by Wes Gehring
While MGM must be credited for bringing the two comedians together, the studio missed the proverbial golden opportunity to make the duo a production team. Keaton so liked Skelton, both personally and professionally, that, as later chronicled by the older comedian’s close friend and pivotal biographer, Rudi Blesh, Keaton “went to bat for him [Skelton] as if he were his own son—or an extension of himself from the disastrous past into a restored future. He went straight to [MGM chief Louis B.] Mayer.… In the inner sanctum he surprised himself with an eloquence he had never been able to summon in his own behalf. ‘Let me take Skelton,’ he said, ‘and work as a small company within Metro [MGM]—do our stories, our gags, our production, our direction. Use your resources but do it our way—the way I did my best pictures. I’ll guarantee you hits,’ he said. ‘I won’t take a cent of salary until they have proved themselves at the box office.’”29 A supportive Skelton also “offered to work without salary” (no small task for the money-conscious comedian) if he could team up with Keaton.30
Sadly, but not surprisingly, given Mayer and MGM’s less-than-enlightened perspective on personality comedy during the 1930s and 1940s (versus a screen-clown friendly studio such as Paramount), the production duo of Keaton and Skelton did not happen. And maybe it would not have worked. In Keaton’s 1960 autobiography he expressed frustration over Skelton’s lack of passion for pictures, though he leaves the funnyman unnamed: “Another great comic would not even watch the scenes in his pictures that he did not appear in. He was more interested in getting back to his dressing room so he could write jokes for his radio show.”31
How does one know Keaton was referring to Skelton? His widow, Eleanor Norris Keaton, told me at a later film festival in her husband’s honor.32 Keaton had put a name to this “great comic” in an obscure documentary broadcast after his death: “Skelton’s first love was radio and yet nobody could do a better scene on the screen than Skelton without opening his trap.… [But] he’d go to his dressing room on the stage between scenes and he wasn’t worrying about what he’d do in the next scene. He’d go in there and start writing gags for [his] ‘Little Junior’ to say, or something for his radio script.”33
Despite this frustration on Keaton’s part, the older comedian’s next direct collaboration on a Skelton picture, A Southern Yankee, still has the comedy connoisseur bemoaning what might have been. While Skelton preferred radio, one would never know it from his whimsically winning performance in Yankee. Since Skelton exercised more control on radio, he was more drawn to writing for that medium. Yet, his execution of the often Keaton-devised sketches for Yankee is so effortlessly funny they seem almost improvised. (Ironically, late in Skelton’s life, he actually made that improvisational claim about Yankee.)
Skelton’s big smile seems to acknowledge the masterpiece status of A Southern Yankee. (Wes D. Gehring Stills Collection)
Before examining the surviving evidence of Keaton’s influence on this picture, one must note again the importance of writers Panama and Frank, as well as producer Jones, whose greatest gift to a production was simply letting the creative people do their thing, with minimal interference. This trio was brought in by MGM after intensive lobbying for better material by both Skelton and others. MGM was also trying to save face in the film industry, since Skelton’s first hit postwar-produced picture, The Fuller Brush Man (1948, shot just prior to Yankee) had been made on loan out to Columbia. Along similar lines, MGM had been embarrassed a few years earlier when its up-and-coming musical star, Gene Kelly, had first maximized his dance on film potential in Cover Girl (1944) in another loan out to Columbia! Consequently, MGM very much wanted to make Yankee an in-house critical and box-office hit.
Parody and witty dialogue are at the heart of Panama and Frank material. For example, one of their most celebrated bits was Hope’s last-second admonishment to a Road to Utopia bartender, after his allegedly tough character had inadvertently ordered a sissified drink (lemonade), quickly demanding it be put in a “dirty glass.” This writing team was also a master of tongue-twisting dialogue, including the tricky axiom Skelton’s Yankee character must remember, “The paper’s in the pocket of the boot with the buckle, [and] the map is in the packet in the pocket of the jacket.” One could argue that the duo’s tongue-twisting prose for Skelton was a warm-up for the even more acclaimed Panama and Frank verbiage Danny Kaye must commit to memory in the watershed parody The Court Jester (1956), where “The pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle.” (The writing team also directed Jester.)
