What did the film stars of the 1920s-1930s make of the 1950s-1960s?

[Benzadmiral]

That is a great quote in a movie full of great quotes. Not a week goes by that my girlfriend or I don't use "I'm ready for my close-up, Mr DeMille" (as a short hand for "I'm ready when you are") which is a bastardized version of the real quote "Alright Mr DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up," but it flows better the altered way in normal conversation.

The film also resonates, after you've watched it even once, with an air of doom and tragedy. Almost all of Billy Wilder's films leave you with an emotional "overcast" or aura after they end, either depressing (as here and in Double Indemnity) or cheerful (The Apartment, Spirit of St. Louis, Witness for the Prosecution).

I hesitate to use the word "aftertaste," since that has a negative connotation. "Flavor" would probably be better.

 

[Fading Fast]

The film also resonates, after you've watched it even once, with an air of doom and tragedy. Almost all of Billy Wilder's films leave you with an emotional "overcast" or aura after they end, either depressing (as here and in Double Indemnity) or cheerful (The Apartment, Spirit of St. Louis, Witness for the Prosecution).

I hesitate to use the word "aftertaste," since that has a negative connotation. "Flavor" would probably be better.

I agree with all this, but I'm not sure I came out of "The Apartment" or "Witness for the Prosecution" feeling cheerful despite the technically positive outcome of those movies. The personal evil - the "man's inhumanity to man" at a very granular level - in those movies was so disturbing that a "cheerful" outcome couldn't overcome the depressing feeling I get when I think back on them.

For "The Apartment," my first thought of the movie is alway of Fred MacMurray's full indifference to morality. He isn't cruel if you don't get in his way and isn't cruel for the joy of it - he just wants his affairs and views any obstacle as fair game to be be driven over. It's a self-centered almost bored cruelness that I've seen so often in life and that is why I think I find it so depressing - it's so real.

"Sunset Blvd." is less about man's cruelty to man than it is about life's small and large cruelties we all endure. Norma Desmond just experienced them on a very large and visible scale.

But as I noted, you are spot on - Wilder movies leave an impression or, as you said, an "emotional overcast," that reflects the genius of his moviemaking.

 

[Stanley Doble]

A lot of people feel nostalgia for their youth. George Burns for all his success, looked back on his days in vaudeville as the happiest of his life and often said all he ever wanted was to be a good song and dance man. That did not stop him from making Burns and Allen one of the biggest acts in radio and television, or from producing some very popular TV shows in the fifties and sixties.

For some of the same feeling watch Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee. If you are not familiar, it is a show where Jerry Seinfeld drives around with another comedian in an old car talking about show business. With the older guys like Don Rickles, Steve Martin and Jay Leno there is a definite feeling of nostalgia for the good old days.

Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee by Jerry Seinfeld

 

[LizzieMaine]

The best "nostalgic reminiscence" of early 20th century show business is Fred Allen's unfinished autobiography "Much Ado About Me," published posthumously in 1956. Allen spends a lot of time in this book reminiscing about the bizarre acts and odd incidents he ran into over the course of his stage career -- but at the same time he's brutally frank about his childhood, where he and his brother were abandoned by their drunken father after the death of their mother, and they were raised by an aunt whose husband, a plumber, would die a slow death from lead poisoning. Much of his nostalgia about late 19th Century Boston is tempered by vivid memories of the rancid stench of the Brighton Abattoir, where his sickly uncle would go to drink fresh cattle blood from a pail in hopes of curing his illness.

His show-biz reminiscences are similarly tart -- he was very fond of vaudeville as a millieu, but he was also honest about it being a brutal way to make a living, and one which broke a lot of people. His reminiscences of his later radio career are just as honest -- his volume dealing with that period, published in 1954, is called "Treadmill To Oblivion." I recommend both these books for a refreshing look at the periods in question -- good humored, but entirely lacking in "good ole days" schmaltz.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Funny thing about Allen, he always called his audience 'yucks' and similar names, and considered radio fans to be some kind of sub human lacking in intelligence taste and manners.

