Mondays | 23 Movies
Comedians from Radio’s Golden Age Are Ready for Their Closeup
Don’t touch that dial!
In September, TCM pays tribute to radio.
What does radio have to do with the movies? Don’t give us any static about this; radio and the movies grew up together and enjoyed a synergistic relationship in their simultaneous golden ages.
Unlike the dread television, which was initially regarded as a palpable threat to the film industry. In 1948, four major TV networks began broadcasting a daily prime-time schedule. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, weekly movie attendance dropped from 90 million in 1946 to 60 million in 1950 and 40 million in 1960.
The crossover between movies and radio was mutually beneficial. Hollywood A-listers guested on popular radio shows to plug their current project, or even act them out. On “The Lux Radio Theatre,” for example, William Powell and Myrna Loy re-enacted “The Thin Man,” Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town” and Errol Flynn and Olivia de Haviland “Captain Blood.”
Popular radio stars, particularly the comedians, with their built-in fan bases, found audiences who wanted to see them onscreen and in the flesh, so to speak. If it was a treat to listen to W.C. Fields and dummy Charlie McCarthy exchange barbs on “The Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy Show,” it was even funnier to see the comical-looking characters in action in George Marshall’s You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man (1939):
Charlie: Are you eating a tomato, or is that your nose?
Fields: Very good, very good, Charles. You must come with me after the show to the lumberyard and ride piggyback on the buzz saw.
Charlie: Nobody’s gonna find me after the show.
Fields: Yes, they are. You’ll be hanging in my window as a Venetian blind.
Charlie: That makes me shutter.
Fields: Quiet, or I’ll throw a woodpecker on you.
Radio proved to be a fertile breeding ground for some of the screen’s biggest stars. With apologies to Howard Stern, Bob Hope was the original “king of all media.” Boffo in vaudeville and on Broadway, he parlayed his successful radio program, The Pepsodent Show, which ran from 1938-1948 and was No. 1 in the ratings for two consecutive years, into a successful movie career. Between 1941 to 1953, he was among the top 10 box office stars, and was No. 1 in 1949.
Arguably his legacy films were the “Road to” comedies he made with Bing Crosby, a towering recording artist and radio star in his own right, and big band singer and nightclub entertainer Dorothy Lamour. Road to Singapore (1940) was the first of seven, and, while more grounded and less silly than later entries, it set the template for the series, with its toss-the-script barrage of in-jokes, ad-libs and breezy banter. At one point, the boys try to wrestle a sailfish into their fishing boat. “He won’t give up,” Crosby yells. “Must be a Republican,” Hope responds.
Red Skelton, like Hope, also enjoyed a successful movie career while establishing himself on radio, and went on to topline one of the most beloved variety shows in television, the Emmy-winning The Red Skelton Show. Vincente Minnelli’s I Dood It (1943) is a remake of Buster Keaton’s silent swan song, Spite Marriage (1929). The musical takes its title from one of Skelton’s radio catchphrases.
The Big Broadcast of 1937 (1936) features a trio of legendary entertainers who were radio royalty: George Burns and Gracie Allen and Jack Benny. George and Gracie, like Hope, honed their act in vaudeville. George originally delivered the punchlines, but audiences so loved Gracie’s set-ups that he reversed their roles. “For 40 years, he once wrote, “my act consisted of one joke. And then she died.” The team would have their greatest successes on radio and television, but they livened up revue films such as this with their peerless chemistry, their dynamic exquisitely summed up by George at one point when he observes, “Talking to her is like shaking hands with an empty glove.”
Jack Benny was one of radio’s most beloved comedians. He, too, was best appreciated on radio and television. Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942) was the apex of his film career, but in movies like The Big Broadcast of 1937, he gave the audiences his more familiar radio persona, in which he was often the butt of the jokes, as when he makes a surprise visit to Shirley Ross to take her out, and is informed that she is already out with someone “taller than you, thinner than you and darker than you.” “I know, and earlier than me,” he responds.
Jack also appears in It’s in the Bag (1945), which actually stars his on-air nemesis Fred Allen, with whom he shared radio’s long-running faux feud that began with a joke on Allen’s radio show. A 10-year-old violin prodigy named Stuart Canin dazzled audiences with Schubert’s “The Bee.” Allen ad-libbed that Jack Benny, whose supposed terrible violin playing was a staple of his persona, ought to be ashamed of himself.
Unlike his contemporaries, Allen did not make the transition from radio to television (he died in 1956), but he did make his feelings about the fledgling medium known. Television, he famously quipped, is called a medium because nothing is well done.
He brought that same sardonic wit to It’s in the Bag, a rare starring role. No sooner has the film begun then he addresses the audience: “Why is it when you folks come into a theater like this to see a picture, before you can see the picture, you have to sit there and look at a list of names for 20 minutes?”
He proceeds through the credits: “Screen treatment and screenplay; these four people are now out of work. You’ll see why in just a minute….”
Another radio comedy team whose gentle comedy was better suited to the aural medium were Jim and Marian Jordan, the artists formerly known as Fibber McGee and Molly. They star in Allan Dwan’s light-hearted vehicle Look Who’s Laughing (1941) along with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. Also co-starring is Harold Peary in character as Gildersleeve, who originated as the McGee’s nettlesome neighbor and who was spun off on his own radio--and then film—series, beginning with The Great Gildersleeve (1942).
Also featured in TCM’s salute to radio is Woody Allen’s Radio Days (1987), a bittersweet reverie about radio’s golden age. (The imperious mother of the child star Whiz Kid, by the way, is portrayed by my aunt, Victoria Zussin. She appeared in several Allen films. Her most noteworthy role was in Stardust Memories (1980) as film tribute attendee Mrs. Payson, who famously tells Allen’s Sandy Bates that she likes his films, particularly his “early funny ones.”)
“Now it’s all gone,” Allen’s narrator reflects. “I've never forgotten any of those people, or any of the voices we used to hear on the radio. Although the truth is with the passing of each New Year's Eve those voices do seem to grow dimmer and dimmer.”
But not this month!
