Burns and Allen were an American comedy duo consisting of George Burns and his wife Gracie Allen. They worked together as a successful comedy team that entertained vaudeville, film, radio, and television audiences for over forty years.
The duo met in 1922 and married in 1926. Burns played the straight man and Allen played a silly, addle-headed woman whose convoluted logic Burns was often ill-equipped to challenge. The duo starred in a number of films, including Lambchops (1929), The Big Broadcast (1932) its two sequels (1935 and 1936), and A Damsel in Distress (1937). Their 30-minute radio show debuted in September 1934 as The Adventures of Gracie, whose title changed to The Burns and Allen Show in 1936; the series ran, moving back and forth between NBC and CBS, until May 1950. After their radio show's cancellation, Burns and Allen reemerged on television with a popular sitcom, which ran from 1950 to 1958.
Burns and Allen's radio show was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 1994. Their TV series received a total of 11 Primetime Emmy Award nominations, and its episode "Columbia Pictures Doing Burns and Allen Story" was ranked No. 56 on TV Guides 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time in 1997. They were inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1988.
Vaudeville
thumb|upright|Burns and Allen on the vaudeville circuit in 1924
Burns and Allen met in 1922 and first performed together at the Hill Street Theatre in Newark, New Jersey and continued in small-town vaudeville theaters. They married in Cleveland on January 7, 1926 and moved up a notch when they signed with the Keith-Albee-Orpheum circuit in 1927.
Burns wrote most of the material and played the straight man. Allen played a silly, addle-headed woman, a role often attributed to the Dumb Dora stereotype common in early 20th-century vaudeville comedy. The team had played the opposite roles until they noticed that the audience was laughing at Allen's straight lines, so they made the change. In later years, each attributed their own success to the other.
The Burns and Allen team was not an overnight sensation. Burns said, "We were a good man-and-woman act, but we were not headliners or stars or featured attractions. We were on the bill with them. There would be a star or two stars and a featured attraction, and then we would come—fourth billing in an eight-act show." Their career changed direction when they appeared in their first film.
Motion pictures
In the early days of talking pictures, the studios eagerly hired actors who knew how to deliver dialogue or songs. The most prolific of these studios was Warner Bros., whose Vitaphone Varieties shorts captured vaudeville headliners of the 1920s on film.
Burns and Allen, who had earned a reputation as a reliable "disappointment act" (one that could substitute for another performer on a moment's notice), were last-minute replacements for Fred Allen in Lambchops (1929), in which they performed their patter-and-song routine.
thumb|thumbtime=8:00|Burns and Allen in Fit to Be Tied, a 1930 short film made under [[Paramount Pictures]]
Paramount Pictures used its East Coast studio to film New York-based stage and vaudeville stars. Eddie Cantor, Fred Allen, Ethel Merman and Smith and Dale were among the top acts seen in Paramount shorts. Burns and Allen joined the Paramount roster in 1930 and appeared in a string of one-reel comedies through 1933, usually written by Burns and featuring future Hollywood character actors such as Barton MacLane and Chester Clute.
In 1932, Paramount produced an all-star musical comedy, The Big Broadcast, featuring the nation's hottest radio personalities, including Burns and Allen. Their favorably received performance was followed by guest appearances in Paramount features through 1937. Most of these used the Big Broadcast formula of an all-star comedy cast. In 1935 they also starred in a pair of low-budget features, Here Comes Cookie and Love in Bloom.
At RKO, Fred Astaire succeeded in his efforts to make a musical feature without Ginger Rogers, and the studio borrowed Burns and Allen from Paramount for the 1937 film A Damsel in Distress. Their names appeared with Astaire's before the title. Under contract to RKO, the young Joan Fontaine was assigned as Astaire's romantic interest, but when she proved to be an inadequate dance partner, Astaire performed most of his dancing with Burns and Allen. The trio's comic dance in the film's funhouse sequence earned an Academy Award for choreographer Hermes Pan. Burns suggested a dance number that employed whiskbrooms as props, used in vaudeville by a duo called Evans and Evans. He bought the idea and auditioned the routine for Astaire, with Allen and the surviving member of the Evans and Evans team.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cast Burns and Allen in its Eleanor Powell musical Honolulu (1939). This was their last film as a team; Allen appeared in two subsequent films on her own, but Burns and Allen did not return to the cameras until their television series in 1950.
When Burns was 79, he had a sudden career revival as an amiable, beloved and unusually active comedic elder statesman in the 1975 film The Sunshine Boys, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. In 1977, his starring role in Oh, God!, along with the former film, permanently secured his career resurgence. At the age of 80, Burns was the oldest Oscar winner in the history of the Academy Awards, a record that would remain until Jessica Tandy won an Oscar for Driving Miss Daisy in 1989. Burns, who became a centenarian in 1996, continued to work until just weeks before his death of cardiac arrest on March 19, 1996, at his home in Beverly Hills.
