THE HONEYMOONERS 4/23/55 “Boys And Girls Together”
When people talk about The Honeymooners, they usually think of what is known as “The Classic 39” but there is much more to The Honeymooners than those episodes. It’s more like “The Classic 232”:
en.wikipedia.org
Most of the 1960’s episodes were remakes of episodes that were originally done in the 1950’s, as sketches in ‘The Jackie Gleason Show’, which originated on the Dumont Television network, (which went out of business in 1955), in 1950 under the title “Cavalcade of Stars” and switched to CBS in 1952 and lasted to 1957. There were 130 such sketches from 1950-1955 and 1956-57. The Classic 39 was a half-hour filmed situation comedy based on those sketches that ran from 1955-56. Those were actually the least-watched Honeymooners episodes of the 1950’s but because they were filmed instead of just being broadcast live, those episodes were available for syndication and thus became the most famous Honeymooners episodes. They are all a lot of fun and several are, indeed ‘classics’. But I do not think that they were, as a group, the best episodes of 1950’s Honeymooners.
The genesis of the skits was that Gleason wanted to depict what happens before, during and after an argument between the couple, which every neighborhood had, who were always arguing but always seemed to kiss and make up. They must have been truly in love so their marriage was a perpetual ‘honeymoon’, as the introduction to the first episode says. The first couple of years, the skits were 10 minute segments of a variety show that also included Reggie Van Gleason, the Pour Soul, Joe the Bartender and other Gleason characters, as well as separate musical numbers and guest stars, etc. Then they started to experiment with longer episodes, even ones that took up the whole hour, (meaning that they lasted 35-45 minutes with the rest going to an opening monologue, commercials and closing credits). The Honeymooners didn’t appear constantly but with increasing frequency until they mostly took over the show.
The longer shows naturally had to have full-fledged plots, not just arguments, with multiple scenes. Situations that can be seen in many of the 10 minute sketches were expanded into the 45 minute plots and themes were woven into the show: Ralph is a frustrated man in a difficult job who dreams of being a big, important man or a great financial success. But his dreams never come true. His wife, Alice is always dubious of his big ideas, (which causes the arguments to still be a big part of the series), but she’s there to catch him when he falls and reassure him they still have their love and that that’s all that matters – something he has to conveniently forgot in time for the next episode. Ed Norton starts out as a wacky neighbor and becomes a full-fledged co-star and (not always willing) partner in Ralph’s schemes and misadventures.
In the Dumont days, Alice was played by gravel-voiced Pert Kelton, who seems like the battle-axe sort of wife you’d expect Ralph Kramden to wind up with. But Kelton had health problems and blacklist problems and had to be replaced when the show moved to CBS in 1952. Audrey Meadows, who had been known as a glamour girl, decided she wanted the part and had a friend take a picture of her after she just woke up to convince Gleason that she could do the role.
She created a more attractive, intelligent and capable Alice that gave Ralph a good motivation for his desire to be wealthy and important: he can’t believe that he wound up married to a woman like Alice and he wants to be a man who could deserve a wife like her. The best comedy has a dramatic backbone: it makes the characters more real. The Honeymooners was kind of a “kitchen-sink comedy”, to use a term made popular at the time for family dramas. It made this series more indelible than the more purely comedic shows oft the time.
The Jackie Gleason Show was hugely popular at the time, rising to second in the season ratings to I Love Lucy, due largely to the popularity of The Honeymooners. It’s easy to imagine the Ricardos and the Mertzes living in the same city as the Kramdens and the Nortons: it’s too bad they never met, although Gleason as Ralph appeared on what became ‘Here’s Lucy’ in 1968:
A 1950’s cross-over between the two CBS shows that defined 1950’s television would have bene fantastic but, even though both shows took place in the same city, they were filmed 3,000 miles apart so it never happened. Gleason was jealous of all the money Lucy and Desi were making by filming their show but he preferred to perform in a live theater. Gleason’s show was just broadcast, although a record was made of it because of the time difference on the west coast. Rather than having people out there get the show at 5PM on a Saturday or having the cast perform the show twice, a film camera was bolted glass-to-glass with a TV monitor and an imperfect but watchable record was made of the show for re-broadcast to the west coast. This was the norm for live New York shows but the people making television at that time had no sense of making history: they didn’t know that anyone would care about these shows years later. So they usually melted down the film after the west coast broadcast to retrieve its silver content so they could sell it and the shows were lost.
