Friday, July 24, 2009

Joe E. Brown: Turner Classic Movies Honors The Great Depression's Greatest Movie Comedian, All Day, Tuesday 7/28/09!








I feel like blogging today, because I've just found out that something really great is going to be on t.v. this coming week, on Tuesday, July 28th, and I want to call your attention to it. If you have Turner Classic Movies and a TiVo, and you love classic comedy movies, I'm about to make your whole summer.

Like every good Classic Movie Buff, I have a special place in my heart for old comedy movies from the 1930s and 1940s. Like you (I hope), I grew up racing home from school to catch "the hilarious antics" of Laurel and Hardy, The Three Stooges, the Marx Bros., and Abbott and Costello.

Well, there is one additional classic movie comedian from the same era (‘30s and ‘40s) whom I really enjoy, and while he's fallen off of the radar over the last six decades, the programmers at Turner Classic Movies are trying to put him back on the map, by dedicating a full day each year, on his birthday, to presenting all-day festivals of his movies. In fact, I didn’t know that much about this “mystery person” until around three years ago, which is when TCM began programming annual tributes to him, for the first time.

You’ve seen this great movie comedian before, only, you don’t know it:

Everybody loves Billy Wilder’s great 1959 comedy, Some Like It Hot. Remember the final scene of the movie? Jack Lemmon is on the motorboat with the lecherous old millionaire Osgood Fielding, III. Believing the cross-dressing Lemmon to be a woman, Osgood informs Lemmon (“Daphne”) that he wants to marry him, to which Lemmon incredulously replies, “I’m a man!” Osgood’s smiling reply, “Nobody’s perfect,” the last line of the movie, is one of the funniest punchlines in American movie history, a zinger that’s been bringing down the house for fifty years. Osgood is played by the great American movie comedian, Joe E. Brown, Warner Bros. #1 Box Office Star of the early 1930s (1929 to 1936), and this coming Tuesday, on July 28, 2009, Turner Classic Movies will be presenting an all-day/ten-film birthday tribute to Brown, who was born 117 years ago, in Holgate, Ohio, on July 28, 1892. (He passed away in California, in 1971.)

In the first years of “talkies,” between 1929 and 1936, the amazing Joe E. Brown, who began his career as a circus clown and on the vaudeville stage, starred in more than twenty movies for Warner Bros., and during this seven-year period, Brown was the studio’s #1 Box-Office Draw. (Warner’s #2 draw was James Cagney, who appeared in all of those great pre-Hays Code gangster dramas for Warners, like Public Enemy)! In the Depression era of the early ‘30s, when a down-on-its-luck America needed to laugh (sound familiar?), Brown was the original “go-to” guy for laughs, even before the incipient arrival of the Marxes and the Stooges and Abbott and Costello, who would arrive on the scene directly after him.

The eminently likeable Brown, a favorite of grown-ups and kids alike -- kids responded to his wide-eyed innocence and innate kindness, the main hallmarks of his onscreen persona -- was often called “The Big Mouth” because his huge, always-smiling (even in the face of adversity) mouth was his most distinctive feature, and sometimes his movie titles reflected this facial feature – two of his movies were entitled The Big Mouth and Wide Open Faces. Brown was movie history's first "rubber-faced" comedian, fifty years before Jim Carrey and, for the record, Joe E. Brown is "Hilariously Funny" and Jim Carrey is "Incredibly Not Funny and Annoying," although if a biopic were ever to be made about Brown's life, Carrey, who's better in 'serious' roles than he is in comedic ones, would probably be perfect to play him.

Like a lot of great comedians, Brown, in his movies, covered up his shy, self-deprecatingness by performing overly-confident acts of bravado in front of women he liked – usually, right before falling down the manhole he didn't see, which was directly in front of him. (Bob Hope borrowed this shtick from Brown, and Woody Allen borrowed it from Bob Hope.) When Joe E. Brown gets threatened in his movies, or when he's in panicked distress, he opens his yap wide – it stretches so that his whole head turns into the Grand Canyon – and makes the funniest/strangest/most captivating noise you’ve ever heard. Here's that noise right now:







Brown was a huge sports fan, and a lot of his movies center around weaklings who are thrown into the sports world (baseball, football, polo, etc.) and triumph, even though you think they will fall flat on their faces. (I myself am not a huge sports fan, but I enjoy Brown's sports-themed movies anyway, because the guy is non-stop hilarious.) In fact, three of Brown's best movies – Fireman Save My Child, Elmer the Great, and Alibi Ike – center around baseball and are often referred to, in film history books, as Brown's "Baseball Trilogy." All three of these movies will be on TCM, on 7/28/09.

Here is Tuesday, July 28th’s schedule of Joe E. Brown movies on Turner Classic Movies. I promise that if you don’t like these movies, you never have to read my insufferable blogs again. All of the films which TCM will be broadcasting on 7/28 are from Brown’s 1929-1936 Warner Bros. catalog. WB is where Brown made his best and funniest films, and when his WB contract was up, and the studio wouldn’t up his salary commensurate with the huge profits his movies were taking in at the box office, he left them and became a free agent. The movies in which Brown would star after his tenure at WB (mostly, at Columbia and Republic) aren’t as good for the reason that the Marx Bros.' earlier movies were better than the later ones -- in the case of both the Marx Bros. and Joe E. Brown, the early films were 100% centered around them, while in the later pictures, the studios, in an effort to bring 'comedy-averse' women into the theaters, often added insufferable romantic subplots featuring blandly-good looking couples who crooned to each other, ad nauseam.

TiVo as many of these hilarious Joe E. Brown movies as you can, and then feel free to post a response to this blog and tell me what you think of them. Turner Classic Movies will be presenting ten of Brown’s Warner Bros. pictures in the order in which they were released theatrically.

Here is the schedule, which I’ve listed in both PST (Pacific Standard Time) for people on the West Coast and EST (Eastern Standard Time) for people on the East Coast.
ON WITH THE SHOW (1929) (3:45 AM PST, 6:45 AM, EST);
THE TENDERFOOT (1932) (5:30 AM PST, 8:30 AM, EST);
FIREMAN SAVE MY CHILD (1932) (6:45 AM PST, 9:45 AM EST);
SON OF A SAILOR (1933) (8:00 AM, PST, 11:00AM, EST);
ELMER THE GREAT (1933) (9:15 AM PST, 12:15 AM EST);
A VERY HONORABLE GUY (1934) (10:30AM PST, 1:30PM EST);
THE CIRCUS CLOWN (1934) (11:45 AM, PST; 2:45PM EST);
ALIBI IKE (1935) (1:00PM PST, 4:00PM EST);
POLO JOE (1936) (2:15PM PST, 5:15PM EST);
SONS O’ GUNS (1936) (3:30PM PST, 6:30PM EST).

If you want to read about Joe E. Brown, check out the book about him, Joe E. Brown: Film Comedian and Baseball Buffoon, by Wes D. Gehring (MacFarland, 2006). Gehring doesn't really capture Brown's personality, so if you've never seen Brown before, you won't really "get what he's about" from reading his book; however the author has done a very admirable job of researching Brown's life, to completion. It's available on Amazon.com.

Why did Brown fall off the radar? Who knows. Pop Culture is weird, in the sense that we remember some people from the past but, at the same time, we forget other people who are equally as valuable. But I guess that's why Turner Classic Movies and "bloggers like me" are here: (maybe) to redress past mistakes...

Anyway, that’s all! Please give these Joe E. Brown movies a chance when they appear on Turner Classic Movies this week. I promise you will love all ten of them. Each film is hilarious from beginning to end.

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