Watched a Jackie Gleason Show tonight. It was about the Honeymooners characters, but it's from the hourlong variety show. One result is that the story is longer than a Honeymooners episode would have been, about forty minutes without commercials.
A new boy in the neighborhood looks up to Ralph. The kid is played by Van Dyke Parks, whose subsequent musical career may well have been influenced by Gleason's mood music albums. Anyway, Ralph is initially uncomfortable with this kid idolizing him, but warms up to the idea. He also gives a very creative account of his own past and athletic prowess.
There's a scene where Ralph and Ed go to see one of the kid's teachers. Ralph is bothered by the sound of chalk on blackboard. Ed picks up a stick of chalk and scrawls on the board. At the squeak of chalk on graphite Ralph makes these weird, unnatural motions. It's almost like a modern dance recital.
The Honeymooners, and the variety sketches that preceded it, was as impoverished-looking as any American sitcom would ever be. The stage set had the rough textures of a tenement apartment, and the actors acted like tenement dwellers. Some of Gleason's odder, hammy choices may have been meant to inject a quality of escapism, just for leavening. Art Carney's reassuring presence certainly helped.
2 comments:
I doubt I've watched an episode of the Jackie Gleason Show since those long ago Saturday evenings when I sat with my parents in front of the television set. It's funny to remember that although the Kramdens and Nortons lived in a NY City tenement building their lifestyle wasn't that different from the way a lot of us lived back then - not poor but certainly not middle class either. It was pretty much the same with I Love Lucy; a world without many pretensions that likely appears more than a little quaint now. Truth to tell, seeing clips from the 50s and early 60s makes me quite nostalgic.
I remember Ralph Kramden as a great blowhard who hid a tender heart. He played some other memorable characters too - The Poor Soul and Joe the Bartender, for instance. Jackie himself was amazingly light footed for his size and was a gifted physical comedian. Art Carney was an understated genius.
One of our favorite parts of every Jackie Gleason Show was getting to see the June Taylor Dancers. Boy, did I ever want to tap dance.
Yeah, a few early shows reflected the real world surroundings of their audience in a way TV generally wouldn't in the future. I always thought of I Love Lucy as being more luxe, but it wasn't by much. Funny thing is that Lucy and Ricky were joined at the hip with the Mertzes, who were their landlords. Which means that if they went on vacation or even moved to the suburbs, they took their landlords along.
Ralph Kramden was a great character. His marriage to Alice felt very real. Oddly Jackie Gleason initially thought Audrey Meadows was too pretty to play the part. I remember seeing the Joe the Bartender bits as well. That was a good comic setup. Art Carney had something special as well.
The interesting thing about tap dancing is that more than most types of dance, you hear it as much as you see it. True that the June Taylor! dancers had a gift for it.
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