What I watched: The seventeenth (?) episode of Admiral Broadway Review, a short-lived early variety series. The series was directed and written by Max Liebman, with a handful of other co-writers, including a young Mel Brooks. It starred Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. This episode was broadcast on 8:00 PM on Friday, May 27, 1949 on NBC. (Once again, there’s a bit of a dating discrepancy, with the YouTube uploader listing the episode as airing on May 27 and IMDb on the 20th. The NYT from these dates is unhelpful, so I’ve gone with the latter day.) This episode is available on YouTube.
Do not dress like this unless you have a brother named Mario.
What happened: The opening number tries to sell us on the titular Hotel Paradise, accessible on the Hudson tube! The number gets a little off track as various actors do solo verses describing their mischievous personalities. Some guys have really goofy sweaters. Bobby Lane and Claire, one of the two dance teams filling in for the absent Champions, do a dance routine where they fight over a newspaper.
This is followed by a sketch starring Sid Caesar and Howard Marx. Caesar is, true to type, a nonsense-speaking Italian chef who is unhappy about having to cook at the Hotel Paradise instead of a more upscale joint. As Caesar goes on and on, Marx stays silent, pantomiming his delicate potato-peeling technique. Caesar teaches Marx how to make chicken soup, a process that includes bludgeoning a stuffed chicken and putting it in a pot whole.
This is followed by a lively trumpet solo. The player, Dick Hyde, tells goofy jokes about being from Niles, Kansas, and then starts playing multiple trumpets at the same time! (18:50) It’s kind of a bizarre act, but definitely an impressive one.
Another group musical act features everyone excitedly singing about “the old Jalopy going to town.” They leave behind Caesar and Imogene Coca, playing two lovers having trouble parting. They do a pantomime sketch of what life would be like if they both moved to the city. It turns out that they don’t quite get along outside of the summer fling. It’s a very unusual role for the two of them to be playing — romantic and musical, and it never quite gels.
Coca is right back out to sing a song about black magic while producing string and bouquets of flowers from within her outfit. It’s a nice bit of sleight of hand, and the tension between the goofiness of the magic trips and Coca’s nonchalant heightens the segment’s amusement value. After that, Mata and Hari present a “sports newsreel”, featuring pantomimed boxing, bowling and horse racing.
Caesar’s monologue focuses on “the familiar figure” of a man in the hospital nervously waiting for his child to be born. For a supremely confident man, Caesar imitates a nervous one rather well. As time goes on, he seems to get increasingly irritated at the idea of having a kid and the oncoming tribulations. Caesar gives us little previews into all the disappointments of parenthood, from the crying baby to the elopement on his wedding day. It’s kind of bleak, in a funny way.
The closing number is “Indian Legend”, presented as .the Paradise Hotel’s “annual pageant.” It’s a retelling of the Pocahontas story, with Imogene Coca as Pocahontas and plenty of brownface and stereotypical costumes. There’s a twist at the end, however, as Pocahontas settles for her original suitor after he cuts off John Smith’s beard — apparently the only thing she was really attracted to.
What I thought: After a month’s worth of unpreserved episodes, it’s worthwhile to note the changes in Admiral Broadway Revue since its beginning. It’s much more of a star-driven show, marked by the formal aspects — at this point we have a proper, even lengthy credits roll. The announcer tells us the name of performers before their segments. By this point, people weren’t tuning in to see the show as whole, they were doing it to see the stars.
Those stars are, of course, Caesar and Coca, as we’ve had quite a bit of cast attrition in the intervening months. Marge and Gower Champion are on vacation, and Mary McCarty seemingly never came back. I didn’t miss the Champions, who were replaced by two more interesting dance pairs, but I could have used some of McCarty’s more bitter sense of humour. The remaining stars are overstretched, best exemplified by the sight of Coca finishing a long sketch and then immediately scrambling back out to do a musical number. Caesar and Coca would, of course, be the stars of Liebman’s next series Your Show of Shows, with McCarty and the Champions fading into obscurity. It seems as if Liebman’s already pruned the cast down to who he really needs.
For the time being, Admiral Broadway Revue seems exhausted of ideas. There’s an increasing reliance on pantomime and more abstract humour. The replacement of faux-Fred & Ginger Marge and Gower Champion with the almost mime-like Mata & Hari, dressed in androgynous athletic outfits, seems emblematic of the trend. In many ways, this is a retreat back into the Vaudeville tradition, but using the intimacy of the television camera to allow for more focus on facial acting. The performers are good at wordless storytelling, but they do it ad nauseum in “Hotel Paradise.” Dick Hyde’s four trumpet-performance, on the other hand, is an example of the charming miscellaneous variety acts which had much more of an outlet in the mid-20th century than they do today.
I couldn’t conclude without commenting on the last segment, although the post-colonial analysis almost writes itself. In the musical number, traditional Western gender roles assigned to Indigenous culture. There’s a long segment about all the work Pocahontas will have to do after her marriage to her local fiance, and how thankless her life will be under tribal tradition. When Pocahontas runs into John Smith, she is fascinated by his whiteness (“to what tribe did he belong?”) and the thickness of his beard. Framed in this way, European colonization is a liberation from the violence of indigenous society, violence which is later visited on the innocent white man who just happens to be walking through the woods on another continent.
Of course, it’s all a joke, with the twist ending being that Pocahontas has fetishized the white man just as much as the whole sequence has fetishized Indigenous culture. But it’s also not too far off from the straight-faced retelling of the Pocahontas story in, say, Disney’s 90s movie. The tendency to displace the restrictive social norms and structural violence of Western society onto a thankfully-vanquished Indigenous culture is a theme that we’ll certainly see a lot in the coming decade of TV Westerns.
What else is on?: Interestingly, the Revue is no longer listed on the DuMont schedule. Instead, DuMont showed something called Fanfare for the first 25 minutes of the hour before cutting to a Phillies/Yankees game. CBS likewise showed a musical program (Adventures in Jazz) heading into a baseball game, while ABC aired a quiz show titled Ladies Be Seated.
Coming up next: Suspense takes us all the way up to the 13th floor.
The Eternal Couch Potato 