Very Cool!!!

Overrated

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

Mickey Rooney plays Sammy Hogarth, a famous comedian of stage and television, adored by the masses, hated and despised by his intimates.There are two plots here, the lesser involving Sammy's brother, Lester, played by Mel Torme--a grown crybaby who clings to his big brother's shirttail from which comes his job as an abused go-for, and along with the job comes a weekly sketch portraying him as Lester the bumbling fool. There's a desire to get out from under this character abuse, but poor, weak Lester hasn't the backbone to properly make his stand without the aid of his endearing, but troubled wife played by Kim Hunter.Edmond O'Brien plays the pivotal role in this production as Sammy's head comedy writer, and the plot involving a less than honorable script he's come up with is the real fuel for this story. Deceit is the name of the game in this television... well, let's call it a mini-movie since that's what Playhouse 90 more or less turned out, and as usual, O'Brien upstages pretty much everyone he's on screen with. Mickey Rooney certainly gives him a run for his money though. Unfortunately, these bad guy type roles Rooney started playing in the 50s were a big part of what contributed to his losing the public's admiration even though he did them well.I don't think you'll be disappointed with anything, except perhaps the ending, which may leave you less contented than ole' Bossy on a late milking day. It's done well though.

I suspect there were two figures, maybe three, who were the basis for the character of early television comic giant Sammy Hogarth in this drama. First there were Sid Caesar and Red Buttons, both of whom were notably difficult to write comedy for (Caesar less than Buttons, in that he was just outspoken when presented by second-rate material; Buttons made a name for himself - and a hash of his comedy variety success - by firing comic writers almost weekly in the second year of his show). The other may be Arthur Godfrey, another "beloved" television personality of the 1950s who was something less than likable in his relations with his staff (ask the unfortunate Julius La Rosa, for example).THE COMEDIAN was a drama by Rod Sterling that was revived on television by Sonny Fox in 1994 in a series showing the best surviving kine-scopes of live television shows from the golden age of television drama. The others included the original BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY, NO TIMES FOR SERGEANTS, and REQUIEM FOR A HEAVYWEIGHT. THE COMEDIAN starred Mickey Rooney as the energetic, dynamic, and totally lousy Hogarth, an ego-maniacal comic genius who demanded the best from everyone around him. He dominates his nervous and downtrodden brother, Lester (Mel Torme, in a surprisingly good performance as a snook who finally seems to grow claws). Kim Hunter plays Julie Hogarth, the wife of Lester, whom has had to fight off the attentions of Sammy. And Edmund O'Brien plays Al Preston, a script writer for Hogarth who is finding the comedian less and less easy to work for and less and less satisfied by his work. Preston's wife Connie (Constance Ford) is trying to convince him that despite the salary it is not worth the aggravation tied to such a creep as Hogarth. O'Brien is almost convinced, and then a disaster hits in the form of a script.Before Preston had been on the staff, another writer worked for Hogarth, and this writer had died. That was why Preston was hired. What Hogarth did not know was that the previous writer had written a full script for Hogarth, and Preston ends up in possession of the script. But the script is in the other writer's name, and if Preston uses it, and the act becomes known, it can ruin his reputation. But if it is used and nobody discovers the truth, Preston's reputation is secured.In the meantime, Hogarth does a series of jokes about noted critic Elwell (Whit Bissell). Elwell discovers all about Hogarth's relationship with his sister-in-law, and publishes it. While this is going on, the purloined script is being produced, and Hogarth is very pleased by it. But each day approaches the date of the television production, and Preston is growing worried. Is he sure he's safe, or will the truth come out to hurt him? Like the contemporary film THE GREAT MAN (also based on Arthur Godfrey), and the business in the contemporary British comedy THE NAKED TRUTH (or YOUR PAST IS SHOWING) concerning British television star "Wee Geordie" MacGregor (Peter Sellers), THE COMEDIAN showed the difference between the real world of television personalities and the final production the public loved. It strives too hard at times at being a bit philosophical (O'Brien finally demanding from Rooney what makes him tick - in real life he would not have bothered to ask). But the drama was a very good one, and certainly added to the laurels of it's five stars (Rooney, O'Brien, Ford, Hunter, and especially Torme). And it added another feather to the legend of Rod Sterling, that peerless television dramatist before the coming of THE TWILIGHT ZONE.

