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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
Except he couldn’t compose, right? He could whistle a tune and have someone else transcribe it. He didn’t arrange anything. Not that I care – he produced some of the finest swank melancholic “easy listening” music of the period. The later small-ensemble stuff wasn’t bad, either.
A true and succinct review. The Fifties were an era when middlebrow art was earnest and unashamed of itself. Far more Americans knew the paintings of Grandma Moses than those of Jackson Pollock.
His grand personal project was squarely in Charlie Chaplin territory. 1962’s Gigot was a sentimental drama about a deaf mute Parisian janitor, a character similar to his Poor Soul. His reach exceeded his grasp. It got lukewarm reviews and “eh” box office.
EDIT: IIRC, Chaplin didn’t actually transcribe his music onto the page either. That was David Raksin. To be fair, Chaplin and Gleason did make up the tunes they are credited with writing.
“Swank melancholic” probably describes a goodly percent of my posts.
Here I am–Mr. Swank Melancholy, if you please. (Photo illustration by EJ Hill. And a comically flattering one, at that.)
He’s “addressing the ball”, right?
The Fifties were an era when far more Americans suspected that it didn’t matter which side of a Pollock was on top. Maybe Pollock himself didn’t care. Maybe he was drunk.
What Sort of Man Reads Playboy?
Needs a hot babe or two ogling you.
Right. “Hello, ball!”
Plus an expensive component stereo, a Trinitron color TV, and leather-clad, designer-y Italian couches, a crowded wardrobe closet, and a European sports car:
Which is why they’re so damn good. Luxurious rue.
True – but there was also a sense that the enlightened middle-class person should strive to appreciate higher culture. It wasn’t derided as longhair stuff, but pitched as the means to better one’s self, to enjoy life in these United States. A civilized man had a hi-fi, and his collection would have a few classical records. (Well, maybe Arthur Fiedler.) The front room had a set of Great Books with identical spines. Mom would page through a Home and Garden magazine whose model homes might have a piece of modern sculpture, and she would nod and feel smart that she was up on these things, even if she preferred a lamp shade with a puffy brocaded hem.
Grandma Moses is an interesting case. She certainly popularized a style of naive, unlettered folk art – in other words, not very good on its own merits. But she had an American authenticity that appealed to people disconcerted by postwar Modernist aesthetics, and intellectuals who loved to elevate the Noble Savage. She influenced a lot of magazine-cover artists, who flattened their style and went a bit folky, but couldn’t quite bring themselves to paint as poorly as she did.
Speaking of middlebrow culture in mid-century: The “Sunday ghetto” was a semi-official policy observed by the three networks, reserving Sunday pre-prime time for news, documentaries, religious and cultural programs. The Sunday ghetto is when Victory at Sea became a big hit; it’s when Davey and Goliath and Lamp Unto My Feet aired; it’s when Arturo Toscanini and the NBC orchestra lived up to David Sarnoff’s solemn proclamations about the nobility and public service of broadcasting.
That’s one reason why commercial networks liked PBS (back in the day, NET). Over time, the existence of high minded educational TV gave networks the excuse to slowly back off their perceived obligations. The Sunday ghetto dried up, soon to be replaced by sports. And every PBS station meant one fewer commercial competitor.
When mini-golfing, we always address the ball. “Hello, ball!”
When there was no Cubs game, WGN ran “Family Classics,” movies like The Adventures of Robin Hood, Sink the Bismarck, Treasure Island, The Last of the Mohicans, Captains Courageous, The Mark of Zorro ….
Plus Sherlock Holmes or Charlie Chan flicks. Good stuff.
I can’t count the number of times I have seen Sink the Bismarck, Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes, the Marx Brothers, or Zorro.
WOR-TV, channel 9 in New York City, was a local station. In the late Fifties and early Sixties, when even ABC and CBS broadcast in black and white, little WOR was in color. They carried Mets games; WPIX, channel 11, broadcast the (then) lordly Yankees, but only in black and white.
The Crimson Pirate, a 1952 swashbuckler with Burt Lancaster, played on WOR lots of times per year. My theory is it was one of the only color films that was available cheap.
Thanks for an insider’s word, @postmodernhoplite! My father-in-law, a New Yorker, did basic and later, skill training in Texas in 1944 before being shifted back northeast to train other navigators in the use of the Link trainer.
My father trained at Air Force bases, four or five years later, that were Army Air Force bases in the process of conversion to a separate service. It went smoothly (they claim). We can’t be the only family with pictures of Dad in Army green when he went in and Air Force blue when he got out. He had funny stories about being stationed in Texas, nothing bad. Though he wasn’t wild about the climate, freezing overnight and then broiling mid-day. When he was flown out to the Azores as part of some NATO exercise with Spain, the weather seemed miraculously good to a big city kid.
You’re right; taking young American men by the millions and shipping them all over the country without regard to regional origin, however a rough experience for all, had the strong positive effect of introducing some common understanding (as well as gripes, on all sides, as always.).
That’s something about Sergeant Bilko’s effect on 1955-’59 audiences that’s hard for today’s younger audience to remember: most men 20–60 had been in the service, during peacetime and/or wartime. The Army was a familiar world to many civilians because of that.
And Camels. It was a world where most adults smoked–at home, in cars, in bars, on elevators, at the movies, pretty much everywhere. In those days, sponsors had much more say over launching a new show. In this case, soldiers and cigarettes sounded good to the sponsor.