Bananas

We've been going through our Three Stooges collection, and were wondering about the origin of the Niagra Falls routine ("Slowly I turned..."). A little research turned up two possible sources - Joey Faye and Harry Steppe. Steppe is credited by Phil Silvers with introducing the term "top banana" to vaudeville. This lead us to discover that Silvers made a movie called Top Banana (1954) (which actually includes Joey Faye in the cast). Even better, we discovered that it is available on Amazon Prime.

It's about a TV show starring Phil Silvers. We meet the writers grousing about working all night on the show, while trying out jokes on each other (mostly flops). Then Silvers comes in, full of pep, wanting to hear some jokes, quick one-liners. The sponsor is coming to the show that night, and he wants to be ready. He also calls his girl, Judy Lynn, complimenting her with lines the writers come up with when he snaps his fingers (mostly flops). He even gets his show's singer, Danny Scholl, to serenade her over the phone. 

Then they all rush off to a department store so Silvers can do a book signing. He also meets Lynn, who is a model at the store - which allows for some fashion and cheesecake. Here, Scholl meets Lynn, and they hit it off, making a date, because she doesn't think of Silvers as her guy. 

Also, Rose Marie shows up, kind of poking her nose into Silvers business. It looks like she was intended as his consolation prize, but the part kind of got cut.

When the sponsor appears, he wants to cancel the show. But maybe if someone on the show got married... So Silvers demands that Scholl elope with his girl. Silvers has lost his glasses, so he doesn't realize that he is forcing Scholl to steal his girl - and he's too pushy and hyper to listen to Scholl's objection. 

This all leads to an elopement scene in front of a cardboard flat of an apartment house. I'm going to drop the plot now, and just get meta. You see, this movie is basically the filmed version of Silvers' Broadway play Top Banana, making it a movie filmed from a play about a TV show. (It was also filmed in 3D, but not released that way, so skip that part.) Some parts are more or less realistic, like the writers' room. Some are theater but real, like rehearsals for the show. Some are totally theater, like the elopement, and some are fantasies, daydreams about the days of vaudeville. This jumping of frames is fascinating to me, and maybe not something they could have achieved on stage. 

It is also very much about comedy, particularly the vaudeville variety. Silvers alsways wants the jokes to be shorter, snappier, one liners. He comments to his barber, "That was good! A one-liner and you one-upped me. Don't do it again." He complains that a writer takes two pages to get him into a barbershop. One of his cronies shows him how to do it - "Here we are, in the barbershop." These cronies (including Joey Faye) are all over the movie. In the elopement scene, there's a little guy with no expression who sort of sticks to you - you can't let go of him. This leads to some amazing physical comedy - truly roll on the floor. But all the discussion of comedy, the use of the insider term Top banana, adds a meta-comedic element to it all as well.

Unfortunately, it was also chopped to hell. There seems to be a 100-minute, but the DVD and streaming versions are ~80 (see film blog It Came from the Bottom Shelf). Rose Marie's songs and most of her role were cut. You can feel a lot of the missing material in the clumsy cutting. There are also sound problems, making a lot of the fast patter hard to hear. Oh well.