Podcast Tuesday: "A Simple Desultory Phil Silvers (or How I Was Sgt. Bilko'd into Submission)"

Phil Silvers and Cathy Silvers on Happy Days.

After Ron Howard and Don Most left Happy Days in 1980, taking the characters of Richie Cunningham and Ralph Malph respectively with them, the producers brought in some replacements to round out the cast, namely Ted McGinley as Roger Phillips and Cathy Silvers as Jenny Piccalo. Roger, a straight-laced, preppie basketball coach, was an obvious substitute for the very square Richie Cunningham. But does that mean gossipy, boy-crazy Jenny Piccalo was somehow the new Ralph Malph?

At first, these characters would not seem to have much in common. Were they to meet, the conversation would probably be a little awkward. But, upon closer inspection, I can see how Jenny Piccalo became the show's new Ralph Malph during its final seasons. After all, Ralph is the wacky, wisecracking sidekick to the more responsible, pragmatic Richie, just as Jenny is the wacky, wisecracking sidekick to the more responsible, pragmatic Joanie (Erin Moran). 

It's important to remember here that Joanie's personality changed subtly over the course of nine seasons. She started out as the somewhat bratty, insult-slinging kid sister whose main job was to keep Richie's ego (and those of his idiot friends) in check. She was even the first character to utter the show's immortal catchphrase, "Sit on it!" But as the sitcom wore on, Joanie matured, toned down her personality, and even settled into a long-term relationship with Chachi (Scott Baio). She was in danger of losing her edge, but the wilder Jenny Piccalo was able to tempt her into various hijinks and shenanigans, just as Ralph once did with Richie.

Jenny's relationship with her father Roscoe (played by Cathy's real-life father, Phil) is even similar to Ralph's relationship with his father Mickey (Jack Dodson). In the Season 4 episode "Last of the Big Time Malphs," Ralph runs up a gambling debt but can't talk seriously about the problem with Mickey because the latter is such a zany jokester. Jenny runs into a similar problem during "Just a Piccalo," the Season 9 episode we're reviewing this week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast. She's facing vandalism charges after trying to steal a statue from the park, but she doesn't feel she can go to Roscoe for help. How interesting that both Mickey and Roscoe are played by classic sitcom stars: Jack Dodson from The Andy Griffith Show and Phil Silvers from Sgt. Bilko.

I hope you'll join us for our review of "Just a Piccalo." As usual, this episode let us talk about a whole bunch of topics, including the brilliant career of Phil Silvers. This one was a real treat to record.

Mill Creek comedy classics #15: "The Admiral Was a Lady" (1950)

That's right! Edmond Wanda and O'Brien Hendrix are together at last in The Admiral Was a Lady.

The flick: The Admiral Was a Lady (United Artists, 1950) [buy the set]

Current IMDb rating: 5.6

Director: Albert S. Rogell (Universal's The Black Cat [not the Boris Karloff film, but the comedy-mystery with Basil Rathbone], In Old Oklahoma)

Actors of note: 

• Edmond O'Brien (The Wild Bunch, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance)

• Wanda Hendrix (Ride the Pink Horse, Prince of Foxes)

• Rudy Vallee (I Remember Mama, Unfaithfully Yours, famed megaphone crooner of the 1930s)

• Richard Erdman (Stalag 17, Tora! Tora! Tora!, played Leonard on Community)

• Steve Brodie (Out of the Past, The Giant Spider Invasion, The Wild World of Batwoman)

• Johnny Sands (Orson Welles' The Stranger, The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer)

• Hillary Brooke (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Man Who Knew Too Much)

"Wandafull." Get it? Huh?

The gist of it: Wisecracking Jimmy Stevens (O'Brien) and his three pals (Brodie, Sands, and Erdman) were once a combat crew in WWII. Now the war is over, and they're back home doing everything they can to avoid work -- getting $20 a week from Uncle Sam, scrounging cheap (and past its sell-by date) food wherever they can get it, living in an abandoned aircraft plant (which they've converted into a mini-palace), and running any number of penny-ante scams.

Their slothful lifestyle is threatened, though, by jukebox tycoon Peter Pedigrew (Vallee) who threatens to put them to work—no! anything but that!—unless they can make sure a man named Henry marries pretty little Jean Madison (Hendrix), an ex-WAVE whom Jimmy kiddingly nicknames "the Admiral." But Henry turns out to be a tough guy to track down, thanks to Pedigrew's scheming ex-wife Shirley (Brooke) who has selfish reasons for keeping Jean and Henry apart. Meanwhile, Jimmy and "the Admiral" are getting awfully chummy, if you catch my drift, even though she can't abide his cheapskate lifestyle.

My take: Like Here Comes Trouble, The Admiral Was a Lady is a comedy focusing on the troubles our servicemen faced when they came back home and returned to civilian life. But Admiral is considerably more sentimental than Trouble, and it occasionally aims for poignancy. And that, in my opinion, is precisely where this film disappoints. Jimmy and his crew seem to have a swell thing going at the beginning of the story, but the script provides them with sad, serious backstories that detract from the overall enjoyment level of the flick. Admiral predates Phil Silvers' Sgt. Bilko by five years and Hanna Barbera's Top Cat by eleven, but what made those TV shows fun is that Bilko and T.C. never even considered going legit and giving up their scheming habits.

In a way, Admiral sort of echoes Peter Pan, especially the Disney animated version from 1953. Jimmy is the Pan figure, the eternal boy living a life of ease, and his buddies are like the Lost Boys, his enraptured followers. Unfortunately, this makes "the Admiral" the Wendy Darling of the story, i.e. the sensible woman who reminds Peter and the Lost Boys about the conventional, respectable lives they should be leading. Pedigrew is Captain Hook, the scoundrel who's too ineffectual to be much of a threat as the villain. I guess the sexy, duplicitous Shirley is the closest thing this movie has to Tinkerbell, since she and "the Admiral" have a bitchy, competitive relationship over a man.

I didn't find "the Admiral" all that alluring, even though every guy in this movie falls in love with her instantly. The ads above make her look like a scantily-clad sex bomb, but she's much more prim in the movie. She can be a lot of fun when she lightens up and starts enjoying life, though, and there are a couple of funny scenes in which she can no longer keep her anger and frustration in check.

Sgt. Bilko

Is it funny: Mildly so. I got a good chuckle out of The Admiral Was a Lady about once every five or ten minutes. Mainly, I liked seeing all the crazy little scams Jimmy was always trying to pull, like pretending to be a sophisticated millionaire in order to take a yacht out for a test drive or sneaking into a Broadway show at intermission or getting one of his buddies a job as a lifeguard so the gang can live it up at a ritzy country club (where you have to take a blood test just to be considered for membership!) once a week. But the Admiral sets the boys on the right path, and the fun kind of peters out. Giving Jimmy and his pals weepy backstories doesn't help matters either.

What's wrong with a comedy just being silly from beginning to end and letting its characters learn nothing? Groucho Marx wouldn't have sold out the way Edmond O'Brien seems to do in this picture! And if Bilko and his men had as sweet a setup as the guys in this movie do, they'd never let some dame louse it up.

My grade: B-

P.S. - Yet another stereotype-free comedy! We're on a roll! And, yes, there have been female admirals, but it would take another couple of decades.