While most story treatments for a picture only run ten to twenty pages, the Panama and Frank contribution to what became Yankee is a full seventy pages. Titled The Spy, the story’s Civil War spoofing tone, about a bumbling secret agent (Skelton), is consistent with the finished film, as well as providing a great deal of the movie’s dialogue, such as its “the packet in the pocket” bit. As a tongue-twisting addendum, the story also supplies Skelton with potential comic screwups of this tricky line. For example, “The map’s in the packle [sic] of the bucket with the jackal! No! No! The jacket’s in the buckle of the pocket with the boodle [sic]!”34
For all the delightful parody of an action adventure movie provided by Panama and Frank, their most imaginative touch, an “alternate ending,” went unused. But this was probably because Skelton’s antihero would not have gotten the girl, Sally Ann (Arlene Dahl). Panama and Frank had proposed that Skelton’s character lose touch with her as the war wound down. Then, a chance encounter at the close finds Ann married to a Mr. Butler—Rhett Butler, with a show-stopping cameo by Clark Gable, as he briefly reprises his Gone With the Wind role.
Such a delightfully dizzy deviation had much to recommend it, beyond comic surprise. First, with Skelton often borrowing parody pages from Hope, losing the girl in the final reel to Crosby was often the “Road Picture” norm for the comedian. Second, nothing says parody any faster than cameos by actors associated with the genre being spoofed.35 In Hope’s first independently produced picture, the film-noir parody My Favorite Brunette (1947), the comedian cast Alan Ladd, a fixture in noir cinema of the 1940s, in the movie’s funniest takeoff on this tough guy detective genre. Third, because both Skelton and Gable were MGM contract players, one would assume something could have been worked out. In fact, Gable’s widow would later reveal that Skelton was one of the actor’s favorite entertainers.36 Fourth, as my teaching colleague and Gone With the Wind scholar Conrad Lane reminded me, fans of the epic story would enjoy even a playful suggestion of what happened to Rhett Butler. (Along related comic lines, Skelton joked at the time that Yankee would be another Gone with the Wind and should be called Back with the Breeze.)
Despite the inventive Panama and Frank original story foundation and the opportunity to draw from Keaton’s own Civil War reaffirmation parody, The General (1927), there were creative problems on the Yankee production. In Keaton’s autobiography, he chronicles being called in as a troubleshooter because the movie “had received disappointing receptions when previewed.”37 Other sources suggest he was diplomatically toiling on the film much earlier, for example, Marion Meade’s Keaton biography includes this comment from Dahl: “Whatever ideas Buster had were given sotto voce, so as not to hurt Red’s feelings. He [Keaton] was a quiet presence who always knew what worked and what didn’t. You never would have imagined he was one of the great comedians of all time.”38 Keaton’s early involvement was undoubtedly assisted by the fact that Yankee was directed by the comedian’s old crony Edward Sedgwick, who megaphoned several of Keaton’s MGM films, including the memorable Spite Marriage. And when it came to collaborations between Keaton and Sedgwick, film historians tend to give the lion’s share of credit to the silent clown.
