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Top Banana and the Topkick
You know how influential TV is with children. I was no more than six when I first cast an admiring look at the Sergeant Bilko lifestyle and said to myself, now that’s the kind of man I want to grow up to be. By the time I was eight, I’d added Richard M. Nixon to that select list of inspirations (“Do you want to win? Steal!”). Well before I was twelve, Cardinal Richelieu (Armand du Plessis, onetime bishop of Luçon), had joined them as my role models. A soldier. A statesman. A man of God. Men of confidence.
In 1954, Phil Silvers was still a year away from the role that would bring him lasting fame. Top Banana had been his big breakthrough on Broadway, a hit 1952 musical about a TV comedian’s struggle to top the ratings and produce his show in the middle of chaos. Top Banana, the film, has echoes of other mid-fifties comedies about television, like the TV show finales of White Christmas and It’s Always Fair Weather; or Bob Hope’s That Certain Feeling, with its disruptive broadcast of Edward R. Murrow’s “Person to Person.” Top Banana’s New York Times review is hilarious—wildly laudatory towards Phil Silvers, a locally well-known night club comic who was then all but unknown nationally—but on the other hand, “It is hard to imagine a picture appearing more cheaply made. Even the color is shabby. It’s the cheapest-looking film we’ve ever seen.” Quite a Times review!
Unlike almost every other film made from a Broadway musical, this one deliberately made no attempt whatsoever to “open up” the staging for the movies, or to adapt it to a wider world of the things that films do that theater can’t—locations, spectacle, camera moves, editing. It was part of what was intended to be a whole series of hit Broadway musicals filmed in 3D, then delivered on screen in depth. Same actors, costumes, and sets, exactly as they appeared on stage. By the time the film premiered in 1954, the 3D boom was almost over. Released “flat”, it doesn’t look like an incredibly realistic rendering of a live theater experience, it just looks…well, flat. It comes by its “stagy” look honestly.
Phil Silvers and his mid-fifties rivals in TV comedy, Milton Berle and Jackie Gleason, knew full well they weren’t movie star material. They were all raised in a nightclub tradition that was only a half generation, if that, removed from vaudeville. All three had mediocre, B-movie credits in the forties. Middle-aged comics who finally made it big after a lifetime of struggle had memories of those who helped them, and very long memories of who did not, on their long career journeys to the top.
The Phil Silvers Show (1955-59) was produced differently than most TV shows. It wasn’t filmed in Hollywood, like I Love Lucy, or broadcast live from a New York theater, like The Honeymooners (who shrewdly made a simultaneous, lasting film copy). Bilko was filmed in a nondescript sound stage on a side street in midtown Manhattan’s garment manufacturing district. The sets, like those of most early fifties T.V., were strictly Poverty Row. As Silvers once said, “I’m funny. Scenery isn’t funny.”
The original opening credits of You’ll Never Get Rich (the original title) were rarely seen in later airings. When I found them online, I didn’t remember seeing them even in the fifties. They look strange to us now. The barked orders, marching soldiers, and packs of Camel cigarettes could be the start of a U.S. Army training camp documentary. The images don’t call out “comedy!” in the way that the more familiar animated opening does.
Despite being set in a Kansas Army base, the show’s dialog had a New Yorker’s rat-a-tat-tat nonstop schtick, a showbiz descendant of vaudeville or burlesque. As television networks reached beyond the Northeast and Midwest, T.V. personalities with a New York nightclub background, like Milton Berle, Jackie Gleason, and Phil Silvers were upstaged by newer shows filmed in Hollywood. By today’s standards, they were blander, more homogenized. Shows like Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, and Leave it to Beaver. The Phil Silvers Show managed to stay competitive right to its end in 1959, years after The Honeymooners signed off, and years after Lucy and Desi “moved to Connecticut” to get their show out of its claustrophobic New York apartment set.
