TV SHOW OF THE DAY: "THE SUNDAY SPECTACULAR: INSIDE BEVERLY HILLS" (1956)

Celebrities! They can laugh at themselves! They've got kids! They go to church! They're just like you! 

That seems to be the message of Inside Beverly Hills, a 1956 "spectacular" combining a testimonial dinner, live comedy sketches, musical numbers, and filmed interviews with celebrities outside their palatial homes. Originally airing in color, it exists now only in a faded black & white kinescope, the better to make the long-gone stars even more ghostly than they already are. (You want old? One of the dinner guests is Burton Green, who, in 1900, bought the land that became Beverly Hills after failing to find oil there.)

"Are you asleep yet, folks?"

Inside Beverly Hills is really a 90-minute effort in self-congratulation masked in phony humility. Human blank slate Art Linkletter is your unctuous host, both commending and joshing the citizens of Beverly Hills with not-bad jokes that would be funnier if delivered by Bob Hope, who made himself scarce for this broadcast. 

"I think we're missing somebody."

The occasional flashes of wit found throughout Inside Beverly Hills can be partly attributed to co-writer John Guedel, the creator and director of Groucho Marx's quiz show You Bet Your Life. Top-billed Groucho himself appears in a few segments, cracking wise about Beverly Hills and the cheap set standing in for it. Chico Marx turns up from time to time (once briefly with Groucho), while Harpo is "interviewed" on his lawn with his wife Susan and three of his kids. In typical Hollywood thinking, the producers had the freakin' Marx Brothers on their show in color and put only two of them on screen simultaneously. 

Peter Lawford has a premonition of what life
will be like after Sinatra throws him overboard.

Two sketches come off pretty well. Pre-Rat Packer Peter Lawford does an amusing bit of self-parody, sleeping with sunglasses, letting his wife run off with the gardener (Chico again), telephoning Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper with the same "exclusive" piece of gossip ("I awoke this afternoon at 3:15!"), and shooting a movie scene without getting out of bed. Later on, the great character actor Sheldon Leonard plays his typical shady character reminiscing about an ultimately futile experience trying to become a Beverly Hills resident, before moving to Pasadena, "where I belong." (I bet Pasadenans thought that was hilarious.)

The dancers earn their $50 the hard way.

Singers Tony Martin and Helen O'Connell handle the "special material" in typical 1950s
middle of the road style that was fast becoming a thing of the past. The most interesting musical number is a dance piece filmed on location on Wilshire Boulevard. Edited in such a way that it appears to be one long take, it must have been filmed very early on a Sunday, before the streets were filled with tourists, shoppers, and pickpockets. With only a handful of rubbernecking pedestrians and streets blocked to traffic, it almost seems to be the inspiration for the opening scene of LaLaLand, albeit on a much smaller scale.

James Stewart counts the days before the kids go
back to school and he can have fun again.

But people don't just break out in dance in Beverly Hills. They live real lives! And so Inside Beverly Hills takes time out to chat with the locals on their well-manicured lawns. The celebrities would be unknown to anyone born after 1960 -- Jimmy Durante, Sam Goldwyn, Harold Lloyd, dancer-turned-Sunday school teacher Eleanor Powell (spreading the Gospel to a bunch of very bored-looking children). Bob Cummings and James Stewart proudly show off their home-on-vacation military school sons, which allowed the actors to continue their extramarital philandering with fewer kids around. And if you're wondering where the ubiquitous George Jessel is, he's quite appropriately in a commercial for the nausea-treatment Tums.

And he still doesn't have a living wage.

For all its humor, Inside Beverly Hills's self-deprecation has the depth of a typical actor's intellect. The tuxedo-clad garbage man who opens and closes the show probably provided chuckles, yet rubbed into viewers' faces that they will never come close to attaining the wealth and status show business professionals enjoy. 

If you can afford it.

When Peter Lawford describes his nightmare ("I dreamt I was an ordinary person, making $20,000 a year, living in an ordinary house with perhaps 8, 10, 15 rooms"), it was at a time when the average annual income was $3,600, and kids had to double or triple up in their bedrooms. I know that's the joke, but for some of the savvier folks at home, the laughter must have featured a bitter aftertaste. 

Certainly, few of them enjoyed Inside Beverly Hills in its intended glory; the price of a color TV in 1956 ranged anywhere from $495 to $1,300. With only 150,000 of them in use that year (in a population of roughly 165-million), a good many of them could be found only -- where else? -- in Beverly Hills.

