Vaudeville in the Movies: Star Spangled Rhythm

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When movies started to sound the death knell for vaudeville and burlesque houses, one fortunate by-product was the preservation of physical comedy routines on film.  Performers and sketch writers transitioning to the latest media naturally made use of the bag of tricks they'd spent half their life crafting. Some of these films were slapdash affairs, hardly memorable as cinematic art, and seemed destined to be forgotten.  But survive they did, thanks to the advent of DVDs and Netflix streaming, and it turns out there are diamonds to be found in these rough cuts.

Which brings us to this post's video clip, a quite well-done piece of business featuring Hollywood actress, comedienne and singer Betty Hutton, in Star Spangled Rhythm (1943), one of those musical and sketch revues produced as a morale booster during World War II. Hutton had begun her performing career in her family's Prohibition-era speakeasy, and later gained fame from such movies as The Perils of Pauline (1947) and Annie Get Your Gun (1950).  I'm not sure who was in charge of this piece; the movie had at least six sketch writers on board, including playwright and Marx Brothers collaborator George S. Kaufman.

What I love about this piece is how it takes the goal of Hutton needing to climb over a wall and the obstacle of the characters not being able to ungrip hands and fashions them into a sustained routine.  While Hutton is the big name, and does a fine job (though perhaps doubled for on one or two tricks), it is the men who seem to come right off the vaudeville stage.  Indeed, one of them is Walter Darewahl, whose later credits include the Phil Silvers movie Top Banana, and on television the Ed Sullivan Show, Jackie Gleason, and Cavalcade of Stars; on the latter he is listed as "vaudeville comic."  Not sure who the other guy is, however.


A thank you to New York clown and dancer Tanya Solomon for alerting me to this piece.  Enjoy!





Update:  Greg DeSanto posted the following comment, which I'm adding here so you don't miss it: "His partner is Johnnie Trama. They performed this basic routine till the late 1960s on variety shows and club revues."

Update (3-26-15): Here's a new blog post with a wonderful comedy acrobatic act by Walter Dare Wahl and Emmet Oldfield.

Happy Birthday, Jack Wilson! (Sand Dance)

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Who?

Long before Steve Martin's King Tut, there was this hysterical sand dance performed by Jack Wilson, born in Liverpool this day in 1894, and Joe Keppel, born in Ireland a year later. Along with a succession of Bettys, they formed the music-hall comedy act of Wilson, Keppel & Betty. This birthday salute is just an excuse to showcase their work, a delicious parody of an earlier craze for all things Egyptian, sparked by the 1922 discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, just as Martin's was inspired by the wildly popular 1978 U.S. tour of the Treasures of Tutankhamun.


Wilson and Keppel first performed together in New York in March 1919 as a comedy acrobatic and tap dancing act in vaudeville, and continued working together until 1963. Yep, that's 44 years together. Yikes! In 1928 they were joined in the act by Betty Knox, former stage partner of Jack Benny, who retired in 1941 to go into journalism, but was followed by something like seven other Bettys, beginning with Knox's own daughter, Patsy.



They toured internationally and, according to legend, were denounced by Goebbels as "bad for the morals of Nazi Youth" after a 1936 performance at Berlin's Wintergarden because they showed too much bare leg. Mussolini, on the other hand, was said to have had no problem enjoying the act. In 1950, they even shared the bill with Frank Sinatra when he headlined the London Palladium.


Along the way, their signature piece, the sand dance, became a cult favorite. Film historian Luke McKernan (see below) commented that "I worked at the National Film and Television Archive for a number of years, and I think this one piece of film was requested by the public more times than any other."













Like Anna Pavlova before them and Steve Martin decades later, Wilson & Keppel are all profile and angles and limbs, funnier than Pavlova and more skilled than Martin — and perhaps vice-versa. Their slender frames and straight faces are perfect for the mock-seriousness of the piece.

Here it is, their trademark sand dance, to the tune of Luigini's Ballet Egyptien, arranged for them by none other than Hoagy Carmichael.




And here's another version, courtesy of British Pathé. It's part of a 1933 variety show at the Trocadero Restaurant, and unfortunately they're in front of the curtain instead of their pyramid backdrop. It includes a cute little dance up and down the stairs.

As Cleopatra, Betty provided the sultriness with her Dance of the Seven Veils and gave the guys something to play off of. Here's my favorite bit from Cleopatra's Nightmare.




