Unironic Ventriloquist Radio: YOU CAN'T CHEAT AN HONEST MAN (1939)

"They say any idiot can write a book, if that's true I'm their boy."

Call me strange but I've always been a little bothered by concert 'films' i.e. filmed music or comedy performances. Maybe I've been to too many Grateful Dead shows while hallucinating but I find the sight of people playing instruments on stage to be fairly obscene. It's dirty! All those phallic necks and jerking strum movements. And the music should speak for itself - like you shouldn't judge a book by its dirty cover. Sometimes seeing the musician is off-putting to your musical enjoyment. What is the correlation, for example, between watching a Jheri-curled ebony gremlin blowing into a shiny brass cornucopia and the the primordial jazz of Miles Davis? Or a bunch of balding white guys in tuxedos with horsehair saws to the music of Mozart? Or a fat dude with crazy gray hair wanking a long hunk of shiny purple wood and the music of the Dead?

In the age of mp3s you can love a band and have no idea what they look like, and it's much better that way. Sometimes I'm afraid to go 'see' my favorite authors read, lest I be turned off by their voices or appearance. On another note: thanks to the anonymity of the web, mixed media collages that used to qualify for stuffy grants from arts foundations are now set up in seconds by freshmen college kids on their laptops who may have no idea how meta and post-modern they are by watching TRANSFORMERS 2 on mute with a Mash-up remix of Pat Boone and Beyonce playing on their iTunes as substitute soundtrack while they iChat about last night's thrash iShow. Meanwhile there are music documentaries or biopics out there that don't even have the rights to the music of their subject and so use muzak that sounds 'roughly' like the band. Authorship as a commodity thus shifts and feints and ducks back through an endless maze of duplication, collage, licensing, advertising 'rips' and adaptation. And you have rock stars now who make their songs on thin square pads and their concert performance consists of them sitting onstage with it. They just press on and extend their right hand across the bar for their check while bewildered kids, too hip to complain, dance uncertainly. Maybe Andy Kaufman would love it... for awhile.  I'm Emperor's New Clothes about it.

Because it's all been done.

No hay banda!

Artists have continually worked to negate each other, to make their own brand obsolete, and various forms of expression that take lifetimes to learn now become mastered, outdated and forgotten within months thanks to overexposure. We must remember that in 1929 a similar thing happened as the icons of the silent film era went stepping nervously into sound, unsure how the public would react to their ungainly, sadly human voices. We know about all that from SINGING IN THE RAIN, Gilbert Roland, "Garbo Speaks!' and Club Silencio in MULHOLLAND DR. (above) but what about the reverse? What about radio comedians moving into motion pictures? What about... ventriloquists on the radio?

In the golden age of radio the 1930s-40s (before TV took over) everyone knew the voices of comedians like Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. The best material resulted from pretend feuds between them, which provided lots of insult gag opportunities. There was a faux-feud between Irish-American NYC-based Fred Allen and LA-based Jewish star Jack Benny and one between Charlie McCarthy and W.C. Fields. The latter was more complicated as Fields didn't have his own show, was an established film star, and Charlie was, well, a hunk of wood. If aliens one day pick up our radio signals in space, some of the first things they hear won't be SETI, but these old radio shows still flying out into space, and they'll probably scratch their heads, especially over Edgar and Charlie. A ventriloquist on the radio? What were those Hu-Mans thinking?

 
I got into old radio as a kid since they'd re-broadcast shows on PBS. This was in the days of one-TV houses and no cable or VCRs. Being able to listen to creepy shows like Inner Sanctum and The Shadow in my bedroom, all the lights off, thrilled my imagination. I eventually saw these radio stars in films I later taped of UHF TV with the arrival of the VCR and they looked.... odd. I had imagined them far differently.

