Back in 1951, Phil Silvers wowed Broadway with Top Banana, a musical about a high-pressure TV comedian who was basically Milton Berle, rolled into one. Berle, in fact, did a number of things to promote it, including bogus threats to sue for slander. Since he was also one of the backers of the show, he later remarked that it was never so profitable to be publicly ridiculed. Since then, the show has rarely been produced, perhaps because stars like Phil Silvers are in short supply. Fortunately (sort of), his performance was preserved (sort of) on film.
In 1953, producer Albert Zugsmith approached the producers of Top Banana about knocking out a quickie film to ride the then-current mania for 3-D movies. Zugsmith was a producer of cheap, grade-Z motion pictures (you can read more about him in Part 2 of our interview with Irwin Hasen, here) and he had a low-budget idea. Rather than really make a movie, he just wanted to stick a camera in front of the stage production, film the whole thing in three days and rush it into theaters. Apparently, they didn't rush enough: 3-D was dying out and the thing was scarcely released in that format. But it was filmed that way so the image looks muddy and strange in its conversion to 2-D. The end product is sloppy and full of mistakes, and the cast often doesn't seem to know how to time the delivery of material that they usually performed with an audience out front howling in laughter.
If you want to see what Mr. Silvers later described as a "totally surreal film experience," it runs on Turner Classic Movies, the evening of October 27. Here and there, you get a sense of how wonderful this show must have been on Broadway…but only here and there.