In 1955, Gleason’s old employer, DuMont came up with a machine that could both broadcast a performance and record it on film at the same time. Gleason realized that he could turn the Honeymooners into a half hour comedy and syndicate it just like I Love Lucy, but still give a theatrical performance and broadcast that live. That involved actually cutting the show down to about 25 minutes, (allowing for commercials and credits). Gleason was contracted to give CBS a full hour of programing so he created a variety show he would not star in but produce, which was given the bland title of ‘The Stage Show’ and was hosted by Gleason’s old friends the Dorsey Brothers.
A critical mistake was made by putting The Stage Show on in the first half hour, followed by The Honeymooners. NBC provided strong competition with the highly popular Perry Como show and audiences preferred that to The Stage Show and they didn’t switch back to CBS to watch The Honeymooners, which fell to 19th in the ratings, (not as high as that would be today as it was basically CBS vs. NBC with DuMont gone and ABC well back). After doing 36 episodes, (the norm in those days), in the 1955-56 season, Gleason started the 1956-57 with the same set-up but decided after 3 weeks, to return to his variety show format. The ratings were poor and they were running out of ideas for The Honeymooners, so Gleason finally gave up on the dream of getting rich through syndication.
The writers still had a few small ideas for Honeymooners episodes and one very big one. They went back to doing occasional short sketches with all of the action in the Kramden’s apartment, just the way things had begun, then a few long ones, then came out with an epic series of episodes in which the Kramdens and the Nortons take a trip to Europe, with their misadventures set to music. This consisted of eight 50-minute episodes. Then they returned to New York, (the show, of course, never left: it was all on stage), for a couple more short sketches- remakes of previous ones, before Gleason closed down the show altogether and went to Hollywood to try to become a movie star.
He had some success, (most famously what is actually a brief role as Minnesota Fats in ‘The Hustler’), then returned to do his variety show under the title “The American Scene Magazine” again in 1962, this time from Miami Beach. That’s the Jackie Gleason Show I grew up with, featuring his other famous characters. Then he re-introduced The Honeymooners in 1966 with re-makes of the 1950’s episodes, including the musical trip to Europe. Eventually they did some original episodes and ended everything with the Honeymooners taking a trip across the USA.
These episodes had a different Alice as Audrey Meadows had moved on to other things. Sue Ann Langdon didn’t get along with Gleason and so they brought in Gordon McRae’s wife, Sheila, who did. But it’s still Meadows who most people think of as ‘Alice’ and she appeared in a series of reunion shows that were done afterwards. Gleason and Carney were irreplaceable but they were also aging and had lived rather hard and they looked like old men in the 60’s episodes, which made the misfortunes that befell them somewhat less funny than in the 50’s episodes.
These shows were done on video tape, which came into use in the late 50’s. But being more than a half hour long, they weren’t really suited to syndication. The one success Gleason had in that field was that WOR in New York had decided to run what came to be known as “The Classic 39” after their late news show and new Yorkers were enjoying it. When Cable TV came on the scene and was thirsty for programing, many local cable outlets also show the Classic 39 and it eventually became a ‘cult’ hit with fans having Star-Trek-like conventions where they would show up dressed like the characters.
