audrablum
This week I watched the episode The Comedian (1957) from the Playhouse 90 television series. A comedic television personality with a Mr. Hyde personality and a god-complex backstage makes life miserable for everyone around him including his manager brother. This episode was amazing in the fact that it was not edit intensive and much of the story was taped live. Surprisingly for the shooting style it remained highly engaging throughout the entire film. Mickey Rooney played the difficult personality of the comedian named Sammy Hogarth, who bullies everyone around him. The interesting thing about this viewing experience is that it seems very relatable. This is a very real personality and those of us who have experienced this can attest that Mickey Rooney's portrayal of Sammy was spot on to this personality type. The sad thing about this show is that it seems like a desperate cry for help from people in the film and television industry. It says that this abuse in the industry is overlooked and no one seems to care. This episode was actually based on a novel by Ernest Lehman and the screenplay was written by the Twilight Zone founder Rod Serling. The screenplay was very strong and I think some of its greatest strengths are that it uses the character of Sammy Hogarth as the abusive, self-inflated boss to tell a very relatable story, not just in film but in many workplaces. The weakness in this script is what I refer to as the leatherface syndrome, which was a prevalent outbreak amongst directors during the golden age of television. Sufferers of this disease would cast actors and write screenplays where old men would hook up with women who could be their granddaughters. The writers and directors minds would delude them into believing that not only would these young, attractive, 20 year old women fall for their grandfathers, but the men they would fall for would look nothing like a George Clooney or Tom Cruise. Thankfully, years later the outbreak subsided and directors and writers were no longer as prone to this disease.
The episode was directed by John Frankenheimer, who would later write classics like Reindeer Games (2000). One of the strongest points of directing was the fact that this episode used very little editing (as stated earlier in this review). This appears to have taken quite a bit of contemplation and direction to pull off effectively and a part of me wonders if we still have this level of directing talent today, or if anyone really cares.
Runcible
The Comedian is an amazing story. Mickey Rooney's performance is mesmerizing. He is despicable, ruthlessly hateful and is a monster to anyone who doesn't bow down at his feet and give him what he wants instantly. What a revelation to me who only really saw him in the movies with a young Judy Garland. The rest of the cast is outstanding. Mel Torme is brilliant as the brother. I kept waiting for him to stand up for himself, but except for a few moments where you think he's reached the end of his tolerance, he backs down like a little mouse. Edmond O'Brien is good as the head writer but he doesn't quite match the intensity of Mickey Rooney or Mel Torme.To think this was performed live and 90 minutes long. A powerful story that you won't soon forget.
megunticook
I watched this yesterday and was astounded by the performances of all, but especially Mickey Rooney. He is so natural and fluid. His performance is seamless. For those who think of Mickey Rooney as a happy-go-lucky character type, this performance will floor you. He is nasty and ruthless and heartless. The rest of the cast is similarly flawless. How much time did it take to rehearse, I wonder? Watching these old live broadcasts is also a revelation. That they were able to have such variety and density in such confined environs is amazing. While some things such as transitions and breaks are crude by today's standards, that they did all of this live is impressive. There is a montage near the end of the program with cross-fades and multiple locations. How did they do it? The writing is equally spectacular. Can one think of anything similar being done today? As another reviewer noted, the denouement does have something of a false ring to it. I won't spoil it here. I know how I would have ended it. It would be interesting to read the Ernest Lehman story on which the show is based to see if it is the same.
tostinati
Spoilers. See it first.A story in one of those "Whatever Became Of...?" books from several years ago convinced me without aiming to that Sammy Hogarth is a thinly veiled composite of the top two or three TV comics of TV's Golden Age. (No names please.) In that book, a second string comic who did a lot of TV in the 50s talks at length, with deadly, convincing examples, of the bloated egotism, vanity and ugly cruelty of THE names of early TV comedy. "The really big ones" he said "they were all b****rds."That certainly describes Mickey Rooney as Sammy Hogarth to the letter. Once you accept the premise --that over-the-top success breeds monsters of the ego-- it is easy to get swept up in a paranoid who-was-he-really? guessing game. Is Rooney as good as he is at playing Sammy because he IS Sammy? (After all, success and wealth came to him a a very early age, and he apparently had the kind of women most red-blooded American Male's dream of on tap throughout his 20s and 30s.) --Or is it another non-comic air personality, of the legendary and ultimately self-immolating high temper, a saint before the camera, a beast behind the scenes, whose rise and fall was encapsulated for all time in the contemporaneous Face In the Crowd? Clearly, turning over all the stones in the field is madness. Sammy is a postulate.
