The Hollywood Revue of 1929

As today is the birthday of Albertina Rasch (see full post here) and I just saw her in this movie, and I’ve been bursting to spread the news about this terrific movie anyway, well here we are.

What if I told you there was a musical comedy film starring Jack Benny, Laurel and Hardy, and Buster Keaton PLUS the original version of “Singing in the Rain”, performed by Cliff Edwards a.k.a Ukulele Ike (best known as Jiminy Cricket), PLUS Joan Crawford doing a song and dance number, PLUS Marion Davies, Marie Dressler, Polly Moran and Bessie Love, plus the Brox Sisters, PLUS Gus Edwards (an important man in vaudeville) plus the aforementioned Albertina Rasch Dancers plus Norma Shearer and John Gilbert doing scenes from Romeo and Juliet, plus numerous others I haven’t mentioned yet. On and on. Lionel Barrymore, Anita Page, Conrad Nagel, etc etc. This exists!

While modeled on the Broadway revues of the time, the film is as close as you can get I think to experiencing a big time vaudeville show of the day as well (vaudeville still had a few years left at this stage.). This was MGM’s 2nd musical, and a clear attempt to show off its talent roster and their vocal abilities. It is much more entertaining (and less strange) than Warner Brothers similar The Show of Shows, released later that year. The art deco sets and costumes are amazing; and several of the scenes are in two strip technicolor. There is a full chorus throughout the show, with several numbers staged with the huge ensemble, including a historically interesting minstrel number**.

Other cool aspects:

* the young Jack Benny as m.c. hasn’t yet discovered the persona he began to be loved for on radio in the ’30s. Here, he is a more or less conventional comic (though funny nonetheless).

* And it is glorious to see Keaton cutting up in this revue, still in the full blaze of his confidence as a star. MGM employed him correctly here and he picked up the ball and ran with it. Within a few short months, that fire would be gone from his eyes. His turn here also gives a pretty good idea of the sort of thing he might have pulled in The Passing Show of 1917, the Broadway show he was booked for before being recruited by Fatty Arbuckle for the movies.

* Laurel and Hardy do a hilariously inept magic act.

This is on our DVR but I really need to own it. I want to watch it again and again and again.

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. And don’t miss my new book Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

**Obligatory Disclaimer: It is the official position of this blog that Caucasians-in-Blackface is NEVER okay. It was bad then, and it’s bad now. We occasionally show images depicting the practice, or refer to it in our writing, because it is necessary to tell the story of American show business, which like the history of humanity, is a mix of good and bad. 

Jack Benny: Fiddle Funology

BENNY: (to orchestra leader upon entering) How’s the show been going so far?

ORCHESTRA LEADER: Just fine.

BENNY: Well, I’ll put a stop to that.

Except for Will Rogers (who doesn’t count because he was a saint) Jack Benny was the most beloved figure in show business history, by both the public and his colleagues. So loved was Benny that Bob Hope, who apparently loved no one, delivered the eulogy at his funeral. In it, Hope called Benny “the undisputed master of comedy timing”, a sentiment that is universally shared to this day. It was that skill as a comedian that allowed Benny to become one of the handful of performers to conquer stage, screen, radio and television.

He was born Benjamin Kubelsky in Waukeegan, IL in 1894. Contrary to his self-created popular image, he was actually an an excellent violinist. He began playing at age six, was considered a child prodigy, and was sent to take lessons from a prestigious teacher in Chicago. But Kubelsky was not cut out for long hours of study. He dropped out of music lessons – and school – in the 9^th grade. At age 16 he began working as a violinist at the Barrison Theatre, a vaudeville house. He worked there for two years, until the theatre folded. At the point, he formed an act with Cora Salisbury, the Barrison’s 45-year old pianist: “Salisbury and Kubelsky, from Grand Opera to Ragtime”. A lawyer for a violinist named Kubelik sent him a letter ordering him to change his name (it was too similar to his client’s), so he became Ben Benny.

In 1914, Cora dropped out, to be replaced by a young man named Lyman Woods. Benny and Woods became a top second rate act, earning $3-400 a week, very good money for those days. The hook was that the two of them mugged and made faces while they played. In 1917, the team got a shot at the Palace, but they bombed, mostly because they followed an animal act and the audience hadn’t arrived yet. There was no time to mope about it, though. Soon thereafter, Benny was drafted into World War I. Oddly enough, it was Benny’s service at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station that provided him with his real big break.  When asked to perform at a camp show, he first essayed some classical music on his violin – which of course went over like a lead balloon with the mostly working-class 18-25 year old men who comprised his audience. A fellow performer William O’Brien (later to become a famous movie star under the name “Pat”) urged him to go out again and pad for time. Instinctively, Benny told some jokes he knew, and he scored a big hit. He’s is recruited next for a touring Navy show The Great Lakes Revue which is very successful. Now he had a couple of years as a comedian under his belt.

In 1919, he returned to vaudeville as Ben K. Benny, doing “Fiddle Funology” a single act wherein he told jokes, sang and played the fiddle.

Then it happened once again, like something out of one of his own routines: a lawyer for bandleader Ben Bernie wrote insisting that he cease using his current stage name, it being too similar to his client’s. At this point, Benjamin Kubelsky finally became Jack Benny. During these years, Benny began playing the violin less and less, until it became almost completely vestigial. Benny clutched it as a prop for confidence during his monologues, seldom playing it except for the occasional comical-dissonant scratchings. At one point, he partnered up with Dorothy MacGuire, better known as “Penny Singleton” the actress who played Blondie in the film series based on the comic strip).

You can get a really cool (and rare) glimpse of Benny the pre-radio vaudeville star, stand-up comedian and m.c. in the movies The Hollywood Revue.

Benny’s long career in broadcasting started in 1932 with the Canada Dry Ginger Ale Program and continued with a half dozen other sponsors through 1955, by which time he’d already begun his tv series, which ran 1950-65. Over the course of those 33 years, America followed the adventures of “Jack Benny” a wholly fictitious character who was famously stingy, self-centered and vain (claimed to be 39 years old for the last 40 years of his life). Around him grew a cast of characters almost as beloved as he was: announcer Don Wilson, bandleader Phil Harris, Irish tenor Dennis Day, his “manservant” Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, Mel Blanc (in various character roles) and Benny’s wife Mary Livingstone. 

As his birthday falls on Valentine’s Day, as our radio sample we give you Benny’s Valentine’s Day themed show from 1937:

Benny continued to do a couple of tv specials a year in the remaining decade of his life; indeed, he was planning one at the time he died in 1974. These specials were how I first new Benny — he was a much-beloved contemporary fact of life when I was a kid, and I adored him. It was only later that I was able to go back and discover the famous Benny of earlier decades.

How he looked in my day!

Benny also had a movie career from 1930 through 45. Though he never set the world on fire as a movie star, he did some very solid pictures, including George Washington Slept Here (1942) and Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 To Be or Not To Be, which was remade by Mel Brooks in 1983. A bad experience with his last film The Horn Blows at Midnight  (1945) persuaded him to retire from the movies. His last film was to have been Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys, in a part written for him, but he died before shooting began, and so was replaced by George Burns.

And so we leave you with a Benny cinematic classic, Buck Benny Rides Again (1940).

To learn about the roots of variety entertainment, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold. And don’t miss my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc