Corrupting the minds of America’s youth

During my hiatus, my younger sister Debbie made a pilgrimage to Savannah, along with her husband and young daughter, for the expressed purpose of attending her twenty-year high school reunion.  Mom made arrangements for Deb and my brother-in-law to stay at a Hampton Inn (we’re kind of starved for space here at Rancho Yesteryear—plus sister Kat and her roommate came down for the weekend as well) while making sure my niece stayed at the house in order to spoil her rotten spend quality time with her only granddaughter.

I don’t get the opportunity to see niece Rachel too often.  I did see her in June, when we made our yearly trek to West Virginia for the annual Shreve reunion (a.k.a. “The Driest Weekend of the Year”), so I was really pumped about her visiting.  The first night she’s here, she tells my mom she can’t sleep—and with the day she had, with the travel and planes and all, it’s no wonder—so “Nana” gets the idea to let her hang out in my room and watch DVDs on my portable player.

I had the Bozo collection I told you about on top of a waste-high shelf, and upon seeing that she wanted to watch some of the shows.  I couldn’t figure out how she knew who Bozo was until she reminded me that I had got her a Bozo doll a few Christmases back—which I did; I bought one at a Cracker Barrel at which the ‘rents and I breakfasted on some long forgotten trip.  (Normally, I do not make it a habit to eat at the Barrel because I strenuously disagree with their policy of refusing to allow homosexuals serve me my food, but since I wasn’t paying I made an exception.)  She watched about a show and a half of the World’s Famous Clown, and then announced she was going to bed.  But then she stops, and looks at some other DVDs on the shelf.

“What’s that one with the moose?” she asks.

Lo and behold, she had found my Rocky and Bullwinkle stash.  And like the proud uncle I am, we watched a few of those before she definitely decided that it was time to hit the hay.

Rachel is pretty bright for her age, but many of the jokes from the residents of Frostbite Falls went over her head—this, however, didn’t matter.  One of the great things about kids is that they don’t discriminate when it comes to cartoons.  We watched a couple of the Bozo shorts—and let me tell you, the animation is lousy—but she didn’t care at all…nor did she go off on a rant (the way I did when I got older) about the limited animation that is Moose and Squirrel.  If it’s a moving drawing, they’ll sit and watch with rapt attention.  The other thing that I marveled about my niece was that after we tucked a few Bozos under our belt, she knew the theme song by heart.  (I’m lucky if I can remember the chorus.)

Rachel had a pretty good stay here in Savannah—she got to go to the beach, swim in my step-Gran’s pool, played some games on the computer (Bombast would pick that weekend to go down, by the way) and watch Rocky and Bullwinkle, Bozo and Fun and Fancy Free (1947) with ol’ Uncle Ivan (again, she couldn’t figure out why I was cackling during the Edgar Bergen-Charlie McCarthy exchanges…but she did recognize Charlie when he first appeared onscreen).  The only downer came when my Mom talked with her on the phone Sunday evening after they returned to Iowa: she was in total tears because she had to go home after having so much fun.

Wednesday Night at the Movies

I had last night off, and I’ve been itchin’ to watch some of these DVDs that I purchased recently—so I treated myself to a midnight double feature of old-time radio-related films. First off the bat, 1942’s Here We Go Again—the follow-up to the successful feature Look Who’s Laughing (1941) which memorably teamed Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy and Fibber McGee & Molly on screen.

Look Who’s Laughing starts out with Edgar & Charlie (performing a reprisal of their famous vaudeville act, “The Operation,” in front of a radio audience) so it seems only fitting that Here We Go Again begin with the McGees. Fibber & Molly have planned a big shindig to celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary, but their pals in Wistful Vista have given them the big brush-off, electing to vacation at a swanky lakeside resort instead. So the McGees decide to head that way themselves (although they can’t afford the tariff to stay there) and upon their arrival, encounter Otis Cadwalader (Gale Gordon, in his film debut)—Molly’s old beau and Fibber’s bete noire. Otis cons Fibber into getting Edgar (who’s also vacationing nearby, in search of a silk-producing moth) to invest in a formula for “synthetic gasoline”; it turns out to be a bust, but lepidopterist Bergen has discovered a use for it for his moths, and everything comes out in the wash by film’s end.

Here We Go Again doesn’t quite have the same punch as its predecessor, but it’s still grand entertainment for any OTR fan. The movie does boast of a boost in star-wattage: Ray Noble, Bergen’s orchestra leader and comic foil, and dummy Mortimer Snerd make appearances, and joining Hal Peary’s Throckmorton Gildersleeve and Isabel Randolph’s Abigail Uppington are Gordon and Bill Thompson as super-milquetoast Wallace Wimple (“Wimp” is the brains behind the formula). Also in the cast of OTR stars is Ginny Simms, a singer-actress who achieved fame as vocalist for Kay Kyser’s orchestra, and was also featured on The Bob Burns Show and her own self-titled variety show on radio from 1942-47. Ginny plays Gildy’s sister Jean and is Bergen’s romantic interest in this movie (I guess that whole Lucille Ball thing didn’t work out). Two other actors from Look Who’s Laughing, Sterling Holloway and George Cleveland, also have small roles in this film as well.

Here We Go Again contains some memorable set-pieces: Gildy and Fibber trade insults over a game of pool, Edgar and Charlie play Indian, and Molly cuts a rug with Cadwalader (both Marian Jordan and Gale Gordon do some pretty impressive hoofing in this one). Even Charlie McCarthy has a song-and-dance number—yes, you read that right, dance. Director Allan Dawn got the idea to allow both Charlie and Mortimer to be a little more mobile thanks to some doubling by midget actors. (This idea to use little people would later resurface in a memorable television episode of The Jack Benny Program; Jack pays Edgar and Francis Bergen a visit and is stunned to see both dummies moving about like real people.) The movie also contains a novel chase sequence at the end that eschews the traditionally tired use of cars and substitutes horse-and-buggies instead (you know how it is with those "A" cards).

Once again, as in Look Who’s Laughing, the comedic strengths in this film emanate from the witty dialogue provided for the stars: Bergen scribe Royal Foster joins Zeno Klinker and Dorothy Kingsley in supplying Edgar and his dummies’ material, and Don Quinn performs the same favor for the McGees. Allan Dwan returns to helm this second film as well; Dwan was a veteran director whose output includes Suez (1938), Frontier Marshal (1939), and Sands of Iwo Jima (1949). All in all, Here We Go Again is a breezy, pleasant romp and a must-see for any old-time radio fan.

“Oh…is that you, Myrt?”

This weekend, I decided to watch another one of the DVDs that I purchased recently from Finders Keepers—the 1941 RKO feature film comedy Look Who’s Laughing, starring Edgar Bergen with Charlie McCarthy, and Jim and Marian Jordan as Fibber McGee & Molly. I’d seen the film previously—it shows up frequently on Turner Classic Movies (TCM), though I think the time I watched it was when Turner Network Television (TNT) still showed classic movies (no, I’m not dating myself, am I)—and after treating myself to an encore I found it to be just as delightful as ever.

In fact, let me go a bit further and praise this movie as one of the best radio-based films ever made. It’s difficult to reach a consensus on just what makes an OTR-themed movie great or successful—a good many folks often have harsh words for films of this type, falling back on the “it isn’t as good/it can’t capture the essence of the radio show” gripe. Personally, I tend to be a little lenient in this area, I think probably because of the sheer novelty and because I’m also a sucker for a well-made B-film. For example, most of the Lum & Abner feature films fall woefully short of what critics would call great or even good movies—but I don’t mind; they’re short, sweet, and endlessly entertaining.

The plot of Look Who’s Laughing—well, I’m not going to lie to you: it’s painfully thin. Edgar & Charlie are forced to land Bergen’s plane in Wistful Vista during a vacation trip, and naturally meet the town’s best-known residents, Fibber & Molly McGee. The Fibster, as president of the Chamber of Commerce, has been out beating the bushes to get an aircraft manufacturer to build a factory in town; Edgar is very good friends with same and so he agrees to help the community out. There are, of course, numerous complications along the way (the movie is 78 minutes, they gotta do something)—but finally the deal is struck and everything comes out in the wash.

