Monthly Archive: June 2007

The rubber-reality phenomenon that one takes for granted in the animated cartoons and a good many comics seldom crosses over into live-action cinema, CGI and/or the influence of David Lynch notwithstanding. A low-rent music-and-slapstick comedy from 1945 called How Doooo You Do!!! makes for a striking exception and bears recalling here, in the context of a series devoted to stalking the pop-cultural borderlands in search of – well, of whatever oddities might turn up. No shortage of those, if one knows where to go prowling.

No entertainer seems to have more fun and less sustained success in appearing before the cameras than the radio gimmick-comic Bert Gordon (1895–1974). Gordon’s presence lay primarily in a persuasive and memorable voice (rather like the once-ubiquitous Paul Frees, of a somewhat later day). Gordon’s big-screen starring career consisted largely of false starts and commercial misfires. He had become so successful, however, as a supporting-act broadcast player – a regular with Eddie Cantor, from 1930 on through the ’40s – that the movies seemed a logical next step for a decade-and-change, progressing from supporting parts to attempted stardom.

Ralph Murphy’s How Doooo You Do!!! takes its title from Gordon’s signature-phrase. Nobody, but nobody, could intone that commonplace platitude, “How do you do?” with the style or the passion of Bert Gordon. In his radio-program guise of the Mad Russian (sometimes known as Boris Rascalnikoff), Gordon transformed the offhand question into the most emphatic of exclamations, a sustained marvel of escalating double-O’s that could move a studio audience to applause before he could complete the phrase. Sometimes, he would worry the first do into submission; on other occasions, the second, like a jazzman milking the improvisational possibilities from some nursery-rhyme melody.

This indelible signature-line was the most logical of titles, then, for a Gordon-starring picture – and in fact, the less imaginatively transcribed How Do You Do? had been the work-in-progress title of a 1942 Columbia comedy that got released as Laugh Your Blues Away, with Gordon and Jinx Falkenberg.

If any corporate-Hollywood studio was attuned to Gordon’s more eccentric tastes, it had to be Producers Releasing Corp. – better known by its initials, which the less charitable cineastes among us might hold to stand for “Pretty Rotten Crap.” Anyhow, PRC Pictures (better known for its horse-operas, rudimentary noirs, and mad-doctor chillers) seems precisely the right studio to have given Gordon and his radio-show accomplices free rein. And precisely the wrong studio to be taken earnestly in such an endeavor by the critics or the paying customers.

The film plants Gordon and fellow radio personality Harry von Zell amidst their own broadcasting culture. Exhausted by the radio-show grind, Gordon and von Zell (playing themselves, in broad strokes) retreat to a desert resort lodge. Two other associates, Cheryl Walker and Claire Windsor, arrive on their own in a similar quest for serenity. Neither party is aware of the other’s presence until von Zell spots the women and panics: Von Zell’s wife suspects an adulterous affair between von Zell and Walker. Meanwhile, Gordon’s over-amorous co-star, Ella Mae Morse, has trailed him to the retreat.

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