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After the silly kiddie stuff in The Huggetts Abroad, Petula was able to play a romantic role in Don’t Ever Leave Me, also from 1949. I hope her hair was done this way intentionally as part of the plot — otherwise, they should have fired Pet’s hairdresser!
My friend Morris grew up in the 50’s, and he’s a big fan of The Phil Silvers Show, also known as You’ll Never Get Rich, aka Sgt. Bilko. I watched the shows in re-runs in the 60’s, but like The Honeymooners I didn’t fully appreciate the comedy until I was an adult.
Sgt. Bilko was the basis for numerous shows that followed, including McHale’s Navy (featuring my mother’s old buddy Ernest Borgnine), F Troop, and even M*A*S*H (yes, I know it was first an Altman movie).
There’s an excellent DVD collection available of Bilko shows. One of the episodes is called “The Big Scandal.” It originally aired on May 14, 1957. The premise is that the character named Doberman is accidentally hypnotized into thinking he’s in love with the wife of the colonel in charge of the Army camp. Bilko intercepts one of his calls and thinks there’s a “gigolo with greasy sideburns” on the make. The colonel’s wife is about to visit her daughter and grandchildren, who have chicken pox, so the camp doctor is stopping by to inoculate her (a neat trick, as a chicken pox vaccine didn’t exist until the 1990’s). That’s Julie Newmar at 23 as the maid.
That’s the setup. Got it? Here’s 10 minutes of the show. Watch and laugh.
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A while back I made mention of Phyllis Diller, and the fact my mother was a fan of hers. This weekend we watched Who Killed the Electric Car? and by chance Diller appears in it for a few moments.
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The next video in the Petula series is from the 1949 movie, The Huggetts Abroad; abroad being South Africa. This song, “Doodle Oodle Day”, is even sillier than the nonsensical “Walking Backwards” in the previous post.
Yikes! It’s been over two months since I posted part 2 of this movie. In part 3 it’s apparent where the look of the sets in Star Trek came from. Director Byron Haskin recycled the spaceships and sound effects from his earlier film, War of the Worlds.
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As promised, here is the start of a Petula Clark video retrospective. This brief scene is from 1948, with Pet at 15 in Here Come the Huggetts, the first in a series about the fictional Huggetts family.
Pet was England’s “Singing Sweetheart,” and she seems here to be a cross between Shirley Temple and Judy Garland. She carries it off, but having sifted through more than 30 video clips of Petula, it seems she had to be quite a chameleon to keep her career moving. I would conjecture the real Petula didn’t show herself until she was closing in on 40.