In addition to the movie’s four major players, there are also appearances by other old-time radio stars: Lucille Ball (though she’s seven years away from her hit sitcom My Favorite Husband) has a plum role as Julie, Edgar’s secretary and love interest, and Harold Peary is along for the ride as famed Fibber nemesis Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve. (Ball and Perry were later re-teamed in a 1942 musical-comedy, Seven Days’ Leave, in which Hal once again played Gildy, and Lucy is a girl that star Victor Mature has to marry in order to collect an inheritance—shades of the Buster Keaton classic Seven Chances!)

This movie also includes appearances from many of the actors that populated Fibber and Molly’s burg: Isabel Randolph, Harlow Wilcox, Bill Thompson and Arthur Q. Bryan. Of these four, only Randolph reprises a radio role as one of the residents of Wistful Vista, society dowager Abigail Uppington; both Thompson and Bryan (who didn’t start playing the town’s medico, Doc Gamble, until 1943) have uncredited bits (as a veteran and a mayor’s aide, respectfully) and Harlow is Mr. Collins, the bank president (no Glocoat pushing here!) Thompson would appear in 1942’s sequel Here We Go Again as Wallace Wimple (“Hello, folks…”). Other great character actors and old-time radio personalities include Neil (Batman) Hamilton, Charles Halton, Jed Prouty, George Cleveland, Sara Berner, Charles Lane and Sterling Holloway (as a soda jerk).

Though the plot of Look Who’s Laughing isn’t particularly compelling, the comedy material provided for Edgar, Charlie and the McGees is first-rate—Zeno Klinker and Dorothy Kingsley, two scribes from Bergen’s radio show, keep him and his dummy supplied with plenty of laugh-getting quips, while Fibber & Molly receive assistance from creator-writer Don Quinn and Leonard L. Levinson (Levinson would later assume the post of head writer for Hal Peary’s spin-off The Great Gildersleeve). There are a couple of prized physical comedy sequences here as well; one involves an out-of-control dishwasher and the other a wild airplane that’s so well-done I didn’t even mind that it involves obvious stuntmen, miniatures and process-screen work.

Look Who’s Laughing was the second feature film showcasing the Jordans as the famous radio couple (their debut was 1937’s This Way Please, which also features solo work by Mrs. Jack Benny, Mary Livingstone) and the notion of teaming them with Edgar & Charlie was a stroke of genius. The film did well at the box-office, prompting the four stars to re-team for Here We Go Again. An attempt at future Fibber & Molly vehicles fizzled out with 1944’s Heavenly Days, a bouncy wartime comedy-musical that has its moments, but can’t hold a candle to its earlier celluloid siblings. I'd heartily recommend Look Who's Laughing, though, and I would most enthusiastically recommend purchasing it from Finders Keepers; their print is simply superb.

Charlie McCarthy, noir-style

I finally finished the FGRA project earlier today, and I guess it goes without saying that I was a little burned out listening to OTR, so I shoved the Jack Benny project aside momentarily and treated myself to a movie from the stack of DVDs I recently purchased from Finders Keepers. It was kind of hard to choose, but I gave the 1939 feature film Charlie McCarthy, Detective the tap.

In this short-and-sweet feature, Bergen & McCarthy play themselves, a successful night club act who find themselves mixed up in a murder case involving an unscrupulous magazine editor, Arthur Aldrich (Louis Calhern), who’s had one of his reporters, Bill Banning (John Sutton), jailed before Banning can reveal the connection between his boss and gangster Tony Garcia (Harold Huber). Aldrich is murdered during a party at his estate, and both Banning (who’s escaped from jail) and Garcia are among the suspects. Robert Cummings is also in the film, playing another reporter who’s attempting to help Banning, and Constance Moore is Banning’s fiancée, Sheila Stuart. The film is actually a fairly straightforward little B-mystery pic, with only occasional comic relief from Edgar & Charlie; in fact, the film’s title is a bit of a misnomer—it’s Edgar who ends up solving the case, which I have to admit had an interesting twist at the film’s end. (Bergen could have gotten into the radio detective game if ever he and Charlie had a parting of the ways.)

