Word: bazooka
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Taken from a story by Irvin Cobb which had been designed as a vehicle for Will Rogers, sold by M. G. M. to Paramount after Rogers' death, Our Leading Citizen was reshaped by Producer George Arthur not only as a vehicle for bazooka-playing Bob Burns but as a Hollywood version of Broadway's The American Way. Despite the skepticism of Hollywood leftists, cutters left intact most of its supposedly inflammatory scenes, including a pitched battle between strikers and strikebreakers bloodier than any yet seen in the newsreels, a citizens' meeting where a cynical employer (Gene Lockhart...
Born. To Robin ("Bazooka Bob") Burns, homely, hayseed film clown, and Harriet Foster Burns, his second wife; their second (his third) child, an 8½-lb. boy. Name: Robin Burns Jr. Christening gift: a baby bazooka...
...same school. Robin Burns is a 42-year-old Arkansan who grew up in Van Buren, Ark., became an itinerant laborer, vaudeville comedian and hobo until he joined the Marines in 1917. Most noteworthy achievement of Robin Burns up to this time was the invention and mastery of the bazooka, a homemade horn composed of two gas pipes and a whiskey funnel, which General Pershing once borrowed and tried to play in a Paris restaurant...
After the War, Burns and bazooka toured in smalltime vaudeville for ten years, rose to the height of running his own carnival show. In 1930, when vaudeville collapsed, Burns tried radio and pictures. Finally Rudy Vallee gave him a part on his program. Burns was a hit and his income thereafter zoomed. As estimated for tax collectors, it was $1,500 in 1934, $9,000 in 1935, $100,000 in 1936 and $400,000 last year, when he not only played second leads in Paramount pictures but shared top honors with Bing Crosby on Kraft Cheese broadcasts and wrote syndicated...
...Kraft Music Hall program has the reputation of going to considerable lengths for a gag. Not long ago its headliner Baritone Harry Lillis ("Bing") Crosby, observed, after a bazooka solo by Bob Burns, that the rendition had been "as dirty as the inside of a Russian horse doctor's valise." In somewhat the same free-style spirit, last week Kraft Announcer Ken Carpenter ad libbed at the end of the program during which Mr. Crosby had played Beautiful Ohio on a saw, that "Cuddle Up a Little Closer is from The Three Twins and Beautiful Ohio from hunger...