It was thought for many years that the other 130 fifties episodes, (besides the Classic 39), were gone forever but Gleason had kept him kinescopes, refusing to have them melted down for their silver, and had been watching them himself for years. In 1984, the existence of these kinescopes was revealed and Jackie agreed to let Viacom Entertainment and Showtime broadcast the Honeymooners segments of the old shows that hadn’t been seen since they were first broadcast 30 years before, (apparently the whole shows, including Gleason’s other characters were also available but all anyone seemed to care about were the Honeymooners). The shows were presented, not in chronological order, so fans could watch the evolution of the series, but piecemeal or by ‘themes’, both on Showtime, (which got an early boost from the release) and in subsequent VHS and DVD releases. Also, many episodes that were available were not shown because they were deemed to be poor visual or audio quality. Some were not even in Gleason’s collection, (see the Wikipedia article above). But true Honeymooner fans want to see it all and in the proper order and TUBI offers that:
The Honeymooners: Lost Episodes
I recall a friend at the time telling me that he was disappointed in the “Lost Episodes” because they didn’t have the consistent visual and audio quality of the Classic 39. But I found them perfectly watchable and was more interested in the content anyway. I actually came to prefer the look of the Lost Episodes over time. The Classic 39 do, in a sense “look better” but they also have the look and sound of something recorded a long time ago. I found my mind, watching the Lost Episodes, tended to filer out the imperfections and “see” the actual live performance. If I’m watching a 1954 episode I feel like I’ve been transported back to 1954 and am in the theater watching the live performance and I came to prefer that. Moreover the epsidoes, escepaillyf rom the 1954-55 season, were longer with more involved stories. That also seemed to have more raucous humor and be generally funnier. Maybe it the immediacy of the audience sounds vs. the more ‘distant’ sound of the Classic 39.
At any rate I came to the conclusion that the 1954-55 season – the year before the Classic 39 – was the actual height of The Honeymooners appeal and that people like my friend who demanded the ‘perfection’ of the Classic 39 were really missing a lot.
So, with another 130 episodes to choose from, which Honeymooners episode is my favorite? My favorite of the Classic 39 is ‘The 99,000 Answer’ (“Way done upon the Swanee River”) because it makes me laugh the most. But the Honeymooners episode that I find the absolute funniest is this short one from January 24, 1953, called ‘Suspense’:
The Honeymooners: Lost Episodes S01:E22 - Suspense
Hitchcock always said that the key to suspense is for the audience to know something that the characters on the screen don’t know. It’s also the key to comedy. But this episode also shows that comedy is really drama from a different perspective. Ralph’s horror at what he thinks Alice is doing is very real as is the love he displays for her – and that makes the comedy all the funnier.
But, in the end, chose one of the longer episodes, actually the last Lost Episode before the Classic 39, which illustrates the same “comedy with a dramatic backbone” in a more subtle way. ‘Boys and Girls Together’ from April 23rd, 1955. (It’s sometimes erroneously listed as May 23rd):
The wives demand that the boys spend more time with them so Ralph and Norton scheme to exhaust the girls with a wild night on the town.
tubitv.com
The 13-minute scene that beginning at 9:30 is one of the best scenes I’ve ever seen in a TV show, movie or play. It starts with Alice trying to bring romance in their lives with a beautiful dress, a candle-lit dinner and fancy food to eat. Ralph comes home after a rough day and is totally unable to understand what Alice is doing or connect with her in any way. The scene is hilarious not only because the audience knows what Ralph doesn’t know but Alice and Ralph don’t know what’s going on in each other’s mind. Alice, heartbreakingly, tries her best to bring Ralph into the mod she’s trying to create and finally gives up and gives along speech about how difficult her life is and how disappointed she in in how her marriage worked out. Ralph responds with a speech of his own about his life and what it’s like to drive a bus all day and how much he needs to do things he likes when he gets home, even if they don’t involve Alice. It makes you feel for both of them.
They then go back to comedy with Alice and Trixie insisting that when Ralph and Ed go out, they bring their wives along. Ralph come sup with an idea for getting back the men’s freedom: keep the wives out all knight, going to various places, until they ask to be taken back home. It results in the still wide awake live watching their husbands get so tired that when they get up to dance, they wind up in each other’s arms. But its’ the power of that one long scene between Ralph and Alice that makes this one truly memorable.
One final note: A live show had to be carefully timed and Gleason was famous for having a clock in his head. If they were going too fast, Gleason would do bits of business to slow it down. If they were running late, he would cut into somebody’s lines to edit the script as they went along. The other actors had to be aware of this and go along with whatever Gleason did. An example of this comes at the 25:30 mark of this episode where Ralph has just described the things he’s had to do with Alice the past few days and Norton beginnings his own litany of things he’s had to put up with and Gleason tells him to ‘shut up’. That’s Gleason editing the show as they were performing it.