The Siamese twin Hilton Sisters in Freaks (1933)

Edgar Bergen and two animate objects

Bergen and McCarthy especially were quite jarring on film, which is strange since the whole reason a ventriloquist act should work is the dummy's anthropomorphic appearance, which is also the reason they are so creepy. In their elder statesman days on the Muppet Show Bergen and his wood fit right in, though, as the pioneers of pop puppetry. But holding down a feature film? In black and white? From 1939? The whole issue of the ebony demon with his silver cornucopia comes roaring back when you have close-ups of old wooden Charlie McCarthy, his mouth moving up and down like a macabre robot, as his handler Edgar tries to get it on with a girl. How can he bust a move while his, ahem, puppet cockblocks from his arm-length distance? It's eerie. It's creepy. It's FREAKS-ish, i.e. the scene with the Siamese twins (1933) and the frisson-laden idea of loving one 'half' of a whole. Is there some aesthetic non-skeevy benefit to seeing a phallic piece of wood move its mouth up and down while his handler tries to woo a girl, especially if the wood says "why don't you kiss her and get it over with?" before they've even half-met.

Is the association of the mouth with the words a mimetic magic of association? Muppets are one thing, colorful and with some level of expression gained through the full range of fingers along the wide felt mouth--and with no handler visible--but Charlie's mouth is kind of robotic - his dead eyes and jaw move but that's it-- and Edgar is always literally an arms length away. For some reason I still find Charlie terrifying... in 'person.'

My first viewings of Bergen's big starring feature debut with WC Fields, YOU CAN'T CHEAT AN HONEST MAN (1938) were from an old afternoon UHF TV show, sped up and edited for time (and racism) as they used to do in those days. It was great on a fuzzy small TV screen, the uncanny valley was less uncanny, and I saw it dozens of times and became quite familiar with its comedic rhythms. Years later now, on DVD, the film is stretched back to normal running time, so it seems to move super slow, with dead air moments. Now the picture super clear, scenes I've never seen have been restored, and now McCarthy's uncanny automaton qualities are much too pronounced to ignore. His close-ups seem like something some devout pagan idol worshiper would make for Andy Warhol if Warhol was into puppetry.

Fields' scenes were often shot by Eddie Cline, separately from Charlie's, helping the timeless-strange aspect along as Cline had a much better knack for ramshackle comedy. Also helping is Field's obvious alcoholism as he staggers through the film in a zig-zag, avoiding the major 'marks' the way his character avoids the process server, preferring to run through his litany of old circus impresario gags from THE OLD FASHIONED WAY, SALLY OF THE SAWDUST, and so on, rather than engaging directly with the material before him.

As a narrative then, YOU CAN'T CHEAT AN HONEST MAN lives and dies in the soft dulcet 'real' voice of Charlie McCarthy's handler, Edgar Bergen, and some anonymous wartime heroine playing Fields' daughter, who heroically tries to seem not creeped out by the fact her love interest can't let go of his wooden 'buddy' even to hold her hand. But the scenes with Larson E. Whipsnade doing his timeless but 'off' carny act are hilarious and the weirdness of the overall film pays off in a skewed three-prong textual dissolve:

Prong 1 - Meta - CHEAT is a relic of a bygone age and my own memories of what was going on in my life (the first warm glow of drink, that golden nectar) when I first taped it, a day I stayed home sick to edit out the commercials and then felt guilty all day as my mom stink-eyed me from the kitchen. I've seen it dozens of times. Dozens! But that stain remains, and as we shall see, nostalgia and reminiscence haunts the film.

Prong 2 - Sub - The Brechtian-reflexive schtick of the film, with the creepy dual come-on of Bergen and McCarthy to Vicky. Charlie's telling Edgar to tell Vicky he loves her and wants to marry her within mere hours of meeting her, long before he has even kissed her (he can't kiss her because Charlie would be stricken mute, or else Vicky would hear Charlie in her molars). And Fields lamenting when a native steals the cork out of his lunch or daring you to guess whether his lines are intentionally or unintentionally fumbled or written that way.

Prong 3 - Inter - The nostalgia of the early Americana circus film, once a huge part of any sawdust-covered five cent cinema's rotation, especially in the silent era: there was always a sad clown played by Lon Chaney or Wallace Ford, who loves the acrobat but she's under the thumb of the abusive strong man; there was also the rich kid scheduled to marry a stuffy heiress; a poor kid romance 'meller' of the "I'll pay the rent!" variety that careened around the country in Fields' heyday and it's this corny schtick that Fields grew up watching (he was a long time circus juggler) which he is here lampooning.