On the other hand Alex Woolcott found the opposite was true. He had experience writing for newspapers and magazines as well as doing a regular radio program and he thought radio audiences were remarkably sharp and well informed. He said that if he made a mistake of fact, no matter how esoteric or obscure, dozens of radio fans would call the station with the correct information within minutes.

To explain the difference you would have to listen to both programs and realize that they appealed to completely different audiences.Their assumptions became self fulfilling as Allen did a moronic show to appeal to the lowest common denominator while Woolcott's was pitched to a higher intellectual level.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I've listened to hundreds of Allen's programs, from 1932 thru the end of his life, and I honestly haven't found that to be the case at all. Allen, was in fact, the favorite radio comedian of the intellectual set of the 1930s, and at the time it was considered that his program was a bit too rarefied for Joe Blow in the street, and the ad agency was constantly on him to "dumb it down." On the other hand, only two of Woollcott's own programs and a handful of guest shots on other programs survive in recorded form, and if they're representative of the whole, I'd have to say the portrait offered in "The Man Who Came To Dinner"is not an exaggeration. While his written essays, such as those collected in "When Rome Burns" and other books, are entertaining, his radio delivery was self-consciously prissy and mannered, which made him a wide-open target for parody. Woollcott is very good, though, as a guest panelist on "Information Please," where he often seems to be willingly parodying his own persona.

Allen's comments about "yucks" referred to the kind of tourists who made up the studio audiences for radio programs -- people who were less interested in what was actually said in the programs than in the thrilling experience of seeing people in business suits standing around microphones reading off pieces of paper, and even more specifically about the kind of a class of people who attended the "second show" done for the West Coast from midnight to 1am, many of whom were too drunk to know what was going on in the broadcast. He strongly protested the network's insistence that he use a studio audience, believing that radio comedians were most effective when they concentrated fully on the audience at home.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

In the late 70s I was living in Santa Barbara and heard an interesting story. John Travolta had a house there and he was a huge Cagney fan. Cagney was retired on Martha's Vineyard but occasionally came out to SB to visit with old friends. Travolta asked Cagney to stay at his house next time he visited and Cagney took him up on it. Travolta's career had hit a low point after a string of flops and one evening he asked Cagney how he'd stood it in Hollywood where one day you're everyone's friend and they all want to be close to you and the next you're a leper and nobody is returning your calls. Cagney told him: "Kid, vaudeville was so cutthroat Hollywood was a piece of cake by comparison."

 

[Stanley Doble]

I think I have only seen one bit of film with Woolcott on it. He had a flat nasal voice with little or no expression which I believe is typical of parts of New England and the Midwest. I can see where the voice and appearance could be funny even when he intended to be serious. If The Man Who Came To Dinner was indeed patterned after him, an actor who could capture that personality would be much funnier than Monte Wooley.

I have read books by both and my impression is, Woolcott was genuinely smart, well read and well informed while Allen was an intellectual only by comparison with other vaudeville actors. Have also heard a few Allen radio programs and was not impressed. He seemed to be straining to seem clever and funny and falling short most of the time.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Allen's work stands the test of time for me. His newsreel parodies of the late 1930s were the most trenchant commentaries on the trivialities of the time to be found in any medium, and his "Mighty Allen Art Players" sketches, especially when they dealt with the idiocies of the movie or radio business, did not endear him to network or agency officials, a class of people who deserved every bit of mockery sent their way.

Woollcott's radio schtick was pretty much as portrayed in "The Man Who Came To Dinner." His "Town Crier" program was basically a radio version of his columns, in which he would give his thoughts on the issues of the moment, review plays and books, and -- more often than not -- go on at great length about how much better the culture of the 1890s was than the proletarian tripe of the 1930s. If the Internet had existed in 1934, Bro. Woollcott would have been the chief moderator at the Boiled Derby Lounge.