Keaton in his classic silent film The General (1927). (Wes D. Gehring Stills Collection)
Keaton’s earlier involvement in the production would also explain how the comedian’s most inspired contribution to Yankee, the two-sided flag scene, is included in Harry Tugend scri
pt material prepared for the picture.39 The Tugend pages were filed after the earliest documented Keaton involvement on Yankee.40 But because there are some questions about dates cited on the original Yankee script material in the Cinema-Television Library at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, it is possible that the idea for the battle scene with the two-sided flag and uniform originated with Tugend but was not initially shot. Later, Keaton recognized the scene’s significance and orchestrated the material’s inclusion in the finished film. Adding further to the confusion is a Long Island (NY) Star-Journal article suggesting the scene in question would be shot sometime in February 1948, a date more supportive of crediting Tugend.41
Still, this pivotal scene is one of the few Yankee contributions for which the otherwise modest Keaton takes credit in his memoir. And like Skelton’s first mentor, Clarence Stout, Keaton’s chronicling of past events usually rings true, as opposed to Skelton’s often “creative” reminiscences. Thus, here is the older comedian’s detailed account of the two-sided scene, and why it proved to be such a comedy highlight: “[I] contributed the gag in which Red was shown walking between the Union Army and the Confederate Army, with both armies cheering him madly. The reason was that Red was wearing half of a Union Army hat and uniform on the side facing the Northern soldiers and a Southern hat and uniform on the other. In addition, he had sewed together the flags of the two opposing sides so that the boys in blue saw a Union flag and the Southerners only the flag of the Confederacy. Both sides cheer him wildly until a sudden gust of wind reverses the flag, showing both sides the game he is playing. As Red turns around to straighten the flag they discover his half-and-half uniform [too].”42
This scene is easily the most brilliant in the Skelton filmography and merits inclusion in any cinema pantheon of legendary comedy routines. The material is also perfectly consistent with the Keaton oeuvre mapped out earlier, by way of a comparison with Chaplin. That is, Skelton’s character’s foray into the contested space between the two opposing armies is initially a great success—a success predicated upon the most knee-jerk of responses—blindly jingoistic, flag-waving patriotism. Such rigid behavior is what comedy theorist Henri Bergson refers to as “mechanical inelasticity.”43 This is comedy more reflective of the cerebral Keaton than the heart-directed emotion of Chaplin.
Though the scene was initially conceived as having the two flags sewn together, and was first maybe even shot that way, the Hays censorship office would not allow it—too disrespectful! Consequently, in the finished picture Skelton carries two flags between the opposing armies, with both the Union and Confederate soldiers initially seeing only their own flags. (Paradoxically, many viewers “remember” the sequence as having the flags sewn together. In fact, that had been my childhood memory of the bit, until I rescreened the movie for this biography.)
Nevertheless, this Keatonesque Yankee scene is predicated upon the older comedian’s formalistic tendencies. The special camera angles that make both armies think one of their own is bravely carrying the flag through no-man’s land. But Skelton’s ruse, to extricate himself from being pinned down between two armies, is short-lived. Yet, even this sudden change is classic Keaton. For Keaton, the absurdity of modern life is often triggered by natural forces, be it the rock slide of Seven Chances (1925) or the tornado of Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928). In Skelton’s Yankee a simple change in the wind wreaks comic disaster. Now, each army sees the enemy’s flag, and as Skelton struggles to control these symbols in the wind, the two-sided nature of his uniform becomes apparent, also. “A change in the wind”—what a wonderful metaphor for how easily man’s grand plans are derailed.
There are several additional Keaton bits documented in the Yankee files at the USC archives. The most entertaining example is an inventive exercise in Keaton minimalism, which is again driven by camera placement—and a small pine cone (another bow to provocative mother nature). After a lengthy horseback ride, Skelton’s character stops to dismount: “Aubrey [Skelton] glances around for a place to rest his sore posterior. He spies a tree stump. The minute his rump touches the stump, Aubrey jumps with pain. He needs something softer to sit on. He looks about for a moment then, gathering an armful of pine needles on the ground, he places them on the tree stump for matting. He sits down and this time he fairly flies off [the stump] with pain. As he turns around we see that a pine cone which was concealed in the needles is still stuck to the seat of his pants. Aubrey, feeling about in the pine needles where the cone was concealed, and discovering nothing that should have caused such sharp pain, sits down [on the stump] again. Of course, he sits right on the pine cone. Once again he leaps with pain. He glances about suspiciously—unable to understand what it is that is causing the trouble.”44
Skelton’s battle with the invisible-to-him pine cone is yet another exercise in Keaton basics. The apparent absurdity of modern life is reduced to a pesky pine cone, out of Skelton’s line of vision. As with the two-sided flag and uniform scene, this second Keaton-constructed routine is predicated on the positioning of the camera. Indeed, Red’s first pine cone-induced jump off the stump is initially a mystery to the viewer, too, until the comedian turns around. Also, like the “change in the wind” catalyst from the earlier sketch, the pine cone represents Keaton’s fatalistic use of Mother Nature to cause a comic character grief. And by having Aubrey/Skelton “suspiciously” looking around, as if there were a conspiracy going on, underlines yet again the psychological/cerebral nature of Keaton’s art, as opposed to the emotional/heart-directed orientation of Chaplin’s films.