Besides the public’s changing tastes, one reason the show only lasted four seasons was the cost of its relatively large cast. A typical episode might involve Bilko’s barracks, other sergeants who are (rightly) suspicious of his latest routine, the women in the Colonel’s office, and the Colonel’s wife, Mrs. Hall. That’s not counting the week’s guest actors, playing doctors, car salesmen, Navy gamblers, or Madison Avenue men. Compare it to a typically threadbare episode of The Honeymooners, another skinflint comedy with obvious sets of painted canvas. At least Silvers spread the workaround.
Once in a great while you run across something in an old film or T.V. show and suddenly see, with admittedly no proof, that a scene or an idea would later be much more famous, and the connection may not be entirely accidental.
When Bilko’s bootleg AM radio station has trouble disguising its illicit continued operations right under the noses of clueless inspecting officers, the station’s “Irish tenor” is stuck repeatedly singing “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,” for hour after tired, worn-down hour. I submit to you that there’s no way this moment wasn’t lodged in the memory of Gene Roddenberry when a Star Trek episode a dozen or so years later featured, for comic effect, an Irish-American crewman under the effects of some mass euphoric spirit affecting the Enterprise. He did the same thing: sang the same saccharine-sweet song about Kathleen, again and again, all night, to the exasperation of Captain Kirk and the rest of the crew.
The series’ final episode involves a typical Bilko get-rich-quick scheme, using a closed-circuit TV camera to set up his own bootleg station. As always, his plan fails in comical ways. What’s slightly unusual is the upshot, Colonel Hall chortling at his desk, using the closed-circuit TV to watch Bilko standing behind bars in the stockade. He waves to us wanly, and the series ends on that image, with no musical “bump,” no comic flourish.
Decades after most old black-and-white shows had faded from American airwaves, the BBC faithfully stuck with the Sarge in re-runs, keeping Ernie Bilko as an icon of brash, funny fifties Americana. So much so that in November 1987, a young British woman wearing a t-shirt with Bilko’s face inadvertently set off an incident in Tibet, with both excited Tiberian crowds and angry Chinese guards who, in the words of the LA Times, mistook the visage of the “wily barracks con man” for that of the local man-god.
But was it really a mistake? Maybe I was right in 1958. Maybe Ernest T. Bilko really was a spiritual leader, right for our times, after all.
Published in General
Agreed! Never thought of that, at all. Never even got close to thinking about it. The crewman was (or, I suppose, will be) Kevin Riley, and he was one of those rare TOS guys who did TWO episodes instead of a one-off. The ep was “The Naked Time,” in which a chemical infestation causes the entire crew to overact.
I just saw “It’s always Fair Weather” a few weeks ago. It was interesting, and had a couple really good songs. But it sure had a darker tone than any 50s musical I’ve ever seen.
If I’d ever seen a theater marquee that read, “THE NAKED TIME Co-starring Nichelle Nichols”, man, I would have bought a ticket.
I think everyone would have preferred it if she kept the outfit from “Mirror, Mirror”. And who knows, she might have preferred it herself. Sure, it was bare midriff, but the skirt was quite a bit longer.
YouTube has been scrubbed of most of the good clips of that film, esp. one of my favorites, the early montage that takes them from 1945 to 1955, covering newsreel events as well as personal ones–the Italian cook and his wife have lots of children; the Irish ne’er-do-well gambles and squires a couple of girlfriends; the rich WASP advertising man accumulates possessions.
I’ve always wanted to do a movie about me and my NYU film school buddies called “It’s Always Foul Weather”. In 1973, right after graduation at Madison Square Garden, the three of us have a drink and swear to reunite in Hollywood in ten years. In 1983, we meet again, this time at Musso and Franks on Hollywood Boulevard, and discover that we really don’t like each other.
I think you need at least one of you to become famous for a greenlight on that one.
I also liked that episode’s sword-through-the-globe logo of Evil Alternative Earth. I’m glad you brought up the hemline versus bare midriff question. Quite frankly, I’m puzzled that one can’t earn a degree in studying it.
