I don’t generally do TV in this column, but I’m happy to make an exception for my favorite sitcom of all time and an extensive collection of rare programs highlighting the talents of a genius from the early days of television who actually deserves the title.
My enthusiasm for “Car 54, Where Are You,” which ran on NBC Sunday nights at 8:30 for two seasons beginning in October 1961, was shared by William Faulkner, who generally despised the medium but according to at least two biographies never missed an opportunity to watch it on a neighbor’s set. When his daughter mentioned “The Turn of the Screw” casually in a conversation, Faulkner is said to have remarked that Henry James’ novel would make a good plot for “Car 54.”
Few TV series ever have mixed high and low cultural references like “Car 54,” the brainchild of Nat Hiken, a veteran TV writer who hit it big with “The Phil Silvers Show,” a prototypical sitcom set on an army base in Kansas.
On one level, the less succesful (but far more beloved) “Car 54” is another service comedy, set at the mythical 53rd precinct in the Bronx. It revolves around what used to be called a Mutt and Jeff team. Joe E. Ross, an obscure veteran standup comedian who had a recurring role in “Bilko” is perfectly cast as Gunther Toody, a short, highly excitable and henpecked patrolman so dim he is sometimes mistaken for an idiot savant. Toody has an ideal foil in his long-suffering partner Frances Muldoon, a tall, smart but pathologically shy Mama’s Boy who is constantly getting caught up in Toody’s harebrained schemes (which heavily foreshadow Kramer’s plots on “Seinfeld”).
I don’t know why Shanachie, the small New Jersey firm that has finally brought the show’s first season to DVD has arranged them wildly out of chronological order. But for maximum enjoyment, you should watch them in the order they’re listed at the IMDB. The first episode, “Who’s For Swordfish,” has Toody hatching an impossibly complicated scheme to go fishing on a yacht belonging to a fellow officer’s brother-in-law. Among other things, it involves such an extreme number of shift swaps in the precinct that the exasperated Captain Block (the brilliant Paul Reed) is, not for the only time, pushed to the brink of sanity. That’s just the beginning in a series where comic complications multiply to the point of absurdity.
A good example of the film’s cultural sampling comes in the celebrated “The Taming of Lucille,” where Toody is inspired to imitation after being assigned on duty at an outdoor performance of “The Taming of the Shrew.” His ferociously nagging wife Lucille — memorably played by Beatrice Pons, who also played Ross’ nagging wife on “Bilko” — is surprisingly succeptible to being tamed by Gunther because she’s just watched “Craig’s Wife,” where a man leaving his nagging wife, on TV. Of course, an unhappy Toody will eventually be scheming to get the nagging Lucille back.
“Car 54” was a landmark series because it casually depicted a mutli-ethnic New York City (Nipsey Russell played a dispatcher during Season 1) at a time when this was far from the norm on network TV. It’s also overflowing with topical references, most famously to the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway which destroyed entire neighborhoods in the bureau. Molly Picon, a celebrated veteran of Yiddish theater, plays a widow who refuses to move. Toody and Muldoon, and Captain Block, are among a long string of city officials who serve eviction notices in one of the funniest episodes in this extremely funny series.
Al Lewis, who plays an exasperated contractor in this early episode — he’s a shady garage owner who paints a stolen car to resemble Toody and Muldoon’s cruiser in another — soon became a series regular as the explosive Officer Leo Schnauzer, who has epic Thursday night fights with his wife Sylvia (Charlotte Rae, much later of “The Facts of Life”) on another classic episode. When Toody, tired of breaking up their disputes with Muldoon, tries to convince Leo that it’s Friday instead of Thursday there are course many unforeseen consequences (Sylvia has been watching “Gaslight’ and is convinced Leo is following Charles Boyer’s example).
The only extra included with all 30 first-season episodes is a 30-minute interview conduct by Robert Klein with Rae and the other series survivor, Hank Garrett, who appeared in most episodes as the befuddled officer Al Nicholson. Garrett says NBC cancelled the series because Hiken refused to sell the network part ownership. There are also hints that Hiken — who also wrote the famous theme song (“There’s a Holdup in the Bronx…”) — had problems with the volatile and hard-living Ross, who used his trade mark “ooh, ooh” to cover up his problems remembering lines. Hiken died of a heart attack in 1965, aged 54, after completing the posthumously released Don Knotts vehicle “The Love God?”
