What I watched: The nineteenth episode of The Life of Riley, an early sitcom. The episode starred Jackie Gleason, Rosemary DeCamp, Gloria Winters, Sid Tomack, Jimmy Lydon and Fay Baker. It was directed by Herbert I. Leeds, and written by Irving Breecher, Reuben Shipp, and Alan Lipscott. “The Gambler” aired on NBC at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, February 7, 1950, and is available to watch on the Internet Archive.
What happened: Babs has signed up for acting lessons at the theatre. You know, I’ve been thinking a lot of people on this show could use them. She’s paying for the lessons with her own money, but she’s still worried about her dad getting mad about it. Simon is coming over to help write the play, so apparently she’s back together with him.
Riley comes home early, and re-establishes how much he hates Simon. We get our second awkward cut in the first four minutes, so you know this was a real hack job. Gillis wants Riley to come over and player poker with the boys. Peg practically rushes him out the door, so he gets suspicious.
After ANOTHER weird cut, Simon finally arrives with his typewriter and a manuscript-sized play. His play is a Wagnerian epic involving ancient gods. This puts Peg to sleep. They then start practicing a scene where Simon, as Thor, asks Babs as Venus to run away with him, and a returning Riley overhears. This misunderstanding is cleared up surprisingly quickly, but Riley again gets mad at the news that his daughter is acting and paid money for the privilege. However, he’s eventually won over by Simon’s affection for his daughter.
Gillis thinks the whole acting school thing is a scam, and Riley swears to get the money back. Riley goes to their instructor, Professor Van Planten (Baker). Because she’s an actor, she acts weird, praising Riley for his stance and entrance. He doesn’t immediately get that she’s the professor, because she’s not a man. Aw, how lovable! She wants Riley to be an actor, and does a lot of touching, proclaiming how big a star he will be.
But it’s not too long before she’s asking for money to help finance his first play. He ends up giving over the money in the form of his paycheque (could she cash this?), and being cast in the role of Thor in what appears to be Simon’s play. (Oh boy, here we go.) Riley comes home and is talking in the same airy actor-speak as the professor. This is what finally convinces Simon that she’s a scammer, and he has apparently gotten the money back off-screen. He pretends that Riley has returned the money, and everything is returned to normal — except that Riley has to listen to Simon’s play.
What I thought: The episodes of Life of Riley available online are, for the most part, edit jobs: the series was originally a full 30 minutes, perhaps including a commercial plug, and it was re-edited so that it could be syndicated to some unfortunate modern audience with commercial breaks and all. For the most part, I appreciate not having to watch an extra ten minutes of this show, but there are time when the cuts just multiply the confusion created by the narrative.
“Acting Lessons”, in particular, seems almost to have been cut down from a full hour or two. We shift rapidly between premises and conflicts, between Babs’s desire to hide her acting lessons from her father to Riley’s hatred of Simon to Riley’s swindling by the teacher. In theory this could be a fun, Simpsons-like chain of events, but in practice it just seems like the writers couldn’t make any one of these conflicts interesting enough to sustain an episode. Despite this, there’s room for an inordinately long and unfunny scene of the acting teacher trying to physically seduce Riley. Did Jackie Gleason put that in?
One of the oddest parts of “Acting Lessons” is that acting is depicted as a fundamentally silly, high-faluting profession. Those engaged in it are untrustworthy and pretentious, and find themselves in conflict with the Riley family’s working-class values, as in “The French Teacher.” And yet, of course, Gleason and everyone else on the show is an actor, and the audience is tuning in to watch acting. The need for Hollywood to portray itself as a voice of the people leads it to constantly cast its heroes against a fictitious class of stuck-up, snobbish actors and critics, the very class which makes up the actual Hollywood.
Okay, I promised myself I would stay away from the Freudian stuff, but something has to be said about the whole business with the play in that episode. Simon’s epic is about a romance between the mismatched pair of Thor and Venus, with the latter played by Babs. The acting teacher seduces and cons Riley by offering him the role of Thor — in other words, offering him the ability to replace Simon as his daughter’s paramour. This proves too compelling to resist.
This detail is Oedipal in a very literal sense — mapping psychosexual anxieties onto plays about gods and ancient heroes was, after all, what the ancient Greek dramatists did. Even if one doesn’t want to agree with some of Freud’s bolder claims, it seems obvious that the fear of a father being replaced in a relationship with his daughter is one that has been a common trope throughout fiction, and one whose incestuous undertones are always protested too much. This is exacerbated in the family sitcom, in which a male actor has tot pretend he has an erotic relationship with one adult female co-star and a completely familial relationship with a different adult female co-star. It takes a lot of acting lessons to pull that off.
Coming up next: The Lone Ranger, who has never taken acting lessons in his life.
The Eternal Couch Potato 