Tag: Look Who’s Laughing (1941)

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Heavenly Days: What I Get to Watch When I’m Home Alone

Here I sit like a good egg given up for Lent. After having spent much of the week leading up to Ash Wednesday—a period celebrated as Karneval in my native Germany—entertaining two old (make that “longtime”) friends eager to get away from those festivities. The guests gone and my better half away in London, I now have the place pretty much to myself (the pleasant company of Montague excepting). Heavenly days? Not quite; but I did get to watch the movie. Heavenly Days, that is, a 1944 comedy based on the characters created by Don Quinn for his hugely popular US radio series Fibber McGee and Molly (many episodes of which are available online at the Internet Archive).

My web journal tells me that I recorded this film way back in November 2005, during a visit to New York City, my former home. So, it has taken me a while to catch up with Fibber McGee and Molly in their last major movie outing. It takes a day like this to do so without impunity, that is, without having to importune someone else who, despite having humored me by sitting through Look Who’s Laughing (1941) and much else besides, cannot be expected to share my enthusiasm for radio stars on celluloid. Who would?

That said, I have never been a friend of Fibber McGee and Molly; I much prefer the urbane wit of the aforementioned Halls of Ivy, a situation comedy conceived by the same writer, over the middle-America average-Joeness I have neither experienced nor longed for during my fifteen years in the United States. That did not stop me from picking up a copy of Charles Stumpf and Tim Price’s Heavenly Days at the Museum of Television and Radio while visiting Gotham in August 2006.

Messrs. Stumpf and Price point out that Heavenly Days, unlike the comedy team’s previous Look Who’s Laughing and its follow-up Here We Go Again, was not a commercial success. Yet whereas those earlier movies were rambling and largely inconsequential, Heavenly Days attempts to be earnest and socially relevant. Like the radio series, it is in the service of wartime propaganda, sending Fibber and his wife on an educational trip to Washington, from which they return with an awareness of their importance to the nation.

Heavenly Days is at once rebellious and (pardon the anachronism) politically correct. It seems determined to infuse the final months of the Second World War—a period in which fear and fervor made way for indifference and impatience—with the spirit of the New Deal, which, by 1944, was rather old hat. According to the peculiar logic of the sentimental comedy into which he is thrust, Fibber has to learn what it means to be “average,” a label all of the citizen he encounters vehemently reject; that it is neither a shame nor a statistical sham, but an honor and an obligation, considering that being average makes him a representative of the people who declare and elect him to be just that.

Of course, Fibber long had the vote of the people who, by tuning in to his weekly radio program, kept him in the office that was a prominent slot on the air—that realm of statistical averages and mediocrity. After the less than favorable reception of his Heavenly Capraescapades, that slot must have seemed a good place to come home to . . .

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The Eyes Have It: A Case of Overruled Aurality

Mary Pickford, from silent screen to radio

Eye or ear—which sense organ do you value more? Which one would you more willingly relinquish? Do we rate or trust our perceptions according to a hierarchy of the senses? I frequently ask myself these questions as I lie there listening in the dark, as I set out to get lost in an imaginary landscape only to switch on the light once more in order to return to what is real and to focus my mind’s eye on the screen of my computer. Ours is such a visually conceived, mapped, and organized world—a world demanding and indeed dependent on “ocular proof”—that I gather most of us would rather part with our hearing than with our sight.

Our lexicon provides clear signs of how we “see” ourselves and “look” at our world; it makes plain, “at a glance,” that we have more “regard” for the icon than for the echo. We say “I hear you” when, in commiseration, we find a mirror image of our thoughts in the words of another; we say “I see what you mean” to signal that we have gained understanding, to show that we have gleaned “insight” from such communications. The ear merely confirms what the eye alone can truly demonstrate; and the ability to see clearly is of such significance to us that we tend to believe that a picture is worth more than a thousand words. Were the radio listeners of the pre-TV era—audiences in the true sense of the word—more likely to give up their eyes and to lend an ear?

To be sure, in the 1930s and ’40s, radio listening was America’s favorite pastime; according to one survey, more Americans were willing to forgo moviegoing and reading than go without their radios. The ways in which Hollywood attempted to catch up with or cash in on radio—after a decade of distrust, rivalry, and neglect—seem to attest to radio’s formerly central role in American culture.

The other night I was watching Look Who’s Laughing, a 1941 trifle starring a number of well-known radio players including ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, his puppet Charlie McCarthy, Jim and Marion Jordan (of Fibber McGee and Molly fame), Harold Peary (the Great Gildersleeve), as well as radio announcer Harlow Wilcox. Although carelessly tossed together, this production proved to be RKO’s most profitable production that year.

Radio personalities sure could sell a picture. And yet, rather than showing how powerful broadcasting was at the time, films like these suggest instead how dependent on visuals American audiences truly were. Not satisfied to imagine, they wanted images of the voices on the air. They bought radio magazines, flocked to studio broadcasts, and paid money to find on the big screen what the radio promised to deliver free of charge. Radio only delivered promises. It teased listeners with messages like “if you could only see us now” or “come and get it,” titillations ideally suited to commerce: to have means to behold.

Movies turned radio performers into stars or prevented former vaudevillians like Edgar Bergen from becoming invisible. Many movie stars (like Mary Pickford, above) stepped up to the microphone and were paid handsomely to address or perform for the masses. Radio—live entertainment for the living room—kept many an actor alive during the Depression; but it was screen and press exposure that assured a larger-than-life star status. Hollywood’s supplementality, its ability to augment or substitute reality, to make us see and believe, tells us much about the tyranny of vision. Now excuse me while I close my eyes . . .