Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg (2009)

Film Perfection

A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

If you liked "Good Night and Good Luck," one of the most under-appreciated movies of the last few years, you will also enjoy this movie, which is being marketed the wrong way and will probably miss its most potentially appreciative audience.Unlike GNAGL, this is a documentary. It raises a lot of fascinating questions that it does not pursue, and that can get frustrating at times. Why, since it had been such a hit - and it was - on radio in the 1930s was the radio show canceled in 1946? What reasons did CBS give for not wanting to pick up the TV program that Gertrude Berg developed out of it, when so many early TV programs were in fact continuations of popular radio programs? A lot of the 50+ year old recollections of people who heard the radio program or saw the TV program don't ring true, and are really a misleading waste of time. Several of those people remark, for example, that "no one saw the Goldbergs as Jewish, but just as a family," yet Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who I believe is one of those who says something to that effect, also recounts that on her first day on the Surpreme Court, Thurgood Marshall addressed her as Mrs. Goldberg. Obviously, American audiences viewed the Goldbergs as not just any American family, but as a Jewish family.On the other hand, a fair amount is made of the originality of portraying a Jewish family on the radio (and then TV). This is completely out of context, and again very misleading. Most of the big figures in 1930s radio and early television were Jewish - Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Fred Allen, Burns and Allen, etc. - and on radio there was Fanny Brice. How was "The Goldbergs" different from those programs?At one point the issue is raised of whether the program presented Jews as negative stereotypes. This is hastily dismissed with a remark that unlike Amos and Andy, who on radio had originally been acted by two white men, Berg chose only Jewish (the exact word is Yiddish) actors to take roles in her show. But that doesn't prove that the characters weren't negative stereotypes, as Amos and Andy continued to be when it moved to TV and was played by Black comedians. That line also gets forgotten when it is explained that for TV Berg picked a gentile to play the part of her son, a fascinating issue that gets no development.There are also simple factual errors. When the narrative gets to the beginning of "The Goldbergs" on radio, it is stated that there were two radio networks: ABC and CBS. There were, in fact, two radio networks then, but they were CBS and NBC. ABC was not sprung off NBC until World War II. There are other historical errors as well.All of the foregoing is negative commentary, I realize. Please do not read it as saying that I did not enjoy the movie, however. Quite to the contrary, I was fascinated by every moment of it. Berg turns out to have been a very intelligent, fascinating workaholic, and is presented as interesting enough by this movie that you want to know a LOT more about her and how she was viewed during her time.Anyone with an interest in the blacklisting of the McCarthy era and the beginnings of network radio and television will find this movie fascinating, as I did, and I heartily recommend it. But it leaves you, or at least me, wanting to know so much more. I can only hope this leads to a new interest in Gertrude Berg and the shows she created, so that we can get answers to some of those questions.

History is replete with countless stories of exceptional individuals. Unfortunately, when people discuss famous women, African Americans, Hispanics, ,etc. they tend to lean towards those individuals who are better known. Every so often there is the exception, the telling of those not remembered or forgotten, this documentary being one of them. Going into the theater I carried with me only the knowledge of who Getrude Berg was. I came out with a deep appreciation of what she accomplished in her life as a writer of 12,000 scripts; first lady of television, etc. and her overall impact. I was impressed especially at her work on behalf of her costar Phillip Loeb during the Communist witchhunts of the 1950s. This is an exceptional documentary and worth taking the time to see.

Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg is American pop history with a twist. Gertrude Berg was a radio and television pioneer who created a persona, the sort of immigrant Mamma a Greek woman could connect with, though the family of her "Molly Goldberg" character (she wrote and acted the part) was Jewish and came from Eastern Europe. In the bland Fifites "Leave It to Beaver" era, Berg created a counter-image that was urban and ethnic. Documentary filmmaker Kempner made a 1988 film about Hank Greenberg. As she tells it, Gertrude Berg created the sit-com, a field ultimately dominated by Lucille Ball, but only when "Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg" faded due to political pressures. So Jewish ethnicity paved the way for WASP conventionality.But Gertrude Berg's creation was a pop, bland (and middle-class) creation too, though this generally upbeat documentary doesn't analyze it much, except to point out that the TV show's final version, when the Goldbergs make it financially and resultantly move to the suburbs, lost the show's original spark. We don't get a very clear idea of what episodes of "Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg" were like from the film, except to experience Berg's personal warmth, sweet smile, melodious voice, and ample bosom. The emphasis of clips shown is on gestures and brief interactions rather than plot-lines.Because it relies on the visuals from old TV shows rather than (perhaps rare?) radio recordings (which may not even exist), it's not much emphasized that Molly Goldberg on radio actually went all the way back to 1929 (Gertrude Berg was born in 1998 and died in 1966). It's claimed that she did the first effective radio advertising, writing her own ads, notably for Sanka coffee. She also sold War Bonds. Her creation throughout its long run boldly provided, in an age of anti-Semitism, a relatively realistic and respectful, if gently comic, version of Jewish New York immigrant life shipped out to be consumed in the American heartland. What effect this had on Middle American thinking is not chronicled, though Ms. Berg's biographer, interestingly, is a young southern WASP type, Glenn D. Smith, who provides much detail of the life. His book is called "Something on My Own": Gertrude Berg and American Broadcasting, 1929-1956. The radio show, also interestingly, was originally called "The Rise of the Goldbergs." What is clear is that out-the-window air-shaft shouted "Yoo hoos" (the way of calling out to people, now old-fashioned) represent the interconnectedness of Brooklyn apartment dwellers in those days who hung out their windows and visited with one another on a day-to-day basis. Molly is always in an apron and always cooking. Yet women in the film remember her as a "feminist" figure because she was strong.The idyllic state of a Jewish family included in pop mainstream American Fifties (and earlier) culture was to hit a terrible snag when McCarthy ad the Red Baiting era came along. Philip Loeb, who played Mr. Goldberg, was a media union activist involved in multiple liberal causes. He was blacklisted and CBS shut down the show when Gertrude Berg refused to replace him. (She later relented and the series got two other Mr. Goldbergs.) The show had a more than year-long hiatus. Loeb committed suicide, and Zero Mostel (himself a blacklisted artist) played a version of the destroyed Loeb in Martin Ritt's 1976 movie, The Front. Neither Gertrude Berg nor Molly Goldberg was quite the same after this. And as a famous Edward R. Murrow "Person to Person" TV interview stresses, the difference between Molly and Gertrude was hard to draw since the writer/actress spent more hours of the day being Molly than being Gertrude Berg. And her real name was Tillie Edelstein and her family and close friends always called her Tillie. The lovable Jewish earth mother's own mother, depressed from the death of a younger son, was cold and withdrawn: "Molly" was a hopeful fantasy (though late-Fifties TV was rich in some high culture and realism such as Playhouse 90, which gave live presentations of versions of Hemingway and Faulkner, William Saroyan and Clifford Odets).During the Mrs. Goldberg hiatus time Lucille Ball began "I Love Lucy" and Ball took over the reigning iconic-TV-woman role. When "Mrs. Goldberg" folded Berg triumphed on Broadway in A Majority of One (1959), a comedy about a Jewish widow involved in a romance with a Japanese millionaire. She, director Dore Schary, and co-star Sir Cedric Hardwicke swept the Tony Awards. Berg was devastated when Rosalind Russell was chosen over her for the movie version, and she was reduced to touring plays and summer stock thereafter and ultimately died, the narrator says, of overwork.This affectionate and nostalgic documentary is full of information but could use more analysis. Some of its talking heads, which include Supreme Court Jutice Ruth Bader Ginzberg, indulge in numbingly vague and euphoric recall. Somehow both the magic and the shortcomings of "Molly Goldberg" and Gertrude Berg don't emerge as clearly as they might.

The story of Gertrude Berg, creator of Molly Goldberg, is told in a slow-starting but ultimately affecting documentary that concentrates on her professional life as the better story -- when you write the script for a five-times weekly radio show for twenty years, star in it twice a day and follow that up with half a dozen years in a weekly situation comedy for television, you don't have that much time for a personal life.But the story of Miss Berg and her ultimate failure-by-success -- it reached the point where instead of Molly Goldberg being a recognizable expression of the American spirit, she became too old-fashionedly Jewish, viewed as caricature -- is only half the story. Within the context of her life is told the tale of her television husband, played brilliantly by Phillip Loeb, smeared by the Blacklist, forced off the air and ultimately driven to suicide. That's the real heart-breaker of this movie.The clips with which fill this movie seem to have been deliberately chosen to be grainy and scratchy, perhaps because that would show their age. Instead they wind up being annoying in their choices. That, however, is a rather small complaint and, should you see this on television instead of in a theater -- as I did -- you probably will not notice.