Stars of Vaudeville #452: Robert Alda

Today is the birthday of Robert Alda (Alfonso Giuseppe Giovanni Roberto D’Abruzzo, 1914-1986). He started out as a singer and dancer in vaudeville, then moved to burlesque when vaudeville tanked. His son Alan Alda relates many funny (and disturbing) anecdotes of what the life was like in Leslie Zemeckis’s documentaryBehind the Burley Q. His big break was playing George Gershwin in the 1945 bio-pic Rhapsody in Blue. Always a lacklustre screen presence, he nevertheless worked steadily if somewhat unmemorably in film and television for the rest of his life. His Broadway career had more high points, with leads in Guys and Dolls, The Owl and the Pussycat, and What Makes Sammy Run? among others.

But, most importantly, he is the star of The Devil’s Hand ! (1962) , in which a beautiful witch plucks him from the crowd seemingly at random and gets him to abandon his fiance and sell his soul to the devil God Gamba through the agency of a voodoo cult run by the guy who played Commissioner Gordon on Batman. Here, why don’t  I just show you?

To find out more about  the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.