The New Pictures

The Great American Broadcast (20th Century-Fox) is Darryl Zanuck's conception of how radio broadcasting was born. According to his version, it was sired by Jack Oakie in a thunderstorm on the roof of an abandoned sausage factory on the Jersey flats, with an assist from a barnstorming aviator (John Payne) and a nightclub singer (Alice Faye).

This unhistorical observation serves well enough for a peg on which to hang another musical from the Zanuck cradle of history. Its pattern is familiar; the three principals rehearsed it almost to the letter in Tin Pan Alley (TIME, Dec. 9). But this time it curdles.

Best sequence in Broadcast is almost straight history. Yellowed newsreel shots of the Dempsey-Willard prize fight are used for the apocryphal ringside broadcast that brings fame and riches to Oakie's cat-whisker station. They are a jolting reminder of the scorching Fourth of July in 1919 when the crop-haired Manassa Mauler, then 24, carved a world's heavyweight championship out of mountainous Jess Willard in just three bitter rounds. They are the best refashioning of history ever contrived by Producer Zanuck.

Never averse to stealing a scene (or a hot stove, some say), Comic Oakie, who is beginning to look more and more like an American Indian, easily walks off with The Great American Broadcast. That is no feat. One tuneful ditty, I Take to You, some tasty hoofing by the Nicholas Brothers (colored), adequate vocalizing from blonde, lymphatic Alice Faye, are no match for the rustic mugging of an Oakie. Adept at using his nimble hands to take the action away from another cinemactor, he has a field day fiddling with the radio dials that clutter up The G.A.B.

About five years ago Jack Oakie's gusty, ebullient capacity for drinking with the boys at local bars got him into trouble at the Paramount lot. Studio executives hit on a scheme for bringing him to work bright and shining. They hired men to tail him nightly, bet him $100 he wouldn't be in shape to work the next day. Never a loose man with a dollar, the comedian couldn't refuse the tempting increment. For a while the ruse worked. But when he returned from a European trip with his wife a few years later, there was no work for him in Hollywood. That was old stuff to Trooper Oakie.

Once long before, he lived on dog biscuits rather than quit vaudeville. A raw bumpkin out of Sedalia, Mo., where he was born in 1903 and christened Lewis Delaney Offield, he went to Manhattan and got his first job--phone clerk in the New York Stock Exchange. It still gives him a solid pleasure to revisit the Exchange from time to time and gaze upon his former employment from the dignified visitors' gallery.

A small part in an amateur theatrical separated the phone clerk from commerce.Told he ought to be on Broadway, he proved it by becoming a chorus boy in George M. Cohan's Little Nellie Kelly in 1922. He changed his name to Oakie* and tacked on the Jack because it seemed to fit. A meeting with Director Wesley Ruggles in 1927 led straight to his first picture, Finders Keepers.

When Charlie Chaplin signed the chastened comic for the part of "II Duce" in The Great Dictator, he had gone almost two years without making a picture. He had also become mayor of West Van Nuys, Calif., a teetotaler, and a fancier of rare Afghan hounds. His crackerjack performance for Chaplin brought him so many offers from producers who had forgotten about him that he can now, he figures, "ask for money when I fall off a chair." Says he, of his lengthy banishment: "Hell, I'm not bitter, but I'm a lot more cunning."

Corny as a back-country bumpkin, Oakie has deftly turned his corniness into a salable commodity. Good comics with a style of their own have always been scarce. Oakie's knavish mugging and air of robust well-being have carried him through more than 60 pictures (Fast Company, Once in a Lifetime, If I Had a Million, etc.), some of which he alone saved at the box office.

Reference to his reputed propensity for snatching scenes (mainly by ogling, leering, picking lint from someone's coat, etc.) is likely to bring a look of pained surprise to the sun-kissed Oakie visage. Says he, weighing his words: "There's no such thing as scene-stealing. It's just that the other actors get careless."

*It meant the same thing to the comic, who had attended school in Muskogee, Okla., that it meant to Author John Steinbeck: an intinerant Oklahoman.

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