Connecting to the OP, Star Trek has one of the great hammy con men of all time, Harry Mudd, a worthy match for Ernie Bilko. Television’s other great con man and suck up: Eddie Haskell, of Leave it to Beaver.
Marty (Brest) made Beverly Hills Cop….but then he made Gigli. He’s famous enough.
“Oh yeah… good one, Marty.”
Peg Lynch, whom I’ve mentioned before, kept the kinescopes of her network TV show. She owned the rights to her show, so there wasn’t any legal issue, but also, the network didn’t care. Saved them the trouble of dumping them in the East River. She had them on a shelf in the living room when I went to visit, and it was like looking at fossilized scrolls of ancient wisdom.
Thanks to a generous benefactor, Peg’s kines are being restored and upscaled. I’ve seen the early examples, and they’re pretty good. But now that they’ve been de-blurred . . . you can see the scan lines on the CRT. Ah well, it’s always something.
Twice! But he’s less hammy the first appearance, if memory serves – he’s more of a pimp than a buffoon. The second time they play him for laughs, and Carmel went over the top.
To this day, when recounting some mild example of marital discord to a friend, all I need to do is raise my arm and extend a finger and say “HARCOURT FENTON” and the reference is complete.
KIRK: All right, Harry, explain. How did you get here? We left you in custody after that affair on the Rigel mining planet.
MUDD: Yes, well, I organized a technical information service bringing modern industrial techniques to backward planets, making available certain valuable patents to struggling young civilizations throughout the galaxy.
KIRK: Did you pay royalties to the owners of those patents?
MUDD: Well, actually, Kirk, as a defender of the free enterprise system, I found myself in a rather ambiguous conflict as a matter of principle.
SPOCK: He did not pay royalties.
MUDD: Knowledge, sir, should be free to all.
KIRK: Who caught you?
MUDD: That, sir, is an outrageous assumption.
KIRK: Yes. Who caught you?
MUDD: I sold the Denebians all the rights to a Vulcan fuel synthesizer.
KIRK: And the Denebians contacted the Vulcans.
MUDD: How’d you know?
KIRK: That’s what I would have done.
MUDD: It’s typical police mentality. They’ve got no sense of humor. They arrested me.
MCCOY: Oh, I find that shocking.
MUDD: Worse than that. Do know what the penalty for fraud is on Deneb Five?
SPOCK: The guilty party has his choice. Death by electrocution; death by gas; death by phaser; death by hanging…
MUDD: The key word in your entire peroration, Mister Spock, was death. Barbarians. Well, of course, I left.
KIRK: He broke jail.
MUDD: I borrowed transportation.
KIRK: He stole a spaceship.
MUDD: The patrol reacted in a hostile manner.
KIRK: They fired at him.
MUDD: They’ve no respect for private property. They damaged the bloody spaceship.
One of the several bad retcons, this time used in the very first (two-part) episode, of the Enterprise series. In TOS the Rigel system apparently had little but the mining planet. But in Enterprise, which supposedly took place nearly 100 years earlier, Rigel seems to be a bustling marketplace.
But of course he expected them to pay HIM for that knowledge.
My favorite actor with multiple Trek appearances was William “Trelane/Koloth” Campbell.
And he was excellent as both, though for me it was Diana Muldaur.
I guess there’s an argument for that. Although most people would probably go with Mark Lenard as both a Romulan commander and Spock’s father, Sarek.
Another notable list is those who played the same character in multiple Trek series-es. William Campbell did that too, playing Koloth in both TOS and DS9. (As did John Colicos as Kor, and Michael Ansara as Kang who also added “Voyager” to his resumé.) And there are other actors who played different characters in more than one series as well. Some are “everybody knows…” others are less obvious.
https://www.startrek.com/news/13-tos-actors-who-appeared-on-other-tv-treks-decades-later
I sometimes wonder how Charlie Brill felt when, decades after “The Trouble With Tribbles,” he gets a call from his agent asking if he would be interested in a TV role.
