September 6 & 13 | 4 Shorts, 13 Features
Puppets aren't the first thing that come to mind when you think of big screen spectacle but in a few films they steal the show. Think of the giant ape, an animated articulated doll animated frame by frame, in the original King Kong (1933) or the fuzzy felt friends in the musical road movie comedy The Muppet Movie (1979). And… okay, there's not a lot of them but a few have made their mark in the movies, either as stars in their own right or as fascinating characters that challenge their flesh-and-blood costars for attention.
The first day in the tribute to Classic Movie Puppets is heavy on ventriloquists and their dummies, in particular one pair that became one of America's favorite comedy teams. For decades, America's most famous puppet was Charlie McCarthy, the wisecracking dummy on the lap of Edgar Bergen. Bergen designed and built his dummy when he was a teenager learning the art of ventriloquism and took the act to vaudeville and then the club circuit. The act became so big that the pair went to radio and remained on the air with a weekly show for almost twenty years. Yes, a ventriloquist act became two of the most popular radio stars in America, thanks to Bergen's comic chops and the public's embrace of his alter ego, the wise-cracking, girl-crazy kid in a top hat and tux named Charlie McCarthy. Though ostensibly an eleven-year-old boy, Charlie was dressed like a debonair man about town, complete with a monocle, and his precocious banter was peppered with witty insults and (when it came to flirting with flesh and blood women) double entendres that no human comic could get away with on the air. Charlie's personality was so distinctive that Candice Bergen, daughter of Edgar, later wrote that her father had a stronger relationship with his wooden dummy than with her.
Before becoming a radio sensation, Edgar Bergen brought Charlie McCarthy to the movies in a series of two-reel comedy short, such as Two Boobs in a Balloon (1935), which sends the pair into the stratosphere in a hot air balloon. Charlie heckles vaudeville acts in Bring on the Girls (1937), essentially providing the comic relief between the attractions of a variety show, while his flirtatious side dominates Nut Guilty (1936), where he gets to play junior judge for a day and hits on all the women who come before him, and A Neckin' Party (1937), which sends the duo south of the border where Charlie's pursuit of a lovely senorita gets him in hot water with her hot-tempered boyfriend. During the run of the radio series, Bergen created Mortimer Snerd, a goofy, drawling hayseed, and he makes an early screen appearance here.
They made the leap to features as guest stars in films like The Goldwyn Follies (1938) and You Can't Cheat an Honest Man (1939) and teamed up with fellow radio stars Fibber McGee and Molly McGee (the fictional alter egos of actors Jim and Marian Jordan) to headline Look Who's Laughing (1941). Here We Go Again (1942), as the title suggests, reunites the stars, this time with Mortimer Snerd joining the fun at a rustic lodge. The film also features "Fibber McGee and Molly" costars Harold Peary (as Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve), Gale Gordon (playing Molly's former boyfriend Otis Cadwalader), and Bill Thompson (as meek inventor Wallace Wimple). If Thompson's voice sounds familiar, it's likely for his distinctive work voicing such animated characters as the White Rabbit in Walt Disney's Alice in Wonderland (1951), Mr. Smee in Peter Pan (1953) and Droopy in the MGM animated shorts.
If Charlie McCarthy is the most famous ventriloquist puppet of the 20th century, the demonic dummy is arguably the most memorable cinematic incarnation of the relationship between the ventriloquist and its puppet. You can trace the roots back to The Great Gabbo (1929), with Erich von Stroheim as the comic whose dummy becomes a kind of alter-ego offstage, but the first great incarnation is in the final tale of the British horror anthology Dead of Night (1945) with Michael Redgrave as a ventriloquist whose doll appears to have a mind of its own. This mix of psychological drama and supernatural horror has a curious connection to the Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy comedies. Redgrave learned to throw his voice by training under British ventriloquist Peter Brough, who became a star when (like Bergen) he brought is act to radio. The feature itself, the only horror film produced by England's famous Ealing Studios, was enormously influential for its anthology format (inspiring dozens of future productions like Tales from the Crypt, 1972, and Twilight Zone: The Movie, 1983) and for its ingenious circular structure.
It's the grandfather of ventriloquist horror cinema and you can see its influence on Magic (1978), starring Anthony Hopkins as a failed stage magician who finds success when he adds ventriloquism to the act with a dummy named Fats. Like Redgrave, Hopkins prepared for the role by training with a professional ventriloquist, and his teacher, Dennis Alwood, confessed that the lines between the performer and the personality of its doll could indeed become blurred in reality. Hopkins experienced the phenomenon first hand when, after blowing a line during a take, Fats popped his head up and yelled "Cut!"
