this post.
Generations of couch potatoes grew up singing the fabled lyrics of The Flintstones’ theme song (“Let’s ride with the family down the street/through the courtesy of Fred’s two feet”)…but it may interest you to know that that oh-so-familiar ditty wasn’t actually introduced until three years into the show — the series’ original incidental music was an instrumental known as “Rise and Shine” (which many people have noted sounds similar to the “This is It” theme song of The Bugs Bunny Show). “Shine” and the program’s credits in the first two seasons were removed when the show went into syndication, so when reruns of Flintstones made the rounds on Cartoon Network (with the original theme and titles) people were more than a little puzzled. The Flintstones, according to animation historian Earl Kress, “are the crowning jewel in the Hanna-Barbera legacy” — and on this momentous occasion I’d like to wish all those involved with the show a happy golden anniversary, with hopes of many more to come. Maybe future television generations will continue to laugh and enjoy watching series…and maybe someday Fred will win the fight (and that cat will stay out for the night).
Ivan G. Shreve, Jr. blogs at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear, and theorizes that somewhere among people who live without any contact with or knowledge of advanced civilizations, their offspring can sing all the words to The Flintstones theme. (Oh, and Gilligan’s Island, too.)
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Labels: 60s, Animation, Hanna-Barbera, Jack Benny, Oscars, Phil Silvers, The Simpsons, TV Tribute
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