Fred Allen was one of America's most influential comedians. Despite leaving behind a legacy of irreverent jackassery that inspired the likes of David Letterman and Saturday Night Live, Allen's own name has faded. Once one of the nation's most beloved, he is now the answer to a trivia question.

Why the fall from grace? He was a radio comedian, a peculiar breed of animal that spontaneously generated in the 1930s and was all but extinct two decades later. Other radio comedians preserved their fame by migrating to movies or television--Allen struggled with both. "Television is a triumph of equipment over people," he quipped. Of movies, he observed, "I'm no good in pictures. I proved that with the last one."

But therein lies our story. By "the last one" Allen meant 1945's It's in the Bag, Allen's one and only starring role in a motion picture. It was one of several film adaptations of Ilf & Petrov's 1928 comic novel The Twelve Chairs, while also improbably an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink patchwork of vaudevillian routines and contemporary comedians doing their "bits." Allen might not have thought much of his performance in the thing, but it's a good time capsule of his brand of comedy--and as his only significant screen credit, one of the few ways for modern audiences to see what all the fuss was about.

To understand Allen's route to the big screen we need to start with Jack Benny. Jack Benny and Fred Allen were not just top radio stars, they were, as far as the audience could tell, mortal enemies. It was a gag--a long-running mock feud the two perpetuated as a publicity stunt--but it had the effect of mildly intertwining their professional fates. Each man would periodically show up on the other's program to pour more fuel on the fake rivalry, and so it went.

Meanwhile, Jack Benny was also making movies. It was never the best platform for him (although a man who boasts Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942) in his resume cannot claim to have been a flop), but his films were popular enough. So, naturally, it made sense to bring Fred Allen into one of Jack Benny's pictures, just as he routinely invaded Jack Benny's radio show. Allen appeared in 1940's Buck Benny Rides Again and Love Thy Neighbor, before deciding he disliked the motion picture experience (the workaholic perfectionist felt he lacked enough control over the production to make sure everything was up to his standards).

As it happened, Allen didn't just forswear movies, he also gave up radio, too--taking a year off from his own show to recuperate from hypertension.

In 1944, producer Jack Skirball approached Allen about giving movies another try--this time in something where he was the central star, not a supporting player, and where he would have substantial creative input. It was a tempting offer--and an odd one. Skirball was not known as a comedy producer--in fact, he had just come from producing Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942) and Shadow of a Doubt (1943). If that doesn't seem like the natural CV of a man about to embark on a project that the New York Times called "a rat's nest of nonsense," then consider this additional unusual fact: the screenplay was written by none other than Mrs. Alfred Hitchcock herself, Alma Reville, in her one and only non-Hitchcock Hollywood credit.

Reville did not write the script alone. As already noted, it was an adaptation of a Russian satirical novel about a family fortune secreted away inside one of a set of dining room chairs that a foolish heir sells before realizing their significance--for the rest of the story he goes on comic misadventures trying to retrieve the chairs and recover the fortune hidden within. It was a good workhorse of a formula capable of supporting a variety of comedy styles--in addition to the vaudevillian aesthetic of It's in the Bag!, there was a 1936 version by slapstick veteran Monty Banks called Keep Your Seats, Please!, and Mel Brooks would attempt his own adaptation in 1970 with Frank Langella and Ron Moody under the title The Twelve Chairs. Reville worked with co-writer Jay Dratler on the adaptation--and since his career was mostly noted for writing film noirs like Laura (1944) and Call Northside 777 (1948) one really has to wonder what inspired Skirball to assemble this specific team.

Nevertheless, this assortment of veterans of film noir and suspense thrillers assembled a vaudevillian showpiece for a who's who of 1940s American comedy. Jack Benny shows up, of course, to lampoon his image as a miserly skinflint obsessed with his popularity. Minerva Pious reprises her role as "Pansy Nussbaum" from Allen's radio show. Robert Benchley plays a pompous windbag, and gets to do a scene about a new, and impossibly overcomplicated, mousetrap he's invented--a routine he could easily have performed in one of his own short subjects. Jerry Colonna plays a woefully unqualified psychiatrist. John Carradine plays the bad guy (naturally). Binnie Barnes plays a variation of the haughty society woman she played in countless screwball comedies. Don Ameche and Rudy Vallee spoof themselves. William Bendix spoofs a spoof of himself (as the head of the "Bill Bendix Mob," forced by his public persona into being the gangster everyone thinks he is).

If this sounds like an unlikely pedigree of talent to find in a low-budget programmer, then take note of how Allen waived his usual salary in favor of a percentage ownership of the film, and used his star power to entice his celebrity friends to join the project.

In this version of the tale, Fred Allen plays flea circus impresario Floogle, whose mega-rich granduncle dies under sinister circumstances. The old man may have left them $12 million--except the money is all gone. All they get are a set of dining room chairs, which the family pawns for quick cash, and a phonograph record, which they don't listen to until after selling the chairs. The record contains a secret confession, as the dying granduncle admits he hid $300,000 inside one of the chairs, along with the identification of the conspirators who plotted his murder. Time to go get those chairs back!

In one standout scene, cited by nearly every review of the picture, Allen's character and his wife, played by Binnie Barnes, try to catch a matinee screening of "Zombie in the Attic." The theater advertises "immediate seating," but several minutes of being led higher and higher into the wings in a vain hunt for available seats turns an afternoon's entertainment into the Theater of the Absurd. Apropos of nothing before or after it, the sequence is an exercise in self-defeat penned by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Morrie Ryskind--who wrote similar material for the Marx Brothers.

As originally screened, the film featured Fred Allen's non-stop voice-over narration commenting on, and undermining, the proceedings. "While they are boring each other with some dull dialogue, I'll tell you folks who were buying candy and have just come in what has happened up to now." That version, however, was replaced for television screenings by an alternate cut that leaves Allen's jokey asides in place during the opening titles but then drops the commentary. As a result, TV audiences missed out on hearing Allen critique the direction by snarking, "You have seen Floogle arrested. You have seen Floogle behind bars. This isn't enough. Floogle now wears stripes so that you will know that he is a prisoner. This director overdoes everything. He's been married six times."

Actually, director Richard Wallace was a journeyman Hollywood director who came up the ranks of Mack Sennett and Hal Roach, directing two-reel slapstick shorts before graduating to features. In 1941 he helmed a screwball comedy produced by Harold Lloyd starring Lucille Ball, A Girl, A Guy, and a Gob. He was also a founding member of the Director's Guild of America.

The director of photography was Russell Metty. He is better remembered as Douglas Sirk's cinematographer, and his keen eye for lighting and camera placement came in handy to moderate this film's abrupt tonal shifts.

Despite having such an accomplished set of talents working on his film, and being given a significant degree of creative input into the project, this proved an isolated experience for Fred Allen. The film received mixed notices and failed to ignite much passion at the box office. Allen happily returned to his native home on radio and continued to make people laugh for another decade, until his untimely death in 1956.

By David Kalat



Sources:

Hal Erickson, From Radio to the Big Screen: Hollywood Films Featuring Broadcast Personalities and Programs