Movie Quote of the Day (The Bowery Boys’ ‘Slip’ Mahoney, With One of Many Contributions to the English Language)

Terence Aloysius “Slip” Mahoney [played by Leo Gorcey] [hanging by his fingernails off the edge of a high New York building, with sidekick “Sach” Jones]: “This is what I call a serious dillemania.”— Bowery to Bagdad (1954), story by Elwood Ullman and Edward Bernds, directed by Edward Bernds

As a child nearly 60 years ago, I seldom missed a chance to see on Saturdays on local station Channel 5 a seemingly inexhaustible set of serials produced over 20 years, featuring the kind of young New York roughnecks my family had left behind in our movie to New Jersey.

This Thursday, as part of its “Summer Under the Stars” festival, TCM will devote 24 hours of its schedule to Leo Gorcey (1913-1969), the center of the group of actors who, whether known as the Dead End Kids, the East Side Kids, or, as I came to know them, the Bowery Boys, appeared in 69 movies.

The Dead End Kids took their name from the stage and film in which they first featured as supporting players, Sidney Kingsley’s drama Dead End. The playwright furnished them with material about as funny as a heart attack.

From A list dramas at Warner Brothers, the Dead End Kids morphed into B-list comedies cranked out under the Poverty Row studio Monogram Pictures (later, Allied Artists Pictures Corp.) umbrella. No matter what the nature of the material, though, audiences were always wondering what the increasingly aging “youngsters” in these flicks would be up to next.

Whenever I watched these slapstick adventures that started in Louie Dumbrowski’s soda shop before radiating out to who knows what in interchangeable, forgettable plots (featuring boxers, gangsters, ghosts—even, as in Bowery to Bagdad, a genie), I chuckled at the stratagems the gang would use to get out of their latest mess—“Routine…,” followed by a number, as if it came from a playbook.

Channel surfing several months ago, however, when I came upon this late entry in the series, I was reminded of how inventively Gorcey’s ringleader, Slip Mahoney, could fracture the English language. Evidently, the actor took special care in crafting these malapropisms.

Offscreen, and especially after the death of his father Bernard (who played Louie) in 1955, Gorcey’s life was anything but funny: married five times, dead in 1969 at age 51 from liver failure –a consequence of years of heavy drinking.

TV Quote of the Day (‘All in the Family,’ As Archie Reveals His Mastery of English—and German)

Archie Bunker [played by Carroll O’Connor]: “It's irrelative.”

Mike Stivic [played by Rob Reiner] [correcting him]: "Irrelevant."

Archie: “Whatever, it ain't German to the conversation.” —All in the Family, Season 1, Episode 3, “Archie’s Aching Back,” original air date Jan 26, 1971, teleplay by Norman Lear, Stanley Ralph Ross, and Johnny Speight, directed by John Rich

Carroll O’Connor, a veteran character actor who reached stardom as Queens blue-collar bigot Archie Bunker, was born 100 years ago today in Manhattan.

Over the last half dozen years, and especially during the isolation of COVID-19, I have been able to watch well-known actors in their more obscure roles. That has been an especially fascinating experience when it comes to watching the pre-Bunker career of O’Connor.

My jaw dropped, for instance, when I spotted him as Casca, one of the conspirators against Julius Caesar, amid the multitudinous cast members in the notorious 1963 epic Cleopatra. I also caught him, in more modern clothes, in the neo-noir films Marlowe and Point Blank, and the early Sixties cop show, Naked City.

Like another actor with a burly frame, James Gandolfini, he might have been fated simply to a career of colorful but subordinate roles until he came across a part that, at best, could be described as an anti-hero—someone who thinks (and often acts) appallingly, but who, through the actor’s overwhelming talent, becomes all too recognizably human.

O'Connor was a major reason why Norman Lear's sitcom became that era's equivalent of "Appointment TV" not only in America, but our house in particular. The actor, you see, bore something of a physical resemblance to my father.

I chose the above quote for a couple of reasons.

First, contrary to viewers who never noticed the show’s satiric bent, these lines make unmistakably clear that Bunker is an idiot who is continually shown up.

Second, I wouldn’t be surprised if this exchange, like many during the show’s run, was not in the original script but instead improvised by O’Connor.

(Incidentally, as the son of a liberal lawyer and teacher, the actor was not remotely close to the character he played. According to this 2001 Irish Echo article, some people had a difficult time believing it, notably the board of New York's famed Dakota, which looked askance at his application for an apartment. It took a reference from Paul O'Dwyer, the Irish-born New York lawyer, politician and activist whose progressive bona fides were beyond doubt, to do the trick.)

I can’t think of another character in sitcom history who’s fractured the English language with malapropisms more often or more hilariously than Archie Bunker.

With Rob Reiner, Sally Struthers, and then Jean Stapleton gone, O’Connor chose to continue playing the character that won him four Emmy Awards in Archie Bunker’s Place.

But without this trio as foils, I’m afraid it was like Michael Jordan closing out his career with the Washington Wizards without the “supporting cast” he enjoyed with the Chicago Bulls.

