Phil Harris & Alice Faye - Gangsters Trunk

Since 1936 Harris had been a comedic mainstay and musical director for The Jack Benny Program; Faye had been a frequent guest on programs such as Rudy Vallée's. Their marriage provoked a 1941 episode of the Benny show. In 1946, they were invited to co-host The Fitch Bandwagon, a musical variety and comedy show that had been a Sunday night fixture on NBC since 1938, featuring such orchestras as Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Grier, Harry James, Freddy Martin and Jan Savitt and Harry Sosnik. In The Big Broadcast 1920–1950 Frank Buxton and Bill Owen wrote: "Even though many people thought that The Fitch Bandwagon was lucky to be sandwiched in between Jack Benny at 7pm and Edgar Bergen at 8pm on NBC, the [show] pioneered Sunday evening entertainment programming, because prior to its appearance most broadcasters felt that Sunday programming should be of a more religious or serious nature." The growing popularity of the Harris-Faye family sketches turned the program into their own comic vehicle by 1947. When announcer Bill Foreman hailed, "Good health to all... from Rexall!" on October 3, 1948, The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show launched its independent life under Rexall's sponsorship with a debut storyline about the fictitious day the couple signed their sponsorship deal. The show was a quick success, making the most of its position in the powerhouse NBC Sunday lineup. Playing themselves as radio and music star parents of two precocious young daughters (played by actresses Jeanine Roose and Ann Whitfield, instead of the Harrises' own young daughters), Harris refined his character from the booze-and-broads, hipster jive talker he had been on the Benny show into a vain buffoon but loyal husband who usually needed rescuing by Faye, his occasionally tart but always loving wife. References to his hair and vanity became a running gag. Harris often passed wisecracks about buddy Frank Remley's taste for the spirits, a continuation of Harris' former Benny character. The show's writers, Ray Singer and Dick Chevillat, also used Faye's experience making the ill-fated film Fallen Angel as a source of meta-gags, writing her as a rich, in-demand starlet. In what is seen by historians as an ironic jab at her former studio, announcer Bill Foreman closed each program with "Alice Faye appears through the courtesy of 20th Century Fox." In truth, Faye's contract had been torn up when she walked out rather than abide Darryl Zanuck cutting her scenes in favor of Linda Darnell. Harris's radio character was also scripted as an occasional language and context mangler, six parts Gracie Allen and half a dozen parts Yogi Berra. ("Why, The Mikado never would have been written if Gilbert didn't have faith in Ed Sullivan!") The sardonic humor and debaucherous nightlife references that laced the show went beyond the gentility of another show which featured a bandleader and his singing wife, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phi... #comedy #humor #family