It must be said, though, that Woollcott himself was in on the joke. He himself played the role of Sheridan Whiteside in a road-company version of "The Man Who Came To Dinner," and gave a very credible performance. He also gets points for losing his sponsor -- Cream of Wheat -- in 1935 by refusing to delete remarks critical of Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia from one of his programs.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

You mean that a company that used a grinning darkie as its mascot objected to criticism of a fascist dictator invading a sovereign, ancient African nation? Say it ain't so!

 

[LizzieMaine]

You mean that a company that used a grinning darkie as its mascot objected to criticism of a fascist dictator invading a sovereign, ancient African nation? Say it ain't so!

Yep. The reasoning was that even Fascists enjoy a bowl of hot steaming breakfast cereal on a cold winter day.

This isn't the worst example of why the Boys deserved all the reproach they got from the satirists of the Era. In 1939, R. J. Reynolds Tobacco dropped its sponsorship of Eddie Cantor because of his outspoken criticism of Father Coughlin and Hitler -- don't want to risk alienating the Bundist market. Cantor was subsequently hired by Bristol-Myers -- on the condition that he never do anything in public to give the impression "that he was ever guilty of a serious thought or deed."

Radio comedians in the Era had to contend with this sort of thing all the time -- if their public views were in any way considered offensive to any established pressure group, the sponsor would either beat them into submission or fire them. There was very little anti-Fascist commentary in American radio comedy during the 1930s because of this -- Amos 'n' Andy got away with doing a storyline satirizing Fascism in 1935 only because it was more about Huey Long on the surface than about Hitler and Mussolini, but other than that and Cantor's occasional gibes -- which he was careful to wrap in a "keep it over there" isolationism that would have been comforting to Hearstites and Liberty Leaguers -- most comedians stayed far away from material with any political shading. In all of Fred Allen's existing programs from 1935 thru 1939, I've found no mention at all of Hitler or any character resembling him, and only one mention of Mussolini -- in a 1938 broadcast, Allen interviewed "the last New York organ grinder," an Italian immigrant of obvious anti-Fascist sympathies who had trained his monkey to execute a Fascist salute at the mention of the Duce's name. The monkey did so during the broadcast, much to the delight of the studio audience.

Pretty much the only radio personality of the Era who got away with freely and directly attacking Hitler and Mussolini whenever he wanted to was Walter Winchell -- who was more powerful than any sponsor and knew it, and also enjoyed the personal protection of J. Edgar Hoover.

 

[PeterB]

Couldn't resist chiming in. The early lives / childhoods of most famous entertainers before the war, at any rate, were pretty horrific, if only because they were almost all of them professional entertainers before they reached the age of eight. Burns, Benny, Fields, Astaire and others were earning their livings on stage in early childhood, so by the time they were grown, they were 100% professional. Imagine that when Jack Benny was in his 70s, he had been performing in public for about 70 years. No wonder he was so good. Their early lives were hard, there is no doubt about that. I haven't come across Fred Allen's book, but I will try to find it. It sounds interesting. George Burns was occasionally interviewed about his childhood, and it was certainly another world. "Cut throat" is an understatement.

 

[Stanley Doble]

The big problem back then was that each program had one sponsor. Listeners would blame the sponsor for anything they didn't like and flood their offices with outraged letters. The sponsor was not spending his money on advertising to drive away customers. So the onus would be on the program to not offend anybody. Allen reported that one day while trying to write his show the producer shot down joke after joke and idea after idea on the grounds that it might offend someone. The last straw was when he suggested a joke about a man with a glass eye and the producer shrieked "my God! Don't you know the sponsor's brother in law has a glass eye?".

