by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I filled out our evening with an intriguing item
from the James Dean: The Lost Television Legacy boxed set: a 1951 episode of The Stu Erwin Show, also known as Trouble with Father. Stu Erwin, a veteran of interesting early-1930’s
movies like The Big Broadcast
with Bing Crosby, International House with W. C. Fields and Pigskin Parade with Judy Garland (a formidable list of talents his
presence here puts one degree of separation from James Dean!), apparently saw
the huge success other showbiz couples were having on TV — particularly The
George Burns-Gracie Allen Show and, of
course, I Love Lucy — and decided
he wanted some of that for himself, so he dragooned his real-life wife June
Collyer Erwin into a family sitcom in which Stu would play a high-school
principal (though there’s no intimation in this particular episode of what he does for a living) and the focus would be on his
home life with his wife and their two daughters, Jackie (billed here as Sheila
James but later known as openly Lesbian California legislator Sheila Kuehl — so
the Bisexual James Dean wasn’t the only Queer in this cast!) and Joyce (Ann E. Todd). The episode featuring
James Dean was first aired December 7, 1951 (tenth anniversary of the Day That
Will Live in Infamy!) and was called “Jackie Knows All,” in which a series
regular identified only as “Boy with Glasses” (Teddy Infuhr) sells younger
daughter Joyce a book that’s supposed to be able to read minds. When it proves
less than successful, the boy brings over a radio with a microphone attached
through which they’re able to bug just about anybody and overhear secret
conversations. There’s also a subplot about Stu holding a piece of swampland
property that’s suddenly become valuable because the city is going to build an
airport on it and drain the swamp to make that possible, and Mr. Parsons (Emory
Parnell) and an agent named Smith want to buy the property, pay a low-ball
price for it and thus make the money on the land acquisition for the airport.
Joyce, the Boy with Glasses (who looks like he’s going to grow up to be one of
the original inventors of the personal computer) and their magical bugging
radio overhear the scheme between Parsons and Smith. They also overhear
Jackie’s boyfriend, Drexel (the almost terminally boring Martin Milner — when
we watched him in Valley of the Dolls I wondered if director Mark Robson had an assistant with a little
mirror to hold under Milner’s face and see if he was still breathing after a
particularly somnolent take from him), talking with Randy (James Dean, making a
few bucks during his first stint in L.A. before he headed to New York to attend
the Actors’ Studio and do live TV there to support himself) about how to keep a
woman’s interest in you by keeping her waiting so Jackie doesn’t find out until
the last minute that Drexel does
intend to invite her to the school dance. This show was shot on film at the old
Hal Roach studios by producer Roland Reed, and thus it doesn’t have the
technical limits of the ancient kinescopes of live TV shows of the period — but
it’s also not very interesting and would be of no moment whatsoever if Dean
weren’t in it.
