This morning finds me in an ever-worsening funk of several days standing. Though there are about a half dozen notable show biz professionals born on January 23 I might conceivably add to our annals alongside ones I’ve already done, such as Ernie Kovacs, Franklin Pangborn, Raymond Griffith, Ralph Graves, Wallace Lupino, Coquelin, Randolph Scott, Bob Steele, Django Reinhardt, and about a dozen others — I find that I am having trouble whipping up enthusiasm to do so. Perhaps a little later. Meanwhile, I can’t imagine you’ll regret my solution. Since, it’s Kovacs’ birthday, I decided to drill a little deeper into his very last project, one that ought to be the stuff of legend, but remains very obscure. The project was Medicine Man (1962), a sit-com, in which he co-starred with none other than Buster Keaton.
That’s right! The man who has been called television comedy’s greatest genius actually teamed up with the man who has been called movie comedy’s greatest genius. For classic comedy lovers, this is the equivalent of matter meeting anti-matter. The universe should have exploded when this happened. The reasons for Medicine Man‘s failure to light up the world are multiple. Sadly, Kovacs died in his famous car accident mere hours after the pilot episode was shot. Secondly, the pilot never aired. And thirdly, the pilot proved to be less than the sum of its parts.
But there is every reason in the world to believe that had Kovacs lived, and the show been picked up, it would have developed into something extraordinarily special. As the title suggests, the premise was that Kovacs was a travelling snake oil salesman and con artist in the old west, operating a modest medicine show of the type I have described here and here. Keaton played his Native American sidekick, comically named “Junior” (he was 67 at the time), something similar to his portrayal of Lonesome Polecat in the 1940 film Li’l Abner. This was redface minstrelsy of course — we never said the show was progressive. The setting, and the style of comedy, both prefigure later sit-com efforts like F Troop and Dusty’s Trail. Like those shows, it depends very heavily on a laugh track.
I was perhaps too hard on this show in an earlier post when I called it a “stinkeroo”. Many’s the television pilot that seems unpromising but later blossoms, and with the talent involved here, that would almost certainly have been the case with the Medicine Man. I refer not only to Kovacs and Keaton. Director Charles Barton was responsible for several comedy classics starring Abbott and Costello, Ma and Pa Kettle, the Five Little Peppers, etc, Disney’s Toby Tyler or 10 Weeks With a Circus (1960), as well as nearly 100 episodes of Dennis the Menace etc. Jay Sommers co-wrote nearly 100 episodes of Ozzie and Harriet and had even written for The Buster Keaton Show. Both he and his partner on the show Joe Bigelow had written for Red Skelton. Bigelow had also written for Jackie Gleason, Jerry Colonna, and others. Right after Medicine Man wrapped, the three men collaborated on Grindl, Imogene Coca’s short-lived sitcom.
The supporting cast included the knockout ingenue Valerie Allen, daughter of Ziegfeld Girl Valerie Raemier and Palace vaudeville booker Edgar Allen, famous for giving comedian Fred Allen the last of his many stage names, the one that finally stuck. The cast also included character Joe Higgins, who made his career playing sheriffs; Josip Elic, who later played bit parts in Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Mel Brooks’ The Producers, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; Richard Devon, a veteran of many westerns who later went on to The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze; Alan Hewitt, who later played the Dean in The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes; Charles Tannen (son of Julius Tannen); and child actor Kevin Brodie, around whom the pilot episode revolved (he gets a pony).
Keaton’s “How, Ugh” schtick has dated badly, but he would soon go on to a new phase of revival that included several AIP beach party movies and the screen version of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. As for the ill-fated Kovacs, he was always at his best in broad sketch comedy. In Medicine Man, as in most of the films he appeared in, he seems too restrained and inhibited. The character of Doc Crookshank is not unlike the one he played in North to Alaska (1960) with John Wayne and Capucine. In both cases, you want Ernie to cut loose a bit more, to give the role a bit more blarney and bluster, to seem at once more charming and performative but also more shifty and shady. Perhaps the show would have found its legs as it went on. I especially think it inevitable that both Kovacs and Keaton would have thought of gags as the show progressed, maybe even egged each other on. If they had been permitted to do that, to invest the show with slapstick business, and crazy props and contraptions of the sort that both guys were famous for, Medicine Man might have evolved into something special, maybe even classic. There was also ample opportunity for variety business: musical numbers, magic acts, the works!
If you’d like to check out the pilot and judge for your self, you can find it in the archive of the Paley Center, where I first watched it about 20 years ago, or get The Ernie Kovacs Collection, Volume 2.
For more on show business history, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, for more on classic comedy please check out my book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.