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Friday, December 19, 2014

Radio Feuds Won't Rest!


Winchell vs. Bernie in Wake Up and Live (1937)

How to take a bandleader and news columnist and make them movie attractions, a cooked-up "feud" driving tissue narrative against backdrop of song. It works, and how, as barometer of what pleased in days when a public paid real attention to stuff press and radio fed them daily. There was no better demo of media power than Walter Winchell giving/taking licks from yowsah-man Ben Bernie, their contretemps profitable in a long run for both. To that slim frame add 20th Fox funmakers Jack Haley, Patsy Kelly, Ned Sparks ... well, the list goes on. Beyond these, Joan Davis just has to show up, and so does in specialty slapstick. Wake Up and Live is what we'd accurately call "escapism" in a best sense of old Hollywood. Being unfamiliar with pop culture of the day would make it seem like foreign language. When a thing like this surfaces on DVD, I'm amazed, but gratifyingly so. Wake woke 1937 trade to rave response, a "bulls-eye" and single day record holder for a past five years at Broadway's Roxy. It was understood that Jack Haley was a feature star born with this. Winchell and the cast guested on Ben Bernie's radio program to stir interest, the home box holding thrall over a wider public than even movies by '37. The only rub for such synergy was its failing to translate overseas. Wake Up and Live took a lofty $1.2 million in domestic rentals, but foreign was meager with $358K. Still, there was $190K profit at the end, and indication that a cycle of such musicals would click, which they did over a next several seasons until the real breakthrough that came with Fox's Betty Grable series. Wake Up from Fox DVD Archive looks fine.

5 Comments:

Blogger Michael said...

Am I the only one who finds it impossible to square Winchell's 30s image, peddling amusing star gossip, with the monster Burt Lancaster plays in The Sweet Smell of Success?

Maybe I need to finally read the Neil Gabler bio to understand how those are the same person. I get that Winchell was peddling HUAC-era redbaiting, but... so was everybody else.

10:48 AM  
Blogger Dave K said...

Had a beat up 16mm print of this one for years. Had a hard time dragooning anyone, even film buff type buddies, into a viewing. The sort of situation where the more thoroughly I described it, the faster friends and relatives ran ("and then Joan Davis does this dance... wait, where are you going?") Me? I loved it!

12:37 PM  
Blogger radiotelefonia said...

It is too obvious which such a film would flop overseas, which I will take it as Europe. These personalities meant nothing to them.

Not overseas, but down the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego, this kind of film was probably a commercial disaster.

20th Century-Fox had recently cancelled their profitable Spanish language series of films and that market at this time was taken over by Argentine films.

1:38 PM  
Blogger aldi said...

"Am I the only one who finds it impossible to square Winchell's 30s image, peddling amusing star gossip, with the monster Burt Lancaster plays in The Sweet Smell of Success?"

Winchell covered the same beat from the 30s onwards. Not just showbiz, Broadway, Hollywood, high society, 'blessed events', etc but gangsters, spies, commies, Nazis, it was all grist to his mill and very early om he forged a close relationship with J Edgar Hoover, staging the Hoover arrest of Alvin Karpis. (Karpis' tale of the arrest in Gabler's book is hilarious).


2:17 PM  
Blogger rnigma said...

Jack Benny, early in his vaudeville career, used the name Ben K. Benny, but changed it because he was being confused with Ben Bernie. And the Bernie-Winchell feud probably inspired Benny's mock-war with Fred Allen.

If Winchell was feuding in real life it was probably with his rival at the Daily News, Ed Sullivan.

11:34 PM  

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