 In other words Fields is parodying genres of film that most of us have never seen nor would we want to. HONEST MAN is a 'parody' of the sawdust-soaked cliches of Fields' youth, the innocent abroad with his hankerin' for the city, the rich but loveless family of snobs Fields' daughter is willing to marry into if it means getting the circus out of debt, it is not just a parody of turn-of-the-century wealthy snobbery, but of Hollywood's past depictions of same.

Small wonder then, that Edgar's competition for Field's daughter's hand is the aptly named Roger Belgoode III. The scenes of class clashes and chaste romance were mockable cliches even in the 1930s, and this third prong represents that intertextual nostalgia the film carries for the lost era of full-length bathing suits, opium pipes, theater organs, and flagpole sitters. Back in 1938, this stuff was their That 70s Show. 

CHEAT also grows less stilted once Fields sends Bergen and Charlie adrift in a hot air balloon and they discover Mortimer Snerd has been sleeping in the basket. For some reason, Snerd eases the creepy affect from all the McCarthy close-ups. Watching a puppet open and close its mouth while Edgar talks to himself, phrasing the set ups to his jokes in such archaic language they could only hold punchlines on the other end ("Is you mother living yet?" - "No, not yet") is less creepy for some reason once there are two puppets interacting with Edgar. It helps too that there are no other people around, especially not a girl.

This was Edgar's feature film debut and he seems nervous and shy. Talking in an effeminate little whisper he's dependent on his dummy to become a 'leading man' who can believably engage in romantic relations. He would make more films and get a better sense of a separate identity, but here he seems naught but a shadow.

The idea of a split personality is of course relevant today, and the interesting thing about Bergen here is the example of just how fucked a ventriloquist who gets successful is: Bergen must now and forever stay in this split character. Bergen's real daughter Candice may know Edgar, her father, without the dummies, but do we? Does Vicky? Bergen seems like the literal half-man --when he speaks as himself his voice is lowered and soft, as if he has nowhere to throw it because no one will have it, so he says his lines nervously, ashamed of his lips moving. This is all done no doubt so Charlie and Mortimer seem louder. Bergen has become devoted to this effect and so his 'own' voice has grown soft and delicate, the way a couple overcompensates for each other's perceived faults; his eyes stay half-focused on his wooden 'other' as if in a trance. This is his Faustian bargain for success - "he" has become his "other's" puppet.

No wonder then that Bergen is such a perfect foil for Fields, who is similarly mired in a defective ego ideal --the liquored-up charlatan. Fields and Bergen can duel with pithy one-liners and simultaneously not even be 'present' -- Fields in his cups and Bergen in his dolls -- it's something beyond acting even, right up there with eerie totemic sacrifices we see in films like THE WICKER MAN or England's Guy Fawkes effigies.

Fields in one of his many ingenious disguises

 The ultimate difference between Fields and Bergen (now that I'm sober this seems especially glaring) is that while they both effectively hide in plain sight through deceptive means, one is multiplied and the other divided: Bergen's deception is 'thrown' (external); Fields' is 'drunk' (internal), Fields slowly vanishes down a beer tap drain while Edgar multiplies like a hydra until he's neither here nor there, but solely in the interaction. The romance between Edgar and Vicky is therefore as creepy as incest, since it automatically infers a menage a trois with an inanimate object.

The relationship Fields has in his films by contrast is always with a daughter or niece since he is in effect already happily married to gin, which doesn't talk but rather is consumed utterly, so Fields in a sense is always in the process of sneaking away in plain sight, drinking his 'other' back into the void, and then being drunk in turn; he mutters to himself under his breath like the very air around him is his dummy, and everything he does or said he had done or said before ("Dragging my canoe behind me!") in his other films. As all drunks repeat their stories and sentiments endlessly, so too does Fields repeat his stories and bits from film to film to his straight men, be they A-list stars, poker tables, cigar store Indians, hick extras, or oblivious family members absorbed in their own petty breakfast gossip. So in a sense Fields has an open dialogue not with an external projection of himself as Edgar does, but with a ghost, a half Fields referencing a 1/4 Fields, and so on... until he's so infinitesimally small he becomes bigger than creation.