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TV SHOW OF THE DAY: " GENERAL ELECTRIC THEATER: THE HOLDOUT" (1962)

Unbridled capitalism is our most
important product.

 If you ever had the desire to see Groucho Marx and Dennis Hopper play opposite each other -- and don't tell me you haven't -- you are in luck! Thanks to the good folks at General Electric Theater (and your genial host Ronald Reagan), that dream team existed one evening in 1962. 

And after watching it, you'll have no doubt as to why Hopper eventually wound up an alcoholic acid/coke head who went into hiding in the Mexican desert before eventually coming to his senses two decades later. 

As for Groucho... well, he needed something to do after ending You Bet Your Life a year earlier.

Before continuing, I confess that I found "The Holdout" so ordinary a half-hour that I can't remember the names of any of the characters. So you'll have to be content with nouns instead.

One of these things is not like the other.
I'm just not sure which.

The story is equally simple. Two clean-cut college students want to get married. Everybody's thrilled except the girl's father (Groucho), who wants them to wait until the boy graduates the following year. He believes it would be wiser for the boy to work rather than rely on the allowance he receives from his parents; otherwise, his folks will gradually get more involved in the young couple's lives. By the closing credits, the boy realizes his future father-in-law is correct. Champagne and big smiles all around!

Sporting a toupee, dyed moustache, and a pipe instead of cigar, Groucho plays it straight for the first and last time in his career. He's OK, but his old-school New York accent, still strong after over three decades in Hollywood, instantly makes you think COMEDY. (He gets to make a wisecrack about Nikita Khrushchev as if a sop to his fans.)

Your expectations can't be helped. I mean, Groucho had been known for playing a particular kind of character (even as a quiz show host) for roughly 50 years by the time of "The Holdout". There's one scene, when rising from a couch and walking across the room, where he appears to start the classic Groucho walk before catching himself. Some habits are hard to break.

Fred Clark shows him how it's done.

Groucho is completely overshadowed by co-star Fred Clark as the boy's father in
their two scenes together.  Clark, a first-class character actor who seemed to work every day of his adult life, takes hold of his role like a cowboy on his favorite horse. Groucho, on the other hand, is still Groucho, even if his familiar inflections have been taken down a couple of notches.

Never have I posed with my daughter
like this.

The more-or-less thankless role of the daughter is played by Brooke Hayward. Considering she was married to Dennis Hopper -- and both attended the Actors School in New York -- you'd think she would have had a little more spark in her scenes with the guy she's supposed to be in love with. 

The most emotion Hayward actually shows is with her bullheaded father, who, without saying so explicitly, is afraid that she'll get pregnant without a ring on her finger, yet still is against the marriage. Groucho must have forgotten the same thing happened to his girlfriend in real life roughly 35 years earlier. C'mon, Groucho, good for the goose and all that. 

Then there's Dennis Hopper, whose performances often promise fireworks, or at least a Roman candle. And the idea of Blue Velvet's Frank Booth going one-on-one with Duck Soup's Rufus T. Firefly makes one's mouth water with anticipation.

Hopper's already starting to look crazy.

Well, you'll remained parched, for in "The Holdout", Hopper, to my eyes, is no different from any 20-something actor kicking around TV at the time. (He had been blacklisted from movies. That's what happens when you respond to Harry Cohn's offer of a contract at Columbia Pictures by literally spitting in his face). 

Maybe I'm expecting too much. It could be that Hopper, who worshipped the be-real style of James Dean, is simply playing his role as a shy 20 year-old who wants only to win the approval of his future father-in-law. If so, he succeeds -- even if it is boring. 

A Night at the Family Quarrel.

As a drama, then, "The Holdout" kind of plays like a "very special episode" of The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, only without Ricky's number at the end. It seems to acknowledge that a new generation has its own ideas of how to live (and act), while at the same time clinging to a style that was fast becoming archaic. Check out Hopper's performance on Naked City the same year, playing a psychopathic rich kid with an Oedipus complex, and you can see where he was headed. 

A good idea on (rolling) paper.

Six years later, Groucho made his own stab at the new Hollywood in Otto Preminger's impressively dreadful acid-drenched counter-culture comedy Skidoo, playing a mobster-turned-hippie pot-smoker. He should have remained a holdout instead.