People were even touchy about a character's job or profession. If they made the villain in a radio play an accountant, they would be flooded with letters from accountants and their families complaining that accountants are not mean. This was beside the point but people complained anyway. W C Fields gave one of his characters the profession of reindeer milker for this reason, figuring there could not be more than one or two professional reindeer milkers in America.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Couldn't resist chiming in. The early lives / childhoods of most famous entertainers before the war, at any rate, were pretty horrific, if only because they were almost all of them professional entertainers before they reached the age of eight. Burns, Benny, Fields, Astaire and others were earning their livings on stage in early childhood, so by the time they were grown, they were 100% professional. Imagine that when Jack Benny was in his 70s, he had been performing in public for about 70 years. No wonder he was so good. Their early lives were hard, there is no doubt about that. I haven't come across Fred Allen's book, but I will try to find it. It sounds interesting. George Burns was occasionally interviewed about his childhood, and it was certainly another world. "Cut throat" is an understatement.

Everybody's lives were horrific back then unless you were among the top 5%. At least by our standards. I remember a newspaper columnist in a Toronto paper in the sixties. He commented on a news story about an elderly woman who was removed from her home which was condemned by the city. They listed about 10 deficiencies which caused it to be condemned, like no running water, no indoor plumbing, no electricity, no lath and plaster walls, no central heating etc. The columnist commented that other than lath and plaster walls the house he grew up in, in the teens and twenties, had none of the amenities on the list. He came from a respectable lower middle class or working class family who never considered themselves poor or hard up, and lived in a rural area of similar homes and families. My mother grew up on a farm that was likewise devoid of modern conveniences, except electricity and liked to brag that they had a telephone and an automobile right through the depression which was more than the neighbors could claim.

George Burns like to tell stories of his youth, and claimed his first show business experience was singing for throw money with the Pee Wee Quartet when he was seven. But he grew up in a respectable Jewish family in New York and probably went to work in show business in his late teens, about the time every boy started working for a living in those days. Jack Benny was a Navy veteran in WW1 and his first show business job was accompanying a singer on his violin. When he lost that job he did a single and added jokes and patter along with the music, and eventually dropped the violin almost entirely except as a comedy prop.

Fred Astaire broke in as a teenager accompanying his older sister Adele in her dance act. He was hardly a lonely homeless waif, the siblings had the support of their parents when they started performing. He only went to Hollywood after she retired. He was 32 at the time,

Fields claimed he ran away from home at 13 and developed his first juggling act.

It is not always easy to get at the truth. We are talking about professional entertainers who saw nothing wrong with embellishing the truth in the interest of publicity. You might be wise to suspect claims of getting a standing ovation at the Palace or being offered $10,000 a week by Shubert but you might also suspect tales of being chased through the snow by wolves and fighting alley cats for fish heads.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The big problem back then was that each program had one sponsor. Listeners would blame the sponsor for anything they didn't like and flood their offices with outraged letters. The sponsor was not spending his money on advertising to drive away customers. So the onus would be on the program to not offend anybody. Allen reported that one day while trying to write his show the producer shot down joke after joke and idea after idea on the grounds that it might offend someone. The last straw was when he suggested a joke about a man with a glass eye and the producer shrieked "my God! Don't you know the sponsor's brother in law has a glass eye?".

People were even touchy about a character's job or profession. If they made the villain in a radio play an accountant, they would be flooded with letters from accountants and their families complaining that accountants are not mean. This was beside the point but people complained anyway. W C Fields gave one of his characters the profession of reindeer milker for this reason, figuring there could not be more than one or two professional reindeer milkers in America.

And if you could get something past a sponsor you still had the network to deal with. "Continuity Acceptance" had a long list of Things You Mustn't Mention, and these lists were enforced by officials especially chosen for their lack of a sense of humor. Janet MacRorie at NBC in the 1930s was a no-nonsense woman who wouldn't be distracted by laughter when vetting comedians' scripts, and she was Fred Allen's arch-enemy thruout those years. She especially hated his habit of ad-libbing -- which was a major element of his long-established comic persona -- and would write long, crabbed memos demanding that the ad agency rein in his tendency to "libel, derogatory reference, and vulgarity."