Additional Yankee production material by Keaton on file at USC includes sketches in which Skelton seemingly attempts to carry half the luggage available during the Civil War, as well as several routines tied to avoiding enemy capture by way of hiding in a doghouse, and behind linen on a clothesline, and an accidental visit to a dentist. Keaton was also responsible for the scrapping of early Yankee footage showcasing Skelton acting like an “imbecile.” The older filmmaker explained, “As the comedian and leading man, Red lost the audience’s sympathy by behaving too stupidly. If you act as screwy as he was doing, the people out front would not care what happened to the character you were playing … [The scenes were reshot,] toning down Red’s nutty behavior.”45
Thanks largely to Keaton, Skelton’s greatest film was a critical and commercial success. The all-important entertainment bible Variety stated, “It’s as wild and raucous a conglomeration of gags and belly-laughs as Skelton’s recent [hit] ‘The Fuller Brush Man.’ The kiddies, the family and the general film fan will find it bait for the risibility’s and respond with hearty ticket window payoff.”46 The Hollywood Reporter said, “Skelton, well on his road to becoming a really great clown, makes the most of every line.”47 The Los Angeles Daily News observed, “Red Skelton fans are going to love this one. It has everything Skelton does best—the pratfall, the delayed gag, the double-take, the mugging, the [spoofing] cowardice, and all the rest.”48
Cue, with an intuitive sense of the uncredited Keaton, noted: “With gags borrowed from old time silent movies, and slapstick stunts adapted from his [Skelton’s] own and others’ comedies, Red Skelton romps dizzily through this wacky Civil War comedy.”49 But the critical pièce de résistance came from Motion Picture Daily, which called the film the “fastest, funniest comedy of this or any recent year.”50
I belabor these superlative reviews both because of Keaton’s unique contributions to the film, and the fact that history has done a disservice to Yankee’s critical reception. Much of this problem can be attributed to Arthur Marx’s Skelton book, the first biography of the comedian, which claimed the Yankee critiques were “lukewarm.”51 Worse yet, Marx suggested “lukewarm” was an appropriate take on this neglected masterpiece. Marx had a proclivity to limit his review research to the New York Times, a publication that had panned Yankee.52 But a close reading of this Times critique reveals more of an ongoing attack on MGM’s continued mishandling of Skelton’s career than
simply a slam of the picture.
Of course, to play devil’s advocate, there was a contemporary Hollywood Reporter article that suggested Yankee had not been well received by New York critics.53 Yet, there were numerous positive Yankee reviews. For example, the New York Morning Telegraph said, “For Skelton fans … this is the gravy train. They’ll no doubt go rolling down the aisles with [comic] hysterics.”54 And it was obvious that the general New York viewer was pleased with the picture. The Motion Picture Herald documented, “Even when [Yankee was] previewed in a hot New York theatre—the air-conditioning engineers were on strike—the sweltering audience had itself a great time as Skelton … mimicked and drawled his way through 90 minutes of pure fun.” The same critique also credited these discerning viewers with fully appreciating the pivotal two-sided uniform scene, resulting in “the theatre howling with uproarious laughter.”55
Sadly, Keaton never received his much-deserved credit at the time Yankee was getting such a plethora of positive reviews. In fact, on the rare occasion when a critic even compared the film to the work of a silent comedian, seemingly everyone but Keaton was noted. Motion Picture Daily stated Yankee “summons up memories of Harold Lloyd … [and] Charlie Chaplin.”56 Even more damaging to Keaton’s legacy than neglect, or forgotten files in university archives, is Skelton’s later denial that such a collaboration ever occurred. The year before Skelton’s death, he did an extensive interview for a New York Public Library oral history project. Betsy Baytos conducted the interview at the comedian’s home, and she asked him about Keaton’s assistance on his films. Skelton responded, “I didn’t know until after I left Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that he had even done work on these movies.”57 An incredulous Baytos could only reply, “You’re kidding?” Unfazed, Skelton goes on to claim that on the seminal Yankee, “sixty-five percent of it was ad-libbed by me.”