From Those Were the Days:

1948 - Our Miss Brooks, starring Eve Arden and Gale Gordon, debuted on CBS Radio this day. Arden played the role of Connie Brooks. The program stayed on radio until 1957, running simultaneously on TV from 1952 to 1956.

Miss Brooks taught English at Madison High School. Her pal, the bashful, biology teacher Philip Boynton, was played by on radio by Jeff Chandler and Robert Rockwell (with Rockwell essaying the role on TV). The crusty, blustery principal of Madison High, Osgood Conklin, was none other than Gale Gordon.

Supporting Eve Arden was Jane Morgan as Miss Brooks’ landlady, Mrs. Davis. The main problem child in the classroom, the somewhat dimwitted Walter Denton, was Richard Crenna.

Eve Arden was so popular as Miss Brooks that she was frequently asked to speak to educational groups and at PTA meetings. She was even offered teaching positions at real high schools.

Ah, the power of radio and television!
12:06:09 PM    comment []  trackback []  

“Snakes are my life…”

Since I spent yesterday watching Henry Fonda do the Presidential thing in Fail-Safe, I chose this morning to observe him perform slapstick in the 1941 classic Preston Sturges farce The Lady Eve with Barbara Stanwyck. Sturges is practically at the top of the list of my favorite film directors, but I must confess that I don’t warm to Eve in the way that other Sturges fans do. For example, Roger Ebert lists the film in his book The Great Movies (which I recently finished reading), and for the life of me I can’t figure out why he places it ahead of superior Sturges vehicles like Sullivan’s Travels (1941), The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944) or Unfaithfully Yours (1948).

Cardsharps Jean (Stanwyck) and Harry Harrington (Charles Coburn—“Let us be crooked but never common”) are planning to clip Fonda (heir of Pike’s Pale, “the Ale that won for Yale”) in a card game as the three of them are sailing back to America (Fonda has spent a year in the Amazon on a snake expedition). Babs falls hard for Hank, and she plans to marry him—she even prevents father Coburn from fleecing her fiancé and plans to tell "Hopsie" all about her past. But Fonda is tipped off beforehand, and he dumps her; she plots revenge, and what a revenge—she masquerades as the veddy British Lady Eve Sidwich and has him so flummoxed that he’s falling over furniture (“That sofa has been there fifteen years and nobody ever fell over it before,” remarks father Eugene Pallette) and making a complete doofus of himself. Fonda’s so confused he doesn’t even realize that Eve and Jean are, in the words of his “valet” Muggsy (William Demarest), “the same dame!”

Although I don’t rank The Lady Eve as high as I do some of Sturges’ other classics, it’s still a entertaining romantic comedy—my admiration for the director is such that even some of his weaker efforts (like The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend) are miles away better than other comedies of that era. I think my lack of enthusiasm for Eve stems from the fact that I’m not as crazy-go-nuts over Babs as other film buffs are; granted, I enjoy her in noir films like The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) and The File on Thelma Jordon (1950) but with the exception of Ball of Fire (1941) her comedic turns fill me with ennui. I’m not all that keen on Fonda’s comedic roles, either—though I can’t deny that he executes some pretty awesome pratfalls in this one. I have found through experience that you can’t go wrong with Sturges—and The Lady Eve is prima facie evidence of that.
11:59:47 AM    comment []  trackback []