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MOVIE OF THE DAY: "TOO MANY KISSES" (1925)

Richard Gaylord, Jr. has been shipped overseas to the Basque region by his rich businessman father. It seems Jr. keeps getting in trouble with the ladies, a hobby Daddy finds expensive after each break-up. Jr. has been assigned to find the valuable mineral turidium. If he stays away from the dames for six months, he gets 50% ownership of the company. Who needs sex when you're the turidium king?

When was the last time the phrase
"Breach of promise" was heard in a courtroom?

 

 

Enter stage left Yvonne Hurja, the beautiful daughter of the Spanish guy that Jr. is working with. Enter stage right, the cruel Captain of the Guards, Don Julio, who has his eyes on Yvonne. And if this what made the movie interesting, it would be exit off the couch for the viewer right then and there.

Made in late 1924, released in 1925, lost until 1971, and restored in 2020, Too Many Kisses is six reels of silliness mixed with romantic comedy and melodrama. It likely would have remained forgotten had it not been for one unlikely piece of casting. For despite the presence of Richard Dix and William Powell as Jr. and Don Julio respectively, Too Many Kisses is known only for the screen debut of Harpo Marx.

Harpo celebrates breaking into movies
before his brothers.

 

What Harpo had over his siblings regarding silent movies was his own silence -- even if, in Too Many Kisses, he has two lines of dialogue (via subtitles). Yet if you watch closely, he stands with his mouth agape in typical Harpo-style when he's supposed to be talking. My guess is that he had become so used to almost 20 years of doing a dumb act that talking just didn't  come naturally in performance. Or maybe he forgot what he was supposed to say.

Laddero Marx.

It's nice to see that Harpo's persona was fully-formed by now. His first appearance, sound asleep and snoring so hard that he's moving straw back and forth, wouldn't have been out of place in any of his subsequent movies. And while there's no chance (or need) for him to play his usual instrument, Harpo does get another Harpoesque moment when he's accompanying Don Julio's musical wooing of Yvonne by "playing" a ladder like a guitar. (His character is billed in the credits as "The Village Peter Pan", which I suppose is nicer than "Village Idiot".)

It would take almost a century for Harpo (right)
to be considered stealing a scene from
William Powell.

Harpo stays primarily in the background for most of the movie; he might not have been even noticed in many scenes by moviegoers who weren't familiar with his stage work. But he's there enough, particularly in the second half, so that a Marx fan doesn't go away entirely disappointed.

More observant (i.e., boring) people like me will notice that not only does he walk like the Harpo we've always known, but that he's playing more like his overly-sympathetic MGM character rather than the earlier, anarchic style at Paramount. Ironic, then, that Too Many Kisses is a Paramount picture.

Richard Dix would lose that silly look in his noirish 1940s dramas, while William Powell
wouldn't be caught dead in an outfit like that again.

 

So what of Too Many Kisses' real stars? Being more familiar with their sound movies, I could "hear" Richard Dix and William Powell speaking their subtitles. But either they improved by the end of silents, or director Paul Sloane instructed them to overact whenever possible. Dix's reaction to sitting next Frances Howard (as Yvonne) is strictly Jerry Lewis. Powell is more subtle, yet appears to be the template for every sneering villain of the time.

Despite being beautifully restored with its original tints -- and a lovely piano score by Harpo's son Bill -- Too Many Kisses is strictly for the diehard Marx Brothers fans who need to see everything they ever did, whether it's worth watching or not. And after they see this the first time, they can rewatch it to see if, as rumor has it, Zeppo Marx really is an in-joke extra. It'll take their mind off the rest of the movie.  

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To read about how good Richard Dix could be, click his name below.

A NIGHT IN HEAVEN

Being a Marx Brothers fan is a frustrating thing. When you get right down to it, there are only a handful of their 13 movies worthy of them. The others are weighed down by sappy romantic subplots, even sappier music and scripts that range from just OK to mediocre.

What makes it even more disappointing is knowing there could have been more great Marx movies if they'd only gotten past the discussion stage. Orson Welles, Billy Wilder and even Salvador Dali had ideas ready to go, all undoubtedly more interesting than most of what was eventually made.

Wardrobe budget: $9.95.

Yet one unfinished project that actually got before the cameras in 1959 was, of all things, a sitcom. Deputy Seraph was to star Harpo and Chico as angels who, every week, would straighten out the problems of a different inhabitant of earth. The earthlings would never physically interact with the Marxes. Rather, they would take on the angels' characteristics while being inhabited by them -- which, in the case of Harpo and Chico, consisted of communicating via pantomime and a comedic Italian accent respectively.

