CSotD: Barney & Clyde, starring neither of them
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There are several strips I keep reading waiting for them to find their legs. "Barney & Clyde" has really been wandering from piller to post since it launched a year and a half ago, but, in the last few months, it has begun to gain stability and to provide some laughs, albeit pretty far removed from its original premise.
It's written by Gene and Dan Weingarten and drawn by David Clark and I picture the three of them crowded around the drawing board all talking and working on it at once, but I suspect that isn't how things go.
The strip started out as a sort of "Sullivan's Travels" or "My Man Godfrey" concept, with the ultrarich character, Barney, and the homeless man, Clyde, striking up an unlikely friendship.
If you've watched those classics lately, you may realize that Godfrey hasn't aged at all well, and that, while Sullivan's Travels remains a very well-made movie, it's quite dated — very much worth seeing, but a little stylized and self-conscious in places.
If you were to remake either of them today, you'd have to add quite a bit of edge, and Barney & Clyde has a pretty gentle tone. The premise just didn't quite gel.
If you go back to those films, however, you can pick up a few things. I don't know if the team had them in mind at all, but the parallels remain nonetheless.
The main reason Godfrey hasn't aged well is that Carol Lombard's spoiled rich girl is too spoiled, too rich and too unlikeable, and it is not only unclear why William Powell's Godfrey would want to bother trying to straighten her out, it is not credible.
But what the movie has is a script with bite, and many of the most sarcastic lines are not given to the elegant Godfrey but to the long-suffering rich man, played with gravelly distinction by Eugene Pallette, including one of my favorite quotes: "All you need to start an asylum is an empty room and the right kind of people."
Meanwhile, though Sullivan has some predictable characters and stock gags, it also has — against all expectations — a disarming performance by Veronica Lake as a genuinely charming waif. Combined with the equally unexpected drama of Sullivan's loss of control over his contrived journey to get a look at poverty, it turns what could have been a ho-hum sermonette into a true classic of the form.
What has been happening with Barney & Clyde has been a moving away from the rich man/poor man premise and a dividing into strips where Clyde makes comments about the nature of life and suchlike, and strips where Barney attempts to deal with his family, which includes a trophy wife and some bright, cynical kids. Even without sarcasm, and granted it's hardly a unique character, the long-suffering pater familias bit is working well for this strip.
Note, however, that today's strip is entirely centered on the kids, without any reference to the title characters. That's not a bad thing, because it's not a bad gag. It's better to be funny than to struggle to live up to a predetermined concept of what your strip is about.
Anyway, Barney Pillsbury is still around a lot more than Barney Google. He should be grateful. As for Clyde, he needs some additional tampering and tempering. Poverty isn't funny, and they may need to sharpen his tongue a little more, at least until the economy improves.
The strip will never feature Eugene Pallette's bite or the drama of Sullivan's imprisonment, though some of the female characters suggest a hint of Lake's cheerful go-for-it spirit.
But it is beginning to carve out an identity which suggests that its creators are through the stage of trying to come up with gags that fit the premise and have started to write for the characters and to come with observations like today's, which not only cracked me up, but which will continue to accent the vapid horror of that part of Jeopardy! for some time to come.
And Eugene Pallette was not only a great Alexander Bullock in "My Man Godfrey" and a terrific Friar Tuck in "The Adventures of Robin Hood," but he certainly captured the spirit of the Sunday funnies fan in this clip from Ernst Lubitsch's "Heaven Can Wait."
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