As central as Sammy is to the experience of The Comedian, the story isn't really about him. It's about Al, Sammy's harried head writer, a middle-aged man who finds himself at a personal crossroads. Deep in a lucrative career most of his peers would kill for, he has come reluctantly to the realization that he doesn't have what it takes anymore. His co-writers are carrying him; he is acting mostly as editor, passive catalyst, critic and executive comedy writer. The crushing grind of turning out huge volumes of material on the tightest schedules has used up whatever he may have had. --Or maybe he never had it to begin with; Al is never sure. (Friends say this character was the great Rod Serling himself, always unsure of his own talent.)
Whatever his perceived personal inadequacies, Al recognizes and savors brilliance when he sees it. Years before, he crossed paths with an aspiring young comedy writer named Davey Farber. Farber wrote knockout stuff; Al says he (Al) would be dining daily on Farber's dust, were his rival-aborning/idol alive now. But Farber was killed in WWII. Al keeps an original set of Davey's unused, unsubmitted scripts from the old days in a locked drawer in his office. Why? --To commune from time to time with a kindred spirit and dead friend/mentor/demon? --As insurance against the day when inspiration fails him, and he has to come in contact with the Godhead via the service entrance? To steal the work of somebody better than he ever was? Your answer to this question is as ultimately just as crass and condemning or as shaded and empathetic as you want it to be. Al's relationship with the image of Farber isn't exactly love/hate, but it is masochistic, and he probably hates himself for the emotions those scripts bring out in him. Every time he removes those scripts from his hiding place, he bathes in his own failure. He admires Farber immensely, while feeling stung that he could never be one of the brilliant ones, like the long departed author of his hard-copy inspiration. It's his connection with Farber that will eventually put him to the test.Sammy's brother Lester is the comedian's home base foil. For all the abuse Sammy heaps on everyone else-- and that's plenty-- he saves the very best for family, as people will. Lester is the brunt of the savage monologue that opens Sammy's show every week. Lester's wife is beginning to hate him for taking it lying down. He is squeezed tight between the allure of a cushy sustaining spot on his brother's payroll and his wife's impatient shame at a husband who got everything he will ever own by submitting to his brother's public mistreatment. Lester's desperate search for a way out of the non-stop humiliation and threatened end of his marriage sets things in motion that will force Al to finally deal definitively with his dark secret.
Into a charged situation sashays gossip columnist Otis Elwood, a dilettante and foppish slimeball, with fur-collared great coat, crisp fedora and shades he never removes. His pompous and high-blown everyday speech betrays his inflated image of himself. But right off, despite all the creep cues thrown our way, we share one undeniable affinity with this 'villain' that prevents us writing him off: We despise Sammy every bit as much as Elwood does. Like him, we ache to see the little weasel fall. It may be hard for modern audiences to realize the kind of power the Earl Wilsons, Luella Parsons, Hedda Hoppers and Walter Winchells used to wield. But they did, and Elwood is no far-fetched deus ex machina. Lester hates Elwood, mumbling into his collar at the beginning of act one "He thinks he's God or somethin'." He will turn to Elwood before the play is over, for leverage against Al and his brother and for salvation from his personal hell.The obsessions of the main characters are essentially Serling's: career (as in how to earn a dollar and retain one's dignity), place in society (as in one's ultimate deemed status in the human community), the nature of talent, and the question of the importance of legacy. In Serling's world, it isn't a question of wanting to fit in and keep up with the other corporation men. Materialistic failure is always an option for Serling. But to be a nonentity, to do something that causes you to slip through the cracks of human memory, is not.If anyone wants to see what all the talk over TV drama from the Golden Age of television is about, this is the place to start.Ten Stars.