Spoilers. See it first.A story in one of those "Whatever Became Of...?" books from several years ago convinced me without aiming to that Sammy Hogarth is a thinly veiled composite of the top two or three TV comics of TV's Golden Age. (No names please.) In that book, a second string comic who did a lot of TV in the 50s talks at length, with deadly, convincing examples, of the bloated egotism, vanity and ugly cruelty of THE names of early TV comedy. "The really big ones" he said "they were all b****rds."That certainly describes Mickey Rooney as Sammy Hogarth to the letter. Once you accept the premise --that over-the-top success breeds monsters of the ego-- it is easy to get swept up in a paranoid who-was-he-really? guessing game. Is Rooney as good as he is at playing Sammy because he IS Sammy? (After all, success and wealth came to him a a very early age, and he apparently had the kind of women most red-blooded American Male's dream of on tap throughout his 20s and 30s.) --Or is it another non-comic air personality, of the legendary and ultimately self-immolating high temper, a saint before the camera, a beast behind the scenes, whose rise and fall was encapsulated for all time in the contemporaneous Face In the Crowd? Clearly, turning over all the stones in the field is madness. Sammy is a postulate. As central as Sammy is to the experience of The Comedian, the story isn't really about him. It's about Al, Sammy's harried head writer, a middle-aged man who finds himself at a personal crossroads. Deep in a lucrative career most of his peers would kill for, he has come reluctantly to the realization that he doesn't have what it takes anymore. His co-writers are carrying him; he is acting mostly as editor, passive catalyst, critic and executive comedy writer. The crushing grind of turning out huge volumes of material on the tightest schedules has used up whatever he may have had. --Or maybe he never had it to begin with; Al is never sure. (Friends say this character was the great Rod Serling himself, always unsure of his own talent.) Whatever his perceived personal inadequacies, Al recognizes and savors brilliance when he sees it. Years before, he crossed paths with an aspiring young comedy writer named Davey Farber. Farber wrote knockout stuff; Al says he (Al) would be dining daily on Farber's dust, were his rival-aborning/idol alive now. But Farber was killed in WWII. Al keeps an original set of Davey's unused, unsubmitted scripts from the old days in a locked drawer in his office. Why? --To commune from time to time with a kindred spirit and dead friend/mentor/demon? --As insurance against the day when inspiration fails him, and he has to come in contact with the Godhead via the service entrance? To steal the work of somebody better than he ever was? Your answer to this question is as ultimately just as crass and condemning or as shaded and empathetic as you want it to be. Al's relationship with the image of Farber isn't exactly love/hate, but it is masochistic, and he probably hates himself for the emotions those scripts bring out in him. Every time he removes those scripts from his hiding place, he bathes in his own failure. He admires Farber immensely, while feeling stung that he could never be one of the brilliant ones, like the long departed author of his hard-copy inspiration. It's his connection with Farber that will eventually put him to the test.Sammy's brother Lester is the comedian's home base foil. For all the abuse Sammy heaps on everyone else-- and that's plenty-- he saves the very best for family, as people will. Lester is the brunt of the savage monologue that opens Sammy's show every week. Lester's wife is beginning to hate him for taking it lying down. He is squeezed tight between the allure of a cushy sustaining spot on his brother's payroll and his wife's impatient shame at a husband who got everything he will ever own by submitting to his brother's public mistreatment. Lester's desperate search for a way out of the non-stop humiliation and threatened end of his marriage sets things in motion that will force Al to finally deal definitively with his dark secret. Into a charged situation sashays gossip columnist Otis Elwood, a dilettante and foppish slimeball, with fur-collared great coat, crisp fedora and shades he never removes. His pompous and high-blown everyday speech betrays his inflated image of himself. But right off, despite all the creep cues thrown our way, we share one undeniable affinity with this 'villain' that prevents us writing him off: We despise Sammy every bit as much as Elwood does. Like him, we ache to see the little weasel fall. It may be hard for modern audiences to realize the kind of power the Earl Wilsons, Luella Parsons, Hedda Hoppers and Walter Winchells used to wield. But they did, and Elwood is no far-fetched deus ex machina. Lester hates Elwood, mumbling into his collar at the beginning of act one "He thinks he's God or somethin'." He will turn to Elwood before the play is over, for leverage against Al and his brother and for salvation from his personal hell.The obsessions of the main characters are essentially Serling's: career (as in how to earn a dollar and retain one's dignity), place in society (as in one's ultimate deemed status in the human community), the nature of talent, and the question of the importance of legacy. In Serling's world, it isn't a question of wanting to fit in and keep up with the other corporation men. Materialistic failure is always an option for Serling. But to be a nonentity, to do something that causes you to slip through the cracks of human memory, is not.If anyone wants to see what all the talk over TV drama from the Golden Age of television is about, this is the place to start.Ten Stars.

This tells the story of an old vaudevillian comic (Rooney) who will do ANYTHING for the show, and at the same time, totally ignore the feelings of his family, particularly his brother (Mel Torme).It is a fascinating production, where Rooney's character, empty of soul, fills the screen with venom and vitriol.Torme, the weaker, less-talented brother, suffers him silently until the end, where he finally loses his grip.I was surprised to see Rooney in such a devastating performance. It makes "Mr. Saturday Night" look like a film-strip.