The great French mime Marcel Marceau took his only feature film lead in Shanks (1974), taking a dual role as both a mute puppeteer with a marionette theater and a scientist who discovers the secret of reanimating the corpses of the dead. It was the final film directed by cult filmmaker William Castle, who built a career out of offbeat projects, clever gimmicks, and sheer ballyhoo. You could say that Marceau's appearance was the gimmick in Shanks but it's his talent as a mime—along with those of fellow mimes portraying the reanimated bodies clumsily ambulating as if manipulated from afar—that sets this film apart.
Silent movie legend Lon Chaney is the ventriloquist in The Unholy Three (1930), a sound remake of his 1925 crime thriller featuring Chaney as the leader of a crime ring made up of former circus performers. It was Chaney's first "talkie" and it showcased another facet of the actor known as "the man of a thousand faces": his gift for voices and mimicry, which was a key plot element in the gang's modus operandi. Sadly, it was also Chaney's final feature. The actor died of bronchial cancer weeks after the film's successful release. And Ida Lupino plays a nightclub ventriloquist caught up in their complicated web of romantic and business interests in Fight for Your Lady (1937), a show business comedy starring Jack Oakie as a desperate promotor and John Boles as his new client.
The second evening opens a whole world of puppetry in the movies, beginning with the most famous puppet stars of the past fifty years. Jim Henson combined traditional puppet figures, marionettes, and sock puppets for his Muppets, which he made of felt with working mouths and limbs (and in some cases, even hands) that gave the puppeteer greater expressiveness. They became famous after appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show and participating in the educational children's show Sesame Street and, thanks to Henson's offbeat sense of humor and the distinctive personalities of his creations, they went on to star in their own hit TV variety show and a series of feature films. For the showbiz comedy The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984), their third feature, Henson created marionette versions of the Muppets to show them dancing, which were intercut with the traditional Muppet hand puppets for close-ups. It also marked the solo directing debut of Frank Oz, a longtime Henson collaborator and the puppeteer and voice behind Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Grover, Cookie Monster, Yoda in Star Wars, and other beloved Muppets. He went on to a very successful career behind the camera, helming the Steve Martin comedies Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) and Bowfinger (1999) and the heist thriller The Score (2001) with Robert De Niro, among others.
Gerry and Sylvia Anderson mastered their own distinctive approach to puppetry in a series of British action shows for kids featuring a mix of Supermarionation (their version of articulated marionette puppets) and elaborate miniature models of fantastical vehicles. Thunderbirds, which featured a team of American heroes saving the world with their space age toys, was their most successful show, running for two seasons and going on to two feature film spinoffs that upped the ante on the spectacle. In Thunderbirds Are Go! (1966), the family of heroes steps in when a Mars rocket is sabotaged, while Thunderbird 6 (1968) features their British cohort Lady Penelope trying to stop a plot to ambush the boys. The films bring new meaning to the term "wooden performance" and the American figures are rather bland and interchangeable, but those high tech toys are like big kid fantasies come alive and the miniature effects are painstakingly crafted and executed with a sense of awe and wonder. They were so impressive in their day that Stanley Kubrick contacted them while preparing to make 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Their first feature also has another inspired highlight: a marionette version of British rock star Cliff Richards performing in a crazy music video with a rocket-powered guitar. Trey Parker parodied the Andersons's Supermarionation style in general and Thunderbirds in particular in the action spoof Team America: World Police (2004).
Filmmaker Bert I. Gordon earned a minor cult following for such low-budget science fiction and giant creature features as The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) and Empire of the Ants (1977), films that earned him the nickname "Mr. B.I.G." Attack of the Puppet People (1958) goes the other direction with the tale of a retired marionette puppeteer turned mad dollmaker who has found a way to shrink people and preserve them as his own living dolls. In one scene, one of the miniaturized people battles a wooden marionette in the middle of the puppeteer's show.
Lili (1953), starring Leslie Caron as a lonely orphan who joins a carnival, takes us into the realm of romantic fantasy. Shy and innocent, she opens herself up to the creations of the show's crippled puppeteer (Mel Ferrer) as if they were real. A lot of folks at MGM were wary of the unusual production. Arthur Freed, producer of her screen debut An American in Paris (1951), was afraid it would harm her image and studio executives dismissed it as "an art house picture," but the film became a hit, as did the featured song "Hi Lili, Hi Lo." It was nominated for six Academy Awards (winning for Bronislau Kaper's original score).
George Pal had earned seven Academy Award nominations and one honorary Oscar for Puppetoon short subjects, featuring his inventive stop motion animation, before making the leap to produce his first feature film. The Great Rupert (1950) is a trained squirrel who takes refuge in the attic of a family of vaudevillians (among them Jimmy Durante). The character is brought to life with a mix of a live action squirrel that scurries through the frame and an animated puppet that dances a jig. The series ends with one last ventriloquist act: The Main Attraction (1962), starring Pat Boone as an American in Europe, a singing drifter who joins a circus after losing his job in an Italian café, and Mai Zetterling as the ventriloquist who makes him part of her act.