(Yes, I know he played Chief Bill Gillespie for eight seasons on In the Heat of the Night. But it’s like Dick Van Dyke: Do you remember him for the five years he played Rob Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show or the eight years he played Dr. Mark Sloan on Diagnosis: Murder?)

 

Quote of the Day (Flann O’Brien, As a Guardian Schools His Orphaned Nephew on Age and Culture)

“One evening Mr Collopy asked me where the morning paper was. I handed him the nearest I could find. He handed it back to me.

“  –This morning’s I told you.

“  –I think that’s this morning’s.

“  –You think? Can you not read, boy?

“  –Well… no.

“  –Well, may the sweet Almighty God look down on us with compassion! Do you realize that at your age Mose Art had written four symphonies and any God’s amount of lovely songs? Pagan Neeny had given a recital on the fiddle before the King of Prussia and John the Baptist was stranded in the desert with damn the thing to eat only locusts and wild honey. Have you no shame man?

“  –Well, I’m young yet.”—Irish novelist, newspaper columnist, and civil servant Brian O’Nolan, AKA Flann O’Brien (1911-1966), The Hard Life: An Exegesis of Squalor (1961)

TV Quote of the Day (‘All in the Family,’ As Archie Butchers the Mother Tongue Once Again)

Archie Bunker [played by Carroll O’Connor]: “Now hear this, all of yous, and pass the word to the kitchen: I’ve got a very serious problem here’s gonna take all of my thinking and all of my consecration.” —All in the Family, Season 2, Episode 10, “The Insurance Is Canceled,” original air date Nov. 27, 1971, teleplay by Lee Kalcheim, directed by John Rich

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Andy Griffith Show,’ As Barney Recalls Reading in Childhood)

Deputy Barney Fife [played by Don Knotts]: “I read all them childish classics. I was an avaricious reader.” —The Andy Griffith Show, Season 4, Episode 12, “Opie and His Merry Men,” original air date Dec. 30, 1963, teleplay by John Whedon, directed by Richard Crenna

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Andy Griffith Show,’ As Barney Explains the Oedipus Complex)

Deputy Barney Fife [played by Don Knotts]: “It’s the old mother figure bit: he loves her like a mother. Sigmund Frood wrote a lot about that.” —The Andy Griffith Show, Season 5, Episode 4, “The Education of Ernest T. Bass,” original air date Oct. 12, 1964, teleplay by Everett Greenbaum and James Fritzell, directed by Alan Rafkin

I’ve always thought that no TV character could fracture the English language so often, effortlessly and hilariously as All in the Family’s Archie Bunker. But I must say, after watching numerous episodes of The Andy Griffith Show in this year of social distancing, that Barney Fife comes in a close second.

Sheriff Andy Taylor’s lovable but flummoxed deputy brings to mind nothing so much as the couplet from Alexander Pope: “A little learning is a dangerous thing/Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.” (Of course, Barney is more likely to think of the creator of those lines as a religious leader than as an English poet.)

Barney applies the principles of psychology far more broadly than simply to substitute mother figures. He is also a student of the criminal mind, concerned that any show of leniency is liable to be interpreted as a sign of weakness. Firearm use is a necessity, he believes. “There's Andy, and there's me, and baby makes three," he says, patting his gun.

Is it really his fault, then, that his gun goes off as soon as it’s placed in his holster?

The physical aspects of Barney Fife—the sneer and strut in front of no-account occupants of the Mayberry jail that inevitably precede his bulging, saucer eyes and sweating forehead—overshadow his extensive resort to malapropisms. But his misuse of the mother tongue also makes him one of the great subsidiary characters in sitcom history.

For his performance in this role—including his dexterity in mangling language in so many sidesplitting ways—Don Knotts was nominated five times for an Emmy, winning each one. By the end of that extraordinary streak, I’m not sure why the Television Academy didn’t simply throw up its hands and rename its Best Supporting Actor Award in his honor.

TV Quote of the Day (‘All in the Family,’ As Archie Shows the Need to Brush Up on Shakespeare—and Geography)

Archie Bunker [played by Carroll O'Connor] (scowling): “Something is stinko in the city of Denmark.”— All in the Family, “Gloria Suspects Mike,” Season 6, Episode 10, original air date Nov. 17, 1975, teleplay by Lou Derman and Milt Josefsberg, directed by Paul Bogart

Quote of the Day (Baseball’s Dizzy Dean, Displaying His Way With Words)

"The runners are returning to their respectable bases."—Hall of Fame baseball pitcher Jay Hanna (Dizzy) Dean (1910-1974), showing that he could be equally colorful in the broadcast booth, quoted in “To Ol' Diz, King's English Was a Snap,” Los Angeles Times, June 22, 1986

TV Quote of the Day (‘All in the Family,’ With Archie Assessing His Effect on People)

Archie Bunker (played by Carroll O’Connor): “Every time I come near people they shut up like I was the Spanish Imposition, or something.”— All in the Family, Season 4, Episode 15, “Edith's Christmas Story,” original air date Dec. 22, 1973, teleplay by Austin Kalish, Irma Kalish and Don Nicholl, directed by John Rich