Now, other than the occasional "the beaver didn't give a dam" type of line, there was nothing vulgar in Allen's material, certainly nothing to compare with some of the material W. C. Fields got away with on the Chase & Sanborn Hour, so it's difficult to understand exactly what she was getting at -- and the "libel" charge is quite a stretch. But Allen very often did make derogatory reference in his scripts -- most often to censors, network officials, and ad-agency executives, and the more thin-skinned said executives proved themselves to be, the more he'd go at them. Admen and media executives tended to be viewed with a good bit of contempt in the 1930s -- the success of "Ballyhoo" magazine in the early part of the decade, a sort of proto-Mad, set up a whole trend for "derogatory references" to the sacred profession of sales, and a goodly number of radio listeners wanted and appreciated that style of humor. So Allen was able to get things thru over MacRorie's opposition, which just made her dig in harder.

There were only two acts at NBC in the thirties that weren't required to submit their scripts to Continuity Acceptance before broadcasting -- Amos 'n Andy, who were given an exception because they usually wrote their program just before air time, and Bob Burns, the Arkansas "bazooka" comedian heard on Bing Crosby's program, whose routines were considered so innocuous that the network was comfortable letting him go without review. But everyone else had to run the Continuity Acceptance gauntlet, and found it just as frustrating as Allen did.

All of this came to a head in the 1940s. MacRorie's successor, Clarence Mesner, was not a humorless man -- he was the production executive who approved "Vic and Sade" in the early thirties, so he clearly had an appreciation for wit. But he was also a devoted company man, the very definition of a network suit, and he'd let comedians have a long leash as long as they didn't criticize the network in any way. Allen, who considered Mesner a "petty tyrant," was not willing to compromise on that point, and continued to jab at "vice presidents" in his routines until finally Mesner threatened to cut him off the air if he went ahead with a particular vice-president joke. Allen refused to back down, did the bit as written, and Mesner cut him off the air for twenty-five seconds.

This incident sparked a nationwide outrage, with the American Civil Liberties Union opening an investigation into NBC's "suppression of free speech," which escalated when Mesner cut off Red Skelton and Bob Hope for making jokes about Allen being cut off. Radio columnists took up the cause and ridiculed the network for its inability to see its own pomposity, listeners began letterwriting campaigns to get Mesner fired, and finally Allen's sponsor demanded a refund for the twenty-five seconds cut out of the program. That last demand was the last straw, and Mesner was canned, replaced by a new Continuity Acceptance chief who went out of his way to be accomodating to the comedians, and let them freely criticize the network. The self-referential freedom that such programs as "Saturday Night Live" would enjoy in future decades stems from this one incident.

 

[FedoraFan112390]

Those directly comparing the air of social change and 'freedom' in the 20s to the '60s...or even the 30s to the 60s...I myself can't reconcile these two images as being from the same vintage:

 

[LizzieMaine]

Jolson was largely a figure of the 1910s -- his peak popularity occured in the early twenties, but he was, in his style and his choice of material very much a pre-WW1 figure. A more apt comparision might be --

This was actually pretty conservative stuff by Broadway standards in the mid-twenties. Nudity was common in mainstream chorus-girl revues of that period -- more mainstream, even, than it was in the sixties. Fred Allen, in "Much Ado About Me" refers to his experience in delivering a comedy monologue immediately following a routine by nude chorines in the 1924 Shubert show "Artists and Models" as being intended as "an antidote to sex." Al Jolson himself was the headliner of the 1927 edition of this show, which topped all previous editions with a chorus of more than a hundred entirely naked women.

As far as social unrest and change are concerned, consider the National Hunger March of 1932, when tens of thousands of unemployed Americans marched in protest, and the Bonus Army campaign of July 1932, where over forty thousand unemployed veterans fought hand-to-hand in the streets of Washington against police and the Army.

F. the police, 1932 style. Said one veteran, "The American flag means nothing to me after this."

The labor wars of the thirties also were in the vanguard of social change. The Memorial Day Massacre in Chicago in 1937 saw ten unarmed demonstrators against the unfair labor practices of the Republic Steel Company murdered in cold blood by police -- you might call it the "Kent State" of the thirties if you were so inclined.