Filmography
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Year
! Title
! Format
! class="unsortable" | Notes
|-
| 1929
| Lambchops
| rowspan=8 | Short
| Added to the National Film Registry in 1999. DVD release 2007
|-
|1931
|Once Over, Light
| Directed by Howard Bretherton
|-
|1931
|100% Service
| Directed by Ray Cozine.
|-
|1931
|Oh, My Operation
| Directed by Ray Cozine
|-
|February 15, 1932 – September 13, 1933
|The Robert Burns Panatela Program
| CBS, 30 minutes<br>Burns and Allen join Guy Lombardo as featured performers<br>Becomes The White Owl Program May 31, 1933
|-
|December 20, 1933 – June 13, 1934
|The White Owl Program
| CBS, 30 minutes<br>Burns and Allen headline their own show
|-
|April 12, 1937 – August 1, 1938
|The Burns and Allen Show
| NBC, 30 minutes
|-
|September 30, 1938 – June 23, 1939
|The Burns and Allen Show
| CBS, 30 minutes
|-
|October 4, 1939 – June 26, 1940
|The Burns and Allen Show
| CBS, 30 minutes
|-
|July 1, 1940 – March 24, 1941
|The Burns and Allen Show
| NBC, 30 minutes
|-
|October 6, 1942 – June 29, 1943
|The Burns and Allen Show
| CBS, 30 minutes
|-
|September 5, 1946 – May 29, 1947
|The Burns and Allen Show
| NBC, 30 minutes
Television
In 1950, Burns and Allen transitioned to television with The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show. An immediate success, the half-hour situation comedy was broadcast from October 12, 1950 to September 22, 1958 on CBS. The show was initially staged live in New York and presented every other week. In the fall of 1952, it became a weekly series filmed on the West Coast. With 291 episodes, the show had a long network run through 1958 and continued in syndicated reruns for years.
The sets were designed to resemble the couple's real-life residence. An establishing shot of the actual house on Maple Drive in Beverly Hills, California was often used. Although extensively remodeled, the house still exists, and Burns lived there until his death in 1996 at the age of 100.
The format had Burns watching all of the action (standing outside the proscenium arch in early live episodes and watching the show on TV in his study toward the end of the series) and breaking the fourth wall by commenting upon it to the viewers.
During the course of the eight-year run, the TV show had remarkable consistency in its cast and crew. The episodes were produced and directed by Ralph Levy (1950–53); Frederick de Cordova, later director of NBC's The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1953–56); and Rod Amateau (1956–58). The original writing staff consisted of Sid Dorfman, Harvey Helm, Paul Henning and William Burns (George's brother).
Bea Benaderet was maintained from the radio show, portraying neighbor Blanche Morton. Her husband Harry Morton was portrayed by Hal March (October–December 1950), John Brown (January–June 1951), Fred Clark (until 1953) and finally Larry Keating. Also appearing in the TV series were Burns and Allen's two adopted children, Ronnie and Sandra. Ronnie became a near-regular on the show, playing himself but cast as a young drama student who tended to look askance at his parents' comedy style. Sandra declined a regular role, although she appeared in a few episodes, usually as a secretary or the voice of a telephone operator.
In March 1953, The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show joined I Love Lucy as part of the CBS Monday night prime-time lineup. As a result, the show entered the top 30 television programs in the Nielsen ratings ranking at No. 20. For the 1954–1955 season, it ranked No. 26, and for both the 1955–56 and 1956–57 seasons it was No. 28. With I Love Lucy ending its six-year run on CBS in the spring of 1957, the television network wanted to renew the Burns and Allen series, but by this time Allen had grown tired of the grind. Nevertheless, Burns committed both of them for another year, which would be their eighth—and last—on television.
Burns and Allen filmed their last show on June 4, 1958. The filming was an emotional experience, although nothing was said about it being Allen's last performance. At the wrap party, Allen took a sip of champagne , hugged her friend and co-star Benaderet and said "Okay, that's it." After one last look around the set, she said, "And thank you very much, everyone."
In 1997, the 1954 episode "Columbia Pictures Doing Burns and Allen Story" was ranked No. 56 on TV Guide's 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time.
McCadden Productions
The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show was produced under the banner of McCadden Productions, a company run by Burns that he named after the street on which his brother William lived. While the series was in production, Burns began producing other television shows and commercials. McCadden Productions employed more than 300 people and produced series including Mister Ed, The Bob Cummings Show, The People's Choice, The Marie Wilson Show and Panic!.
The computerized voices on San Francisco's BART PA system are officially named "George and Gracie" in their honor. Similarly, the pair of whales featured in the film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home are named George and Gracie.
Sources and further reading
References
External links
Radio
- Burns and Allen on Old Time Radio Outlaws
Television