What I watched: Cavalcade of Stars, a variety show hosted by Jackie Gleason. This episode featured Smith and Dale, Art Carney, Gracie Barrie, Donald Richie, Victor Borge, and the June Taylor Dancers. The episode was directed by Frank Brunetta and written by Coleman Jacoby and Arnie Rosen. This episode aired on Friday, September 2 at 10:00 PM on the DuMont network, and is available on YouTube. Based on the description of a similar file on the Internet Archive, this episode is incomplete, and some scenes from the August 19 episode.
What happened: Gleason opens the show dressed for golf, which segues into a sketch where he receives athletic training from a baffling-looking man in a black “Mr. America” jumpsuit (possibly Borge?). It’s one of the more absurdist things I’ve seen on TV of this era. After some strange interactions, Jackie decides to stick to golf, which inspires a segment where the June Taylor girls dance with golf clubs. The ultimate in upper-class sexual fantasy.
This is followed by a pair of old Vaudeville comedians, Smith and Dale. They play a pair of lazy, card-playing firefighters who refuse to go to a job because it’s inconvenient. There’s a strong ethnic component to the humour, with the men having strong Germanic accents. They remain indifferent to the pleas of a man whose house is burning down (Carney), but are more interested when a pretty girl wants them to guard their house.
Jackie introduces Gracie Barrie, who sings a song about having a little fun, another about wanting to talk to her darling. While the music’s still playing, she does a little stand-up set about a husband who spends all his time at the bar. Next up is Donald Richie, the star of Finian’s Rainbow (the musical, not the bizarre Coppola film that adapted it). He also sings a pair of songs, one a love ballad and one about finding inspirations in East Side tenaments that’s just a little condescending.
There’s an abrupt cut, and the video quality changes a bit, so I suppose we’ve jumped to another episode. Performing is Victor Borge who comes out to play the piano. Before he gets going, he muses on the idea of inspiration, telling stories of how composers get their ideas. He keeps going with this train of thought, adding in some jokes and playing little snatches of composition to complement the story. Borge has a thick Danish accent, but he’s very charming, and the combination of comedy and classical is novel. Maybe he was the Weird Al of the 1950s.
The drug store pitchman introduces us to a Western scene. Jackie appears as a blustering sherriff wearing two 5-gallon hats (because he couldn’t get a 10-gallon.) There’s a physical gag about the barkeep knocking the glass away that I didn’t quite understand. He wants to close the gambling hall run by the female guest star. Borge shows up to threaten and ultimately shoot him, and Jackie manages to do a minute-long pratfall while dying.
What I thought: Typically I try to do entries only where full episodes are available, as there are a lot of isolated clips out there and it’s hard to write something substantial about them. But I sort of got tricked into it here by a file that appeared to be a full episode but was actually two incomplete ones stitched together. Maybe this Frankenstein creature was created to be aired in syndication somewhere. The result is a variety show without even the minimal structure usually posed, a succession of acts without context.
Most of the acts here relate to music in one fashion or another, and in general musical acts have dominated the variety shows we’ve watched so far (although comedy has held its own.) I’ve mostly avoided writing about the music on these shows, and for good reason: I have no training in music, can’t tell a fugue from a falsetto, and my own tastes have been pretty irrevocably shaped by growing up with an omnipresent backdrop of rock radio, the sound that sought to rebel against and overcome precisely the pleasant harmonies of Tin Pan Alley. But, seeing as how there’s not much else to comment on, I’ll take a stab at dissecting some music.
There seem to be two great topics in 1950s music, and perhaps popular music of all ages. The first is, of course, love, exemplified by Gracie Barrett’s pair of songs here. Love, and the gaining or losing of it, was an experience seen as both universal and dramatic. These songs were typically unspecific, pledging devotion to an offstage loved one, perhaps the listener. Perhaps these songs would connect with me more if I had met anyone new in the past ten months.
The second genre is songs about songs, a kind of meta-music that relies on the audience’s concept of what a song should sound like. Donald Richie’s second song here is an example of this, using the listener’s knowledge of the traditional parts of music to place them in the unfamiliar environment of the New York tenement. Victor Borge’s act, and seemingly his fame, was based on this, building on a passing familiarity with classical music (assumed of a 1950 audience, but not one today) to entertain and amuse.
These songs, and others we’ve heard on past shows, suggest a world that thought and communicated through pop songs, one that had such a thorough grasp of the genre that meta-commentary could become popular and easily comprehensible. Or perhaps this simply reflects the perspective of songwriters, constantly turning out melodies for other people to sing, their constructions becoming more baroque and self-referential as their contact with the world outside music faded. Or maybe the songwriters were just getting bored of straightforward love songs.
Ultimately, I don’t think I’ll ever connect with this style of music to the point where I would listen to an album in my spare time. (Then again, I’m doing this with my spare time, so who knows.) I’m 31, and I think one’s musical tastes are pretty firmly set by then. It would be like trying to do a new language. But I can appreciate the cleverness in some of these constructions, like Borge, and obviously the skill required to perform. I think that’s the attitude I have to take when watching shows like this.
Coming up next: Speaking of singing, Gene Autry is still having some cowboy adventures.
The Eternal Couch Potato 