Word: bananas
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
...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...
...Edward Alperson; 20th Century-Fox). The difference between stage and screen has been described as "the difference between a kiss on the lips and a kiss over the telephone." By this definition, it takes some vigorously imaginative cinematography to make a movie out of a stage show. In Top Banana (TIME, Feb. 22), and again in New Faces, the movie public is being offered Broadway revues, adapted to the screen with little more imagination than it takes to set up a camera unit in the front-row balcony. Both photoplays are literally photographed plays (most of New Faces was shot...
...hospitals, roads, docks, industrialization. He did succeed in raising wages for black workers. But all he really built was a rainbow-painted fairgrounds for a pathetically unsuccessful 1950 International Exposition. He crippled the U.S.-owned Standard Fruit Co.'s Haitian operation, then found that the country had no banana business left. Meanwhile, official corruption got out of hand; a few insiders got rich quick; word got around that $10 million of the $26 million spent for the fair had never been accounted for. The big wheel that turns once and flips out a Haitian President began to move...
...Banana (Harry Popkin; United Artists) brings Comedian Phil Silvers to the screen in a literal photograph of his long-running Broadway burlesque of burlesque. The sad truth seems to be that burlesque is a delicate flower: it needs a little dirt to grow in, but the censors, in this case, have carted away what little there was. Nonetheless, Comedian Silvers manures his garden energetically with the few faintly smelly old stories he has left (She: "I'd do anything to get into television." He: "It's not that easy...