Last and perhaps least, one more cute novelty.





You can view a few more incidental clips on YouTube, and can read Luke McKernan's excellent history of the act (pdf download) by clicking here.

Happy Birthday, Ray Bolger!

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Today we celebrate the birth and career of Ray Bolger (January 10, 1904 – January 15, 1987), vaudevillian and song & dance man best known for his portrayal of the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz (1939).

Bolger was out and out funny, his work full of clown moments and highly skilled physical comedy. You can read more about him on Wikipedia and IMDB, and see more clips on YouTube, but here are three to get you started.

Here's a clip of Bolger in Stage Door Canteen (1943), a World War II morale booster film that showcases his myriad talents.



And here's a cool dance from The Wizard of Oz that didn't survive the final cut — notice that you can still see the wires used to fly him. If memory serves, the first time this clip surfaced was when it was used as part of the compilation film, That's Entertainment (1974).



One more Bolger dance, which takes wings once he goes solo at the 1:10 mark.

Happy Birthday to the "perfect fool," Ed Wynn!

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"A comedian is not a man who says funny things. A comedian is one who says things funny." —Ed Wynn


Ed Wynn (November 9, 1886 – June 19, 1966), known to his public as “the perfect fool,” was an American vaudevillian who grew up working with W.C. Fields. He gained nationwide fame as a comedian first on radio and then on television and, in his later years, as a serious actor in television and film dramas. He was apparently the first performer to host a tv variety show from Hollywood, and on his show introduced Buster Keaton to television audiences for the first time. Here's a clip of that intro:



[Yeah, it cuts off there, but apparently Keaton did this more than once on television, because you can see him doing it on something called The Ken Murray Show in 1952 right here. It's the molasses scene from the 1917 Arbuckle movie, The Butcher Boy.]

Wynn was not a physical comedian, but his wacky props (e.g., a piano-bicycle) and giddy personality lent themselves to broad comedy with a touch of the surreal, as in this well known scene from Mary Poppins.



Visual effects fans might be interested to know that Mary Poppins was one of the first large-scale uses of chroma key technology, except they used a yellow screen rather than green or blue!

And finally, Wynn's greatest claim to fame (heh-heh) would have to be his appearing alongside Myrna Loy, Tab Hunter, and yours truly in the 1959 television remake of "Meet Me in St. Louis."

The Julians Acrobats

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I already threw a lot of stuff at you in post 008 about the comic uses of human pyramids (On the Shoulders of Giants: From the 2-High to the 1200-High). Since then I discovered these two short but very cool clips of the Julians Acrobats from 1902-3. It's not comedy, but the series of rapid-fire two-high, risley (foot juggling of people), and tumbling moves is fantastic. The clips are similar and very likely shot at the same time, but with some different tricks in each one. You gotta love the group choreography.







You can read more about the Julians on the interesting web site where I got these clips: Palace of Variety, put together by Charlie Holland, a British juggler and circus educator, and the author of Strange Feats & Clever Turns, "an anthology of illustrated articles on remarkable specialty acts in variety, vaudeville and sideshows at the turn of the 20th century." I don't know this book, but hope to pick up a copy when I'm in London.

The site is not extensive, but does contain some choice goodies, including a series of illustrations of the Hanlon-Lees in Le Voyage en Suisse from a children's book, as well as this poster of a three-high column collapse by the Trevally Acrobats, which I am retroactively adding (in a larger-size version) to post 008.

Check it out!

In Remembrance: Frankie Manning (1914-2009)

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I'm no expert on Frankie Manning or the lindy hop, but both are worth knowing about regardless of any indirect connection with physical comedy. Manning made it to just short of his 95th birthday, active almost to the end, and left behind a lifetime of achievement in developing and popularizing the lindy hop. The NY Times obituary is a good starting point, but also check out the Frankie Manning web site and the Wikipedia entry.

The lindy hop is not comedy, per se, but it does share that uninhibited exuberance and pure joy in over-the-top movement with the best of physical comedy. It also shares some specific partner vocabulary, especially in using leverage and counterbalance to flip each other this way and that. The lindy hop clip from the 1941 movie Hellzapopin', based (way too) loosely on the 1938 landmark stage hit of the same name, is considered by many to be the best example of the form captured on film. It was choreographed by Manning, who is the dancer in overalls. Enjoy!