“What’s the character?”
“Arne Darvin.”
*dead* as the kids say.
John Colicos, who played Count Baltar in the original Galactica, and Jonathan Harris, Dr. Zachary Smith on Lost in Space, were specialists in a subdivision of screen con men. They are con man-adjacent comic villains, following in the glowering footsteps of actors like Vincent Price and Hans Conreid.
Note that both Baltar and Dr. Smith were originally serious, unfunny would-be killers. But in both shows, the temptation to make them figures of fun was irresistible.
(The Robot) “Doctor Smith, this musical instrument should be to your liking. It’s called a lyre.”
“Oh, shut up, you blundering bucket of bolts.”
I wasn’t even out of elementary school when Dr. Robinson’s failure to throw Smith out an airlock and the US execution of the Vietnam War convinced me that my tribe was a foolish and ridiculous lot. I am still looking for evidence otherwise. Diogenes just laughs and laughs when I see him.
Actors John Williams and Mark Goddard would have gratefully stuffed Jonathan Harris into that airlock. Aside from an actor’s usual annoyance at being upstaged by what was supposed to be a minor character, Dr. Smith’s increasing prominence made the show more of a comedy, which they disliked.
I always remembered, correctly, that in the first episode of the show Smith was purely villainous and it changed later on. But what I didn’t know until a recent online search was that original show was itself changed. The early version i saw didn’t have Dr. Smith at all. The whole tone was more of a Heinlein lessons-for-boys story. The scenes with Smith were written, filmed, and edited in later.
Some TV characters were surprise standouts in secondary roles, making them into co-equal stars. Besides Dr. Smith, some other examples are Mr. Spock, Ilya Kuryakin, and Fonzie. Audiences responded when they were on screen, and studios responded in return by upping their roles.
They listened to the outside world back then. Amazing.
Ratings. Sponsors. Feedback loops. Quite the ecosphere. If only they hadn’t cancelled Firefly.
If the post is mostly about how the fast-talking, laugh a minute schemer led to the role that made Phil Silvers famous, there’s an aftermath, as there is in any career. In Silvers’ case, he kept working, in films like It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World and A Funny Thing Happened to Me on the Way to the Forum. (He seems to have had a streak of very long movie titles.) In those films, and through the rest of his career, he rarely diverged very far from his Bilko image, even when he was playing a buffoonish villain in a Disney movie. He knew what audiences wanted to see from him and he was happy to deliver.
Jackie Gleason’s career after The Honeymooners is largely forgotten now. but objectively it may have been the best of all of the early TV comedy stars. He won acclaim for non-comedy acting, in The Hustler and Requiem for a Heavyweight. He did get a weekly show back, as pointed out, and managed to resurrect a lesser version of The Honeymooners, with Art Carney but a different set of wives. He was always full of restless frustrated ambition, and prided himself on his composing skills. He idolized Chaplin (not politically) and wanted to do in TV what Chaplin had done in film: be a comedian, an actor, a writer, director, and musical composer. The whole show.
Here:
And this amazing event was commemorated by Zippy the Pinhead:
Especially with the voices.
Top Cat, of course.
But the voices of Fred, Wilma, Barney, and Betty sound all the world like Ralph, Alice, Norton, and Trixie.
Barney never approached Carney’s Norton. Carney ruled.
And Dollhouse, and Tru Calling…
Phil Silvers also wrote the lyrics to a hit song: Nancy (With the Laughing Face.). Written with composer Jimmy Van Heusen (aka, Edward Chester Babcock who took his “stage” name from a shirt advertisement), it was nothing more than a one-off and a staple for Frank Sinatra.
Another comic who had a one-off hit was Morey Amsterdam, who (kinda) cleaned up the lyrics to Rum and Coca-Cola, a Calypso song full of sexual innuendo the Andrews Sisters would have been embarrassed to sing in 1943.