And yes, there was much, much more. The Sixties couldn't hold a candle to the violent social upheavals of the Thirties.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Anybody can work dirty. A little girl can say 'poop poop' and her friends will laugh. Comedians always go for the easy laugh, or the desperate laugh but it soon loses effectiveness. So then you have to think up something dirtier. Now we have witless so called comics who couldn't do a clean act at any price, and whose best audience is a room full of drunks. You can have them.

 

[LizzieMaine]

It was swanky nightclubs where you'd find the smeariest comedians of the Era -- even Edgar Bergen, who was a clean-cut family favorite on radio later on, was known for leering innuendoes in his nightclub act at the Rainbow Room. Quite a bit of that style carried over into his radio performances during his first couple of years on the air, with Charlie McCarthy's encounter with Mae West, in which she invited him to "come up and play in my....woodpile," being the most notorious. Charlie himself was up to the challenge, with Miss West declaring him to be "all wood and a yard long," a line which probably caused Janet MacRorie to fall over dead in a faint.

Milton Berle also had a reputation for working dirty which was especially pronounced during his Broadway days -- a grundyish review in a 1932 issue of "Time" called his performance in "Earl Carroll's Vanities" "the acme of hysterical vulgarity," in which Berle first did an exaggerated impersonation of a flouncing homosexual, and then commented at length on the "fundamentals" of the topless chorus girls. Berle cleaned up his material quite a bit for television in the late 1940s, but he still had a reputation for dodginess.

The movie team of Wheeler and Woolsey also picked up a reputation for blue comedy, due primarily to one film -- the notorious "So This Is Africa," which had the distinction of having the thickest censor file in the history of the MPPDA. Even with all the cuts that were done -- nearly half an hour of the original 90 minute running time was eliminated -- it was still pretty raunchy stuff, and is capable of raising eyebrows even when seen today.

 

[Fading Fast]

Jolson was largely a figure of the 1910s -- his peak popularity occured in the early twenties, but he was, in his style and his choice of material very much a pre-WW1 figure. A more apt comparision might be --

This was actually pretty conservative stuff by Broadway standards in the mid-twenties. Nudity was common in mainstream chorus-girl revues of that period -- more mainstream, even, than it was in the sixties. Fred Allen, in "Much Ado About Me" refers to his experience in delivering a comedy monologue immediately following a routine by nude chorines in the 1924 Shubert show "Artists and Models" as being intended as "an antidote to sex." Al Jolson himself was the headliner of the 1927 edition of this show, which topped all previous editions with a chorus of more than a hundred entirely naked women.

As far as social unrest and change are concerned, consider the National Hunger March of 1932, when tens of thousands of unemployed Americans marched in protest, and the Bonus Army campaign of July 1932, where over forty thousand unemployed veterans fought hand-to-hand in the streets of Washington against police and the Army.

F. the police, 1932 style. Said one veteran, "The American flag means nothing to me after this."

The labor wars of the thirties also were in the vanguard of social change. The Memorial Day Massacre in Chicago in 1937 saw ten unarmed demonstrators against the unfair labor practices of the Republic Steel Company murdered in cold blood by police -- you might call it the "Kent State" of the thirties if you were so inclined.

And yes, there was much, much more. The Sixties couldn't hold a candle to the violent social upheavals of the Thirties.

Great images and, IMHO, they support the premise that the '60s brought together - and were the next highly visible manifestation of - the "softer" 1920s' social changes of a more accepting attitude - amongst the young anyway - toward dress, drugs, drinking, dancing and sex. Whereas, the serious social changes of civil rights and an enlarged gov't safety net of the '60s directly connect back to the highly visible struggles in the '30s of workers rights, early civil rights and gov't provided social programs.

The second-half of the '60s had a lot on its plate along with a not unrelated war in Vietnam. I felt the storm and stress as a young kid of 6, but had no framework or perspective for it - it was just "out" there as one neighbor lost a daughter to drugs and another a son to Vietnam, as we changed where we'd go to get the late-edition since it wasn't safe to go into town late at night, as when you saw hippies on the side of the road and on and on.