Top Banana

Two years ago, Top Banana could convulse New York audiences with a musical parody of television's own Milton Berle. Today, the movie version is kicking a dead horse and doing a bad job of it. Top Banana is the answer to those who think Hollywood can best reproduce Broadway by shoving a camera in front of the stage on opening night. The film shows that even with wide screens, exact reproductions are likely to look shoddy when compared with the original.

Phil Silvers' one-man show is little more than a jumble of old burlesque routines connected by the barest of plots and a few undistinguished melodies. On film, even these overdone antics seem scarcely like parodies and painfully like the real thing. As an opener, four or five comedians plant themselves in front of one set and shout two-line jokes at each other for forty minutes. Top Banana rapidly sheds its appeal in the next two acts with variations on the same theme.

Because of its vaudevillian humor, the film needs ample scenery and enough action to keep from becoming drab. Instead, its producers confine themselves to an actual stage, and proudly advertise that the film is an exact replica of what was seen on Broadway. The sets are as scantily decked as the chorus girls and hardly as well made. This is a disadvantage doubly accented by a color process which brings out blues and greens, adding a blue bag to every eye and just a dash of purple to the lips. The effect is pretty macabre.

Against these obstacles Phil Silvers pits his jovial buffoonery. But his brash, rapid-fire humor entertains only in spurts, and then in the unsubtlest of ways. His best scene comes late in the picture, as he parodies a tenor at the burlesque while half-clad maidens stumble around in the background. No one else has much of a part, although some of vaudeville's oldest stand-bys have landed jobs in the supporting cast.

Good songs could have compensated for this dullness, but Top Banana never had any. The film lacks variety, and undoubtedly much of its spice has gone with the censors.