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.