The Great Gildersleeve

The Great Gildersleeve was a pleasant, charming radio show. The television version utterly lacks the charm and cuteness of its radio counterpart.

The show's principal actor, Willard Waterman, seems charismatic and talented, yet the Gildersleeve character he plays is an unpleasant woman chaser. The writing (at least of the episodes I've seen) is excruciatingly tedious; each episode centers upon a singularly feeble premise and then "does it to death."

For instance, in one typical episode Gildersleeve's lust gets him committed to a long course of dance lessons and must get himself out. It's a tired, worn-out premise, yet it's repeated three times in the same episode. This thin plot is padded with feeble gags so tedious that a kindergartener wouldn't have the patience to write them. There are no sub-plots.

Other observers are apparently not so complementary as I've been. Sam Frank ("Buyer's Guide to Fifty Years of TV on Video") described the TV version of the Great Gildersleeve as "insulting and offensive." I haven't seen the episode he was describing, but apparently the show's values were consistently bad. He cited star Willard Waterman as later proclaiming, "The young man who produced the series, Matt Rapf, was an idiot who had never heard the radio show..."

These are harsh words from the show's star, but regard them fair warning before you waste half an hour on an episode. It was offered on video for a while, but apparently did not sell because the tapes were eventually given away as freebies. Hmmm.

My husband and I have recorded most of the classic radio program from 1941 through 1954. The program began in September 1941 as a spinoff of Fibber McGee and Molly. The first episodes that fall were a bit too vaudevillian, but after the attack on Pearl Harbor, many radio programs took on a whole new patriotic point of view.

Throughout the war years The Great Gildersleeve portrayed the war effort though episodes about gasoline rationing, ration points for meat, Gildersleeve having to repair his own car because the mechanic went off to war, and having a soldier from a nearby army base join the family for Thanksgiving dinner. At the end of the program, Gildersleeve often reminded listeners to buy war bonds.

One memorable episode was about an upcoming election and Gildersleeve was running against Mayor Terwilliger for the position of mayor. It was a tense campaign with each candidate trying to persuade voters to vote for him. At the conclusion of the episode, Gildersleeve asks one of the townspeople, an immigrant from Italy, if he's going to vote the next day. The immigrant responds with a wonderful speech saying how proud he was to finally become an American citizen and how much he's looking forward to casting his vote for the very first time.

Gildersleeve realizes that it's not about winning as much as it is the privilege of living in a country where people can vote and how important it is that everyone proudly participates in the election process.

The radio program had a depth that the television program lacks. We watched two episodes of the television program just to see Willard Waterman and Lillian Randolph.

The summary pretty much says it all. Waterman's talent can't save the tedious scripts, but the show does give a lot of incidental if unintended info about life in the 50s--not only the material furnishings and styles, but also production values. For example, one can readily see the early stages of evolution of sit-coms with how light and harmless (un-controversal) the issues are. Strictly check your brain in at the door type of comedy. It seems that some of the transitional features from radio are readily apparent in this TV version of its radio namesake. The acting seems a little campy and "stagey" -- which makes sense when you consider how young the TV medium was at this point.

It has all the attributes of bad fifties TV-black servant, mouthy bratty kid, girls all in dresses and man-hungry June Cleavers, Dagwood and Blondie style situations. In the episode I saw, the kids swapped around a love-note Gildersleeve had penned to his fiancé w/ a classic Browning one, she put it into their poetry club as being his own(what-she was a fan of poetry yet had never read 'How do I love thee-let me count the ways'-?!), they too fall for it, etc. You know the drill.

"Pleasentville" did a decent job of sending this stuff up, though I can't say I'm a fan of the movie. This show-it worked better on radio. Gildersleeve is a funny character who's laugh and catch-phrases still echo in pop-culture(try the Red Guy in Cow and Chicken--trust me...it's in there...), but this series..forget it.

** outta ****