Charlie McCarthy, Detective was a quickly produced B-picture made to cash in on the success of the duo’s appearance in the classic 1939 W.C. Fields’ comedy You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man (which may very well be their finest hour on screen). In Detective, Edgar and Charlie are reunited with actress Moore, who played Fields’ daughter in Honest Man. (Moore also had an uncredited bit as an autograph seeker in Bergen & McCarthy’s first feature film appearance, Letter of Introduction [1938].) It’s also interesting to note that prior to Edgar Bergen’s success on radio with The Chase & Sanborn Hour, the ventriloquist had quite the movie career, appearing in a series of 14 one-reelers for Vitaphone between 1930 and 1937, the year of his radio debut. (The shorts didn’t make many waves at the time, but proved popular in re-release once Bergen & McCarthy took radio audiences by storm.) 

I was a bit surprised by Charlie McCarthy, Detective in that I had envisioned it to be similar to one of those Bob Hope vehicles in which the comedy is played against a backdrop of menace (My Favorite Blonde, My Favorite Brunette, etc.). Charlie is around strictly for comic relief, and in fact performs a novelty number entitled “I’m Charlie McCarthy, Detective.” (My favorite part is when Charlie—clad in deerstalker cap and inverness cape—rips his pants and turns to Bergen saying, “Quick, Watson—the needle!”) Edgar’s other dummy, Mortimer Snerd, also appears in the film—but he doesn’t have a lot to do. But the comedy from Bergen and his dummies is sort of on the weak side; it’s not nearly as good as some of the dialogue and routines in, say, Look Who’s Laughing (1941).

In watching this film, I couldn’t help but be distracted by the fact that Bergen—I know this sounds like blasphemy, but it’s true—wasn’t a particularly great ventriloquist. So when people often posit the question “How could they put a ventriloquist on the radio?” I think in Bergen’s case, it was pretty much a godsend. Bergen would often modestly joke about his lips moving by having Charlie heckle him about it. (Bergen himself was characteristically honest about his limited talents; he even commented once that one of his rivals, Shirley Dinsdale, was “the best natural ventriloquist I ever saw.”)

Charlie McCarthy, Detective is certainly not the best film I’ve ever watched, but it’s a breezy and enjoyable little diversion, with a great cast of character actors including Edgar Kennedy, Samuel S. Hinds, Charles Lane, Anne Gwynne, and an incredibly young Milburn Stone, the future Doc Adams of TV’s Gunsmoke. Warren Hymer is also in this film, and he plays—I know this is gonna be a shocker—a dumb hoodlum. (Did Hymer ever make a movie in which he played a brainy guy?) The direction is by Frank Tuttle, who specialized in musical comedies like Roman Scandals (1933), College Holiday (1936) and Waikiki Wedding (1937), but also demonstrated a flair for crime and murder pics like the original The Glass Key (1935) and This Gun For Hire (1942), the film that made Alan Ladd a sensation. Ladd, of course, starred in the 1942 remake of Key, one of my favorite “stop-and-watch” movies (if I’m flipping channels and see it playing, I’ll stop and watch it). Now if I could just stop confusing Harold Huber with Joseph Calleia, I'll be okay...

OTR on the (small) screen

I was doing a little random surfing earlier this morning, and I skated on over to Finders Keepers, a nice little video/DVD business overseen by the Grams siblings, Martin, Jr. ("the Isaac Asimov of OTR books") and Virginia. I have been meaning to make a purchase from them for quite some time now, yet something always seems to cut in line--but I had a little disposal income this payday, and I figured I would order a few titles. (Martin scored a VHS copy of Abbott & Costello's It Ain't Hay for me a while back, so I knew the movie quality was top-notch.)

They have so many great offerings over at the website, it's difficult not to go hog wild--but I settled on five choices, which I hope to be able to review here on the blog in the upcoming weeks: Goin' to Town (1944), the fifth Lum & Abner feature (I decided not to wait on Critics' Choice Video for this one); Look Who's Laughing (1941) and sequel Here We Go Again (1942), the two RKO films starring Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy and Fibber McGee & Molly (I saw these years ago when I still had TCM, but it will nice to revisit); The Life of Riley (1948) (I've not seen this one but the positive buzz is that it's one of the best OTR-to-film offerings); and Charlie McCarthy, Detective (1939), another film that I have not seen but am anxious to view.

Martin gave the OTR Digest a heads up sometime back that they were going to discontinue a few titles, and I noticed that the Our Miss Brooks television episodes they had for sale have disappeared. (I could kick myself for not ordering those sooner.) I should get the above titles in about 2-3 weeks, so as soon as they arrive I will offer up my thoughts.