What I watched: The fourth episode of The Life of Riley, an early sitcom. The episode starred Jackie Gleason, Rosemary DeCamp, Lanny Rees, Gloria Winters, and John Brown, with a guest appearance by Marten Lamont. It was directed by Herbert I. Leeds, and written by Irving Belcher, Reuben Shipp, and Alan Lipscott. “The French Teacher” aired on NBC at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, October 25, 1949, and is available to watch on Internet Archive.
What happened: For once our narrator starts off the episode, telling us that if we ever want “a punch in the nose” we should go to Riley’s house in west Los Angeles and speak French to him. This distaste for the Gallic tongue begins when Riley finds a French letter addressed to his daughter. Reading it, he predictably and somewhat humorously mangles the language.
Junior comes home, and Riley proceeds to grill him for information about the teacher in question. Babs is apparently “gooey” for him, and we’re told that the girls think he looks like Errol Flynn, in what was a very dated cultural reference even in 1949. When Babs comes home after seeing him, she’s obviously dazed. When pressed, she defends her interest in the teacher — one Professor Andre Lafayette, presumably the first French names that came to the writers’ mind — as purely platonic. But hey, he’s coming for dinner tomorrow, I guess.
When Professor Lafayette comes in, he’s the image of a stereotypical Frenchman, and immediately begins flirting with Peg. Riley tries to keep butting in to get the professor to say there’s no possibility of love with a big age difference. Predictably, the Frenchman disagrees. The idea quickly comes up of Peg taking private French lessons, much to Riley’s consternation. She agrees to exchange meals for lessons.
The next night, they dine with Lafayette again, deciding to eat only in French. Riley is upset at this too, and easily gets confused by the foreign language. He gets furious at the rest of his family’s cultural development and leaves for the local Chinese restaurant “where everyone’s a 100% American.”
After presumably stuffing his face with chop suey, Riley is sitting in the park when his gravedigger friend Digger O’Dell. Digger talks about his own experiences with a romantic rival, and there’s a strong implication that he straight-up killed the guy. Riley apparently takes guidance from this and decides to confront Lafayette.
Back at home, Riley accosts the French teacher as he arrives for his next teacher. He accuses Lafayette of trying to break up his family. The teacher lets an Americanism slip, and it emerges that he was in fact born in Brooklyn like Riley, and is only performing a French accent. With his sex appeal now stripped from him, the women lose interest, but Riley suddenly becomes friendly to “Andy Lafferty.”
What I thought: I almost feel like I don’t have to write anything about this — the general theme and plot arc of the episode is very similar to “Babs and Simon Step Out”, right down to the plot point of having the would-be suitor to dinner. It’s probably not a good thing if you’re repeating plots four episodes into the series, but it does give us some idea of just how obsessive the sitcom was in its protection of filial virtue.
If anything, Riley’s possessiveness seems even more violent and extreme than before. We learn that he pays his children to spy on each other, and sees his own role as husband as spying on his wife. All of this vigilance is necessary to protect the hetero-nuclear family from the many lusty predators which seek to disrupt it — the “law of the jungle”, as Riley puts it. His paranoia even hints towards the homicidal, as he barks “He’s a man, isn’t he? He’s alive, isn’t he? So there’s a problem.” This is, of course, the man we’re meant to see as relatable.
This is the type of formulaic episode that would have been really brightened up by a great comedic performance, but unfortunately we don’t get one. As always, Gleason tries hard, but his portrayal of Riley is really starting to become one-note. Marten Lamont had a real chance to ham it up as the phony French professor, but doesn’t do that much, and Peg and the kids are comedic non-entities. Probably the most notable performance is Brown as Digger O’Dell, the sanguine undertaker. Still, that’s mostly just a voice. Other than Gleason, who always had an inherent understanding of television, there’s little in the show that would add any new meaning from the radio version.
There are two major differences between this episode of Life of Riley and the previous daughter-protection plot. Whereas previously the suitor was a whitebread American boy who was obviously not a real threat, here we have something dangerous: a Frenchman. Europeans seem to pop up quite a bit on late-40s television. Many Americans had, of course, become acquainted with the funny continentals during the Second World War, and encountering someone with a different culture and a silly-sounding language was a fairly common experience on which TV could draw for easy laughs.
The degradation of Europe on American TV also has its roots in period ideology. America, it was said constantly in subtle and unsubtle ways, had surpassed their former colonial masters and become the inheritors of Western culture. Europe was backwards, stuffy, and stuck in decline — an impression that future incidents like the Suez Crisis would only enhance. So when Europe appears on American TV, it always ridiculous and/or sad, as in Sid Caesar’s goofy accents or the stories of imperial decline on Suspense. “The French Teacher” tells on itself, however, by making its teacher ultimately American. This was, after all, an image of Europe constructed by Americans for Americans, and deep down everyone knew it.
The other unique element to this episode is how the target of the Frenchman’s sexual threat quickly switches from Riley’s daughter to his wife, suggesting that these two positions are basically interchangable. As in Freud, the daughter is a kind of junior wife, who owes a monogamous bond to the father, while as in feminist theory, the wife is a kind of senior daughter, who needs the parental guidance and protection of a paternal figure. In this way, the idea of the family as a child-rearing project that Life of Riley depends on is revealed to be kind of an illusion: a daughter will never get old enough to become independent, because there is no place in the world for an independent woman.
Coming up next: It’s our 100th installment, featuring the return of… SUSPENSE.
The Eternal Couch Potato 