Hollywood Götterdämmerung: Gummo, Zeppo, Chico, Groucho, Harpo

In other words, about 50% of each episode would have been actors imitating actors who imitated a mute and an Italian. It's difficult to see the entertainment value in such a series. 

Perhaps this was why writer/producer Phillip Rapp convinced Groucho, still hosting You Bet Your Life, to appear in every third episode as God's right-hand man -- the deputy seraph -- giving orders to the angels and taking part in their duties when necessary. (The Jackson brothers nobody cared about used a similar tactic whenever trying to interest producers in a reality series, i.e., "Michael will make an appearance!" Unlike Rapp, however, they never bothered asking Michael first.) The Marxes' agent -- conveniently, younger brother Gummo -- finalized the deal. Youngest brother Zeppo presumably congratulated them with grapefruits from his ranch.


Roughly fifteen minutes of the Deputy Seraph pilot, consisting only of the Marx Brothers,

Harpo looks for his driver to get him the
hell off the set.

were shot on a Hollywood soundstage. Producer Rapp must have been counting on the goodwill of the audience to help put this over. Even taking into account that this is faded raw footage, lacking proper edits, sound effects and voice-overs, it's still pretty chintzy. 

The set -- nothing more than foam "clouds" and a black backdrop -- looks less like Heaven and more like a cheap strip club. The angels' gossamer robes appear to have been made from discarded sheets of Reynolds Wrap. Close-ups of Harpo and Chico are badly edited into footage of their doubles using the "clouds" as trampolines. As Groucho once wrote a friend regarding the second-rate Marx Brothers comedy Go West, "This is a fine comedown for a man who used to be the toast of Broadway."

There doesn't seem to have been much effort put into the script, either. Bits from Marx Brothers movies appear throughout, while Groucho's dialogue leaves a lot to be desired -- like real jokes:

GROUCHO: (flicking cigar ashes down to earth) There. That's the first time they ever had snow in Bali Bali.

CHICO: Bali Bali?

HARPO: (honks horn twice)

GROUCHO: Bali Bali?!

The only person less thrilled
than Groucho to be working on Deputy Seraph...

It's one of the one fixed rules of comedy: just because a name sounds funny doesn't mean it is. Especially when it's spoken three times in a row for no good reason. Perhaps that's why Harpo comes off best throughout-- all he has to do is make faces. And it's remarkable how he appears younger and, well, more angelic than his 71 years. Still, he and Chico have the whiff of long-ago vaudeville about them, while Groucho, despite his mediocre dialogue, comes off as the most contemporary. It's easy to picture the new wave of '50s comedians, like Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, enjoying You Bet Your Life while wondering why his brothers were still going through the motions.

… is Chico.

Unedited reaction shots that take up some of Deputy Seraph's running time actually provide the most interesting footage. But it's a little painful to see Chico continually screwing up his lines -- an affliction going back to his stage years -- and having to take inane off-screen direction: "Say 'Look!" "Don't say 'Harpo'!" "Give me the full treatment on the dialect!" Seventy-two at the time, Chico seems not just tired but defeated, as if wondering what he was doing on a drafty soundstage when he could have been playing gin with his buddies at the Hillcrest Country Club.

It's best to remember them this way.

If so, he had only himself to blame. A gambling addict since childhood, Chico bordered on insolvency even at the height of his career. There's a good chance the Marx Brothers never would have made any movies after A Day at the Races in 1937 if it hadn't been for his money problems. (And judging by their subsequent output, that might not have been such a bad idea.) By 1959, Harpo was content with the occasional TV and concert gigs, while Groucho was busy with You Bet Your Life. They probably went along with Deputy Seraph just to make sure their brother had a paycheck.

In the end, it didn't matter. A medical check-up discovered that Chico had arteriosclerosis, preventing him from being insured. As a result, production on Deputy Seraph ceased. (Billy Wilder's intended Marx Brothers movie, A Day at the United Nations, was shelved for the same reason.) Deputy Seraph's footage was promptly forgotten until pirated versions turned up on video three decades later, simultaneously surprising and disappointing Marx fans everywhere. 

Even with Deputy Seraph's demise, Groucho still had a couple of years of You Bet Your Life left. And Harpo and Chico, either separately or apart, were nightclub mainstays and commercial pitchmen for products ranging from shampoo to beer. It's a testament to the Marx Brothers longstanding popularity that they probably would have found an audience for all 39 proposed episodes of the series. But as Groucho says in Deputy Seraph, "Well, you can't win 'em all."

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