Stuff and Moonshine

Just watched The Man In The Funny Suit (1960), and it’s the most meta thing ever.

This DesiLu production is a tv drama about an old vaudeville comic who takes a part in a 1950s tv play because it gives him a rare chance to work with his son, a dramatic actor; however he’s not used to doing anything but the corniest of comedy, or working without a visible audience, and nobody but the producer has any faith he’s going to get through the live broadcast without embarrassing himself.

The meta part is that this is all based on actual behind-the-scenes drama from the original 1956 Playhouse 90 version of Requiem For A Heavyweight, and almost everyone involved: Ed Wynn, Keenan Wynn, Rod Serling, and Ralph Nelson, who wrote and directed this— is playing themselves. Even if we don’t know how it’s going to turn out, we can guess, because Wynn is doing such a beautiful job as a man struggling to make his son proud of him in a genre and medium he’s not (yet) used to; we could guess even if we didn’t know he was playing himself, because the actor is doing such a good job playing a bad actor that he must actually be a good one, and if a good actor’s been cast in the part of a bad one, that means the character is going to find his voice on the night.

And of course he does— the lines he muffed, that he couldn’t get through without laughing, that came out stilted, suddenly all work. But he can’t tell, and there’s a last little bit of heartbreak before the inevitable happy ending where Wynn wanders the set trying to find somebody to tell him if he was any good, as stagehands pull him out of the cameras’ line-of-sight and people such him because the mikes are still live, even as Rod Serling and Ralph Nelson widen their eyes at the believable and heartfelt performance. Keenan Wynn does a nice subtle two-level bit as he has to stay in character and argue with “Army, the old boxing trainer” even as we can see his shoulders and face relax slightly in the knowledge that his father is knocking it out of the park.

(The Playhouse 90 broadcast was such a hit it had to be recreated for a second broadcast and later became a movie, as well as obtaining enough cred for Serling that he was later able to make The Twilight Zone, in which Ed Wynn played the lead in the second episode, “One For The Angels.”)

Seeing an actor who normally plays villains in a hero role is actually much *less* jarring than seeing him/her in a neutral supporting role. With the latter I keep waiting for the character to suddenly turn out to be unexpectedly important to the plot.

This thought brought to you by "OK, so Roger Delgado really is just the hotel manager and not masterminding the kidnapping," and "Henry Daniell is a lawyer, but he's just a solicitor, not a gleefully malicious prosecuting attorney -- what's wrong with this picture?"

Mackenzie Crook (Raggedi from PotC), and a tortoise.