“Red”-Letter Day
This July 18th is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Red Skelton, MGM’s beloved funnyman of the 1940s and early ’50s. Skelton, who died at 84 in 1997, smoothly segued from the movies into an even more successful and longlasting career as one of television’s most popular comics. In his heyday as a film star, Skelton regularly alternated between black-and-white comedies and Technicolor musicals. (His red hair helped to keep him in front of those color cameras.) Though his best-remembered comedy is The Fuller Brush Man (1948), which was made on loan to Columbia, I’d like to take a look at two other Skelton films of the ’40s, one a musical and the other a straight comedy. Neither is especially good, but they are representative of his output, which, it must be said, includes no classics, no wondrous gems to tout.
Skelton worked his way up the MGM ladder rather quickly, thanks to two appearances as a comic orderly in the Dr. Kildare series, plus roles in musicals such as Panama Hattie (1942), with Ann Sothern, and Ship Ahoy (1942), with Eleanor Powell. His real break came with the comedy Whistling in the Dark (1941), and its two sequels (in ’42 and ’43), in which he played a radio personality, “The Fox,” an amateur sleuth (off the air) who would get himself entangled in real-life crime-solving adventures. By 1943, with Whistling in Brooklyn and two musicals, I Dood It and DuBarry Was a Lady, Skelton was a full-fledged A-list star on the MGM lot, the studio’s sweetly innocent, perennially childlike clown.
Bathing Beauty (1944) is the movie that presented Esther Williams as MGM’s newest star attraction, and it is rememembered, if at all, as a Williams picture. With a title like that, how could it be otherwise? But top-billed Skelton is the picture’s actual star, the already established player on hand for his box-office clout. Come see Red and then fall in love with the beautiful young woman in the swimsuit, which is exactly what happened. Bathing Beauty is a typical Joe Pasternak production, a crazily eclectic musical hodegpodge that could seemingly accommodate any kind of musical performer, in this case even organist Ethel Smith. Who else but Pasternak would employ Harry James and his orchestra and Xavier Cugat and his orchestra? Not only that, but sometimes James and Cugat are used in the same musical numbers! This movie plays like some wildly colorful and fearlessly kitschy kind of Hell, a place where specialty numbers never cease. Is there even enough time here to incorporate a plot? Barely, but that’s not such a bad thing when a plot is as dumb as the one they cooked up for Bathing Beauty.
For some inexplicable reason, goddess Esther is in love with goofy Red. Basil Rathbone, as Red’s best pal…okay, wait a second: what in the world is Rathbone doing in this movie, and in what universe could he possibly be Red Skelton’s best friend? Anyway, Basil sabotages Esther and Red’s wedding by hiring a woman to pose as Red’s wife and the mother of three suspiciously redheaded little boys. And Esther believes this! Why, you may ask, would Basil do such a thing? It has to do with him being a producer and needing songwriter Red to write the score for his water pageant. Huh? Esther, hurt and angry, returns to her job, teaching swimming at a girls’ college in New Jersey. You guessed it: Red enrolls, after a technicality is found in the school’s charter. He’s determined to win Esther back.
Skelton is surprisingly subdued for much of the picture, even occasionally seeming like an actual leading man. But he, thank goodness, eventually has a comic centerpiece worth all the inanity that has rigged this plot into motion. It’s a ballet class, complete with Red in a pink tutu. The teacher, the wonderfully severe Ann Codee, mercilessly slaps him into shape. (The sequence appears to be the inspiration for Lucille Ball’s great ballet-class episode on I Love Lucy.) Skelton clunks around the dance floor merrily, gracefully performing the slapstick of klutziness. None other than Buster Keaton worked with Skelton on the gags and bits for this and other Skelton comedy sequences at MGM. Imagine being coached by one of the screen’s true geniuses! Of course, you expect Skelton to be the funniest thing in the movie, but, more surprisingly, he’s also part of the best musical number, pleasantly singing the score’s sprightly duet, ”I’ll Take the High Note,” with bouncy college gal Jean Porter. Another of the students is played by Janis Paige who, coincidentally, played a swimming movie star, spoofing Esther herself, in Silk Stockings (1957).
Don’t worry, Esther does star in Basil’s show, with both Harry James and Xavier Cugat! There’s no mention of WWII during this movie, which makes sense. This is wartime escapism taken to a delirious level: jaw-droppingly colorful, outrageously kitschy, and dizzyingly assembled. All that, plus gorgeous Esther Williams creating a unique kind of musical picture for herself (a formula that would last a solid decade). And then there’s Red, the big star along for the ride, providing some inspired ballet mayhem and jivin’ good cheer.
On a far more modest scale, Merton of the Movies (1947) is a somewhat undernourished but pleasingly low-key Skelton vehicle. Set early in the silent-film era, in 1915, this comedy stars Skelton as a Kansas boy with big dreams of movie stardom. His comic acting here is blessedly short on desperation. It’s a sweet performance, with comedic flourishes of a mostly gentle variety. Gloria Grahame is a delight as a dim-bulbed silent star. Ironically, it would be Grahame who’d win a 1952 supporting Oscar (for The Bad and the Beautiful, another movie about movies), beating Jean Hagen’s ultimate dim-bulbed silent star in Singin’ in the Rain. In fact, Singin’ lifted an entire sequence from Merton: Red strolls by three camera-rolling silent-film sets, of different genres, side by side by side, just as Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor would do five years later.
Merton of the Movies was directed by a choreographer, Robert Alton. It’s a minor effort but not bad at all. It’s certainly of interest to anyone who enjoys movies about Hollywood, specifically its early days. Merton’s star-making film is Soles on Fire, which he thinks is a drama though it’s actually a spoof. A laughing preview audience confirms that he is, in fact, a new comedy star, albeit an accidental one, which makes him very happy. Audiences did plenty of laughing at (and with) Skelton in the mid-century of movie comedy, whether he was taking ballet class in Bathing Beauty, getting stinko in Ziegfeld Follies (1946), or trying to get on a horse in Neptune’s Daughter (1949). If there’s no great Red Skelton comedy, well, you could certainly put together a very funny highlights reel of his work. That may be the best way to celebrate all that he dood.
