A vaudeville vet, Fred Allen was one of American radio's biggest stars for two decades straight - from the first days of the Depression into the 1950s - but his film appearances were few, and so today he's all but forgotten. (What's just as forgotten was how pervasive and vital radio culture was to America from the '30s on, which can be measured, in a sense, by the sheer payload of radio-personality allusions and in-jokes made in Warner's Looney Tunes cartoons that no one can any longer understand.) Not much to look at on his best day, Allen was a protean figure on the air, and his shows were famous for the sharp improvisational humor and invention.

Quick-witted and eccentric, It's in the Bag (1945) was the only attempt to bring Allen and his brand of skewed farce to the screen, and it's saturated with his personality: acidic, darkly cynical and blithely absurd. (Allen was one of the writers, too, and regulars from his radio shows pop in, including Yiddishe schtick mistress Minerva Pious.) Though an icon in his day, Allen's humor feels years ahead of its time - no one in the '40s was cracking jokes this nervy, bitter and topical, and no one made them at his own expense as frequently or deftly as Allen. (He makes rank sport here of his own ugliness and revels in his own petty-minded greed.) The opening titles are characteristic: Allen starts the movie out with an audience direct-address, mocking the "boring" credits as they go by ("Who knows who any of these people are? Who cares?" Allen cracks with an unforgettably dry whine, "You can find names like these in any phone book." When the screenwriting card comes up, Allen scoffs, "These four people are now out of work. You'll see why in just a minute.") Introducing his only movie this way immediately provides the movie with a cynical self-knowledge Hollywood ordinary does whatever it can to avoid, but it was apparently typical of Allen, who was frequently censored on the radio and would frequently mock his own network's executives on the air as a result.

Once the story, such as it is, finally gets rolling, it's instantly recognizable as a loose and unofficial adaptation of Ilf and Petrov's The Twelve Chairs, with the titular items hiding mythical riches that are left to Allen's flea circus manager by a dead uncle, then sold off accidentally and laboriously hunted down. The scenario allows Allen to concoct a variety of set-pieces, all of which are as random as comedy sketches in a revue, and to fold in a plethora of guest stars, including Jack Benny (with whom Allen had a years-long and completely tongue-in-cheek media feud, and who here happily offers a visiting Allen an opportunity to buy cigarettes out of his living-room vending machine, and offers his own furniture up for sale), William Bendix (as a pacifist gangster), Don Ameche and Rudy Vallee (as themselves; Allen greets them with, "Hey, didn't you used to be in pictures?"), and so on, everybody digging at each other with perfectly straight faces and tossing in-jokes like tennis balls. (Robert Benchley and Jerry Colonna show up, too, with less to do.) Were audiences of 1945 up to this jaunty, sardonic, referential patter? We have no way to suss out the film's success at the box office (it wasn't listed in the year's top 36 moneymakers by Motion Picture Herald), but we do know that the studios never gave Allen carte blanche again. Not that he necessarily wanted more starring vehicles in Hollywood - his radio show Allen's Alley was the top-rated radio show in the country in the mid-'40s.

It's in the Bag!'s director was Richard Wallace, an undistinguished journeyman who spent years making B movies of all stripes, and the best that could be said is that he got out of Allen's way, and knew where to put his camera. Perhaps the film's most dazzling and inspired non sequitur set-piece in the movie is an epic comic passage where Allen and his equally dyspeptic wife (Binnie Barnes) try to find one of the inherited chairs in a vast, people-packed, multi-tiered movie theater, getting so lost in the balconies and elevators and double-talking bureaucracy that the very act of trying to see a movie becomes a timeless, circular, Kafkaesque ordeal. It's one of those rare instances from the Golden Age (Preston Sturges's movies are filthy with them) where a mere comedic riff grows into something entirely absurdist and helplessly metaphorical, an ordeal by silliness that evolves into a statement about American life itself in the 20th century.

How did this film come to be so forgotten? Full of ideas and happily taking aim at everyone, It's in the Bag! plays out with a speed and sharpness that the similarly winking-modernist Road movies would envy, and it may be the funniest Hollywood one-off of the middle-century.

For more information about It's in the Bag, visit Olive Films. To order It's in the Bag, go to TCM Shopping.

by Michael Atkinson