Gwynne and Lewis went on to star as Herman and Grandpa in the more successful “The Munsters” and enjoyed long careers after that, Gwynne appearing on Broadway as Big Daddy in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and in movies like “My Cousin Vinny,” while Lewis had a long-running radio show and ran as the Green Party candidate for governor of New York.
Unlike “Seinfeld,” “Car 54, Where Are You” was actually filmed in New York, at (and near) the old Biograph Studio in the Bronx. Not long after the series wrapped, the studio was essentially demolished to make way for..The Cross Bronx Expressway.
Hopefully the second season of “Car 54” will be accompanied by a booklet like the profusely illustrated 40-page epic (complete with an excellent essay by Jonathan Lethem) in another labor of love, Shout Factory’s exemplary six-disc “The Ernie Kovacs Collection.”
The booklet does a great job of explaining the more than 12 hours of extremely rare footage — from Kovacs’ first morning show on NBC’s Philadelphia affiliate in 1951 to his final special, broadcast on ABC on what would have been Kovacs’ 43rd birthday, a month after he died in a car accident on a rain-slicked road after leaving a party at Billy Wilder’s home in Beverly Hills. This treasure trove was salvaged over a period of decades by Kovacs’ widow and collaborator, the late singer-comedienne Edie Adams.
The enormity of the loss to popular culture from Kovacs’ death has long been apparent from the couple of hours of excerpts from his most famous work that has circulated for decades, including on a 2000 DVD, and which are included here.
This collection, though, puts that work in the context of his perpiatetic but prolific TV career, which included a large number of short-lived gigs at all three networks (his longest stay was 21 months on a daytime show for CBS) often in odd time slots or as a summer replacement. Even when he was doing a mock quiz show (“Take A Good Look” has skits providing singularly useless clues to the celebrity panelists, including Edie Adams), they’re remarkably of a piece, with wildly anarchic humor and a style that consistently pushed the technical limits of the medium with remarkable special effects, even before videotape was perfected.
This set also includes unusual trailers that Kovacs prepared for his big-screen debut in “Operation Mad Ball” (1957) as well as well as “It Happened to Jane” (1960) and home movies he made during the production of Carol Reed’s “Our Man of Havana” (1959) staring Alec Guinness. Kovacs, who appeared in supporting roles in 10 features, had planned to direct a movie starring Guinness as Eugene, a silent character he had played in an unusual Emmy-winning special that’s the only color work included in “The Ernie Kovacs Collection.”
MGM has extended its video distribution agreement with Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, which was scheduled to expire this fall, through 2016. The two studios also announced another 19 titles for release this month through the MGM Limited Edition DVD manufacturing-on-demand program. They include Don Siegel’s “The Gun Runners” (1958), the second remake of “To Have and Have Not,” starring Audie Murphy; George Marshall’s “The Happy Thieves” (1961) with Rex Harrison and Rita Hayworth; and Fred Coe’s Oscar-nominated “A Thousand Clowns” (1965) starring Jason Robards and Barbara Harris.
Some are already available at Amazon and Screen Archives, among other vendors, as well as at the Fox and MGM websites. Screen Archives is also taking pre-orders for some May releases from MGM including Sam Fuller’s much-sought, historical newspaper drama “Park Row” (1952), Jacques Tourneur’s “The Fearmarkers” (1957) with Dana Andrews and “The Big Boodle” (1957) starring Errol Flynn in pre-Castro Havana. Via its Twilight Time label, SA is also taking pre-orders for the May release of “Fate is the Hunter” (1965) with Glenn Ford, licensed from Fox.
Today’s Warner Archive Collection releases include six rarely seen Myrna Loy features spanning 17 years and three studios: From her Warner period, Alexander Korda’s “The Squall” (1929) as a gypsy in a cast including Loretta Young and Zazu Pitts; as a Mexican temptress in “The Great Divide” (1929); At MGM, “New Morals for Old” (1932) with Robert Young; W.S. Van Dyke’s “The Prizefighter and the Lady” (1933) co-starring Max Baer Sr. and Walter Huston; “Third Finger, Left Hand” (1940) with Metro’s second string William Powell, Melvyn Douglas; and, from Universal (!), “So Goes My Love” (1946) co-starring Don Ameche.
Also new from WAC are four remastered Sam Katzman productions highlighting MGM Records stars: Herman’s Hermits in “Hold On” (1966) and “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter (1968); Roy Orbison in his only film,”The Fastest Guitar Alive” (1967); and “Get Yourself a College Girl” (1964) featuring Mary Ann Mobley, Nancy Sinatra, Stan Getz, Astrud Gilberto, the Dave Clark Five and the Animals.
