TV Guide: Gracie Allen

Video: Man With Bogart's Face, The

Video Detective — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 00:39:54 -0400

In The Man With Bogart's Face, an affectionate send-up of the Bogart detective films of the 1940s, Robert Sacchi plays a man who idolizes Humphrey Bogart so much he has his features altered to look exactly like his idol. He then opens up a detective agency under the name Sam Marlowe (an amalgam of the names of Bogart's characters from The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep). Sam hires the Duchess (Misty Rowe) as his secretary (She looked like Marilyn Monroe and made about as much sense as Gracie Allen) and Sam Marlowe, Private Eye is in business. Sam gets a meager response until a shooting puts his picture in the paper and business starts to flourish. Particularly attracted to Marlowe's services are a collection of characters -- Gena (Michelle Phillips), an attractive Gene Tierney type; Commodore Anastas (Victor Buono), a Greek shipping tycoon and Sidney Greenstreet lookalike; and the mysterious Mr. Zebra (Herbert Lom doing a Peter Lorre imitation). They are all trying to find the famous Eyes of Alexander -- a

Video: George Burns In Concert

Video Detective — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 00:00:16 -0400

I'm happy to be here. At my age I'm happy to be anywhere. Thus did octogenarian George Burns launch virtually every one of his personal appearances of the 1970s and 1980s. While many of Burns' jokes concern his age, the fact that the man was literally a product of another century never intrudes upon the proceedings. Good humor never really dates, nor does George Burns, despite his reminiscences of his years with his late wife/partner Gracie Allen and his fondness for singing songs like I'll be Waiting for You Bill at the Top of San Juan Hill. When George Burns in Concert was taped in 1982, George still had another full decades' worth of SRO appearances before him. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide.

Video: International House

Video Detective — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 23:40:19 -0400

Hollywood responded to the exigencies of the Depression with such glorious nonsense as International House. The plot is motivated by a revolutionary television device called the Radioscope, which its Chinese inventor (Edmund Breese) is offering to the highest bidder. All interested parties are obliged to converge at International House, an ultra-modern hotel in the bustling Chinese community of Wu Hu. Among those parties is American envoy Stu Erwin, Russian general Bela Lugosi (a hilarious, pratfalling performance), the general's ex-wife Peggy Hopkins Joyce (a much-married showgirl of the era, who like Zsa Zsa Gabor was famous for being famous), and that celebrated aviator Professor Quail, better known as W.C. Fields. The lunacy begins even before Fields arrives, thanks to the antics of the hotel's doctor George Burns and nurse Gracie Allen. When Erwin comes down with the measles (he is always struck down by a childhood disease whenever he's about to marry his fiancee Sari Maritza), the hotel is quarantined.

Video: George Burns and Gracie Allen

Amazon Video on Demand — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 00:38:37 -0400

George and Gracie were two of America's best loved vaudevillians and movie stars who capped dazzling careers by making it big in television. After Gracie's death, the laconic cigar-chomping George becomes an American showbiz institution.