Leo Gorcey: Deluges of Eloquence that were Just Perspiring!
(())
Rare Audio Interviews & Video Film Clips with the Bowery Boys!
For a limited time you can get a FREE BONUS cutout wall graphic of LEO GORCEY and HUNTZ HALL with their perennial Bowery buddies, GABRIEL ("Gabe") DELL and BILLY ("Whitey") BENEDICT, when you order the exclusive cut, peel and stick SLIP and SACH STICK 'em UP. Click on the link below for the details -- but hurry, before this special offer PERSPIRES!...
So, who rates as the Bowery Boys' prettiest leading lady? Well, with all due respect to the considerable charms of Veola Vonn or Laurette Luez, our vote for the most comely B-Boys co-star would have to go to JOI LANSING, who appeared opposite Huntz Hall and Stanley Clements in Hot Shots (1956).
In 1941, Shadow Comics knew what evil was lurking in the hearts of men (at least the prepubescent ones that devoured their comic books!), and attempted to scratch that particular infernal itch by featuring the six original Dead End Kids in comic strip form!

One of the Bowery Boys' best entries had Sach (Huntz Hall) transforming into the mellifluous "Bowery Thrush" -- an amazing crooner who sounded like "Crosby, Jolson and Sinatra, all on one record!". (And besides the vocal similarity, his physique even rivaled the bobby-sox era Sinatra!). Little did movie patrons know that this premise was a case of art imitating life, because it seems that former Bowery Boy Bobby Jordan actually possessed a genuine singing talent! As evidence today's post at the Bowery Bijou features an actual audio recording of Bobby's post-Bowery Boy nightclub performance, in which he sings "Sweet Lorraine".
"Detour" leading man, Tom Neal, to be sure! (But to be fair, Leo was really just a comic foil; William Gargan actually functioned as Ann's leading man). Nonetheless, with the sultry Ms. Savage on tap, the road signs clearly pointed to -- if not a "Dead End" or a "Detour" -- at least some formidable "curves ahead" for Leo!
Actor Mendie Koenig holds the distinction of being one of the last surviving members of the East Side Kids! (Others in this lamentably endangered species include Johnny Duncan, with whom Mendie co-starred, and Eugene Francis, who played "Algie" in the earlier entries of the series).
Some 11 years before he made the cinematic acquaintance of a "Brooklyn Gorilla," Bela Lugosi first condescended to meet a "bowery bonehead" named Huntz Hall! In this historic 1941 encounter from "Spooks Run Wild," Bowery Boy Huntz Hall dons a cloak & skull and turns the tables on the screen's foremost vampire! Employing a respectable Lugosi vocal impersonation, Huntz proceeds to moan: "You scared the HEALTH out of me!"
Today's post affords a rare glimpse of those relentlessly black & white Bowery Boys in color! With the exception of those oddest of film oddities of the 1960's, SECOND FIDDLE TO A STEEL GUITAR (1965) and THE PHYNX (1969), this is your only chance to catch LEO GORCEY and HUNTZ HALL together in color -- and as relative youths at the beginning of their Warner Bros. tenures yet! Here LEO & HUNTZ make a brief cameo appearance in a Warners color short subject that was lensed concurrent with the filming of CRIME SCHOOL in 1938. Along with fellow Dead-Enders BILLY HALOP and BOBBY JORDAN, they can be briefly glimpsed slurping soup and terrorizing the patrons of the studio commissary with their less-than-genteel manners. Luckily for the waitresses in attendance, HUMPHREY BOGART is on hand to keep them in line!
The somber event of Bobby Jordan's funeral in 1965 is the unlikely setting for Leo Gorcey's bemused recollection of East Side Kid Ernie "Sunshine Sammy" Morrison. Ernie (erroneously referred to as "Leo" Sunshine Sammy Morrison in this interview) had departed the series after being drafted in World War II, and declined an offer to sign on later with the Bowery Boys because, in his words, he "didn't like the set-up." (One can only assume that he was referring to the diminishing roles of series regulars in favor of the increasing "Leo & Huntz Show" nature of these postwar entries; but it could have been that the financial renumerations were unappealing, or a combination of both.) In any event, Ernie prospered in an aircraft profession that saw him driving in style to Bobby Jordan's funeral, to the obvious chagrin of his fellow East Siders!
The beginning of the famous 1968 Richard Lamparski radio interview (which served as the basis for the "Whatever Became of Leo Gorcey?" book article), with Leo Gorcey as the amiable, but slightly hungover interviewee.
In our 20th post, Dead End Kids star Billy Halop returns to the microphone for a very special, candid session at the Bowery Bijou! Billy gives us the low down on why he and the other kids (with the lone exception of Gabe Dell), didn't get along, and how he found himself despising the name, "Dead End," as a middle-aged man of 48! Good stuff for all Billy and Bowery Boys fans to ponder!
For our 19th post, it's an "Oscar" ceremony -- Bowery style. Leo Gorcey casts his vote for the Best Actor and Worst Actor of the Dead End Kids! The Best Actor award is actually a tie, as it turns out, and the Worst Actor winner is somewhat surprising, considering the source! All the drama of the "Academy Awards" is on tap here today at the Bowery Bijou and, thankfully, there are no long-winded, embarassing acceptance speeches with which to contend!
Dead End Kids ringleader, Billy Halop, takes center stage in our 18th post. Here he talks (briefly) about the "message" that made the Dead End Kids features "great." Halop, of course, was the Dead End Kid who had both the acting chops and the good looks to have succeeded in a "solo" career as a sensitive "John Garfield"-type tough guy (albeit one with a voice that sounded curiously like Jerry Lewis!). Co-starring with Humphrey Bogart in You Can't Get Away With Murder, it seems like Warners Bros was grooming him with such a strategy in mind, but somehow solo stardom managed to elude Billy. More from Billy soon in future posts, so stay tuned!
Like the Three Stooges (but on a smaller scale), Leo Gorcey & Huntz Hall found themselves riding a resurgence of popularity with the syndication of the Bowery Boys films to TV in the early 1960's! As it had likewise done for the Stooges, this set the wheels in motion to exploit their "rejuvenated" careers in new film & TV projects featuring the Gorcey & Hall duo. For instance, it was around this time that there was serious discussion of making an animated Bowery Boys TV series, implementing the voices of Leo and Huntz (as had been done for the Stooges and Abbott & Costello -- likewise employing the real voices of the surving members of those comedy teams). Regrettably, this cartoon project was never realized, and Leo & Huntz were destined to work together only twice more: in 1965's "Second Fiddle To a Steel Guitar" and 1969's "The Phynx". However, in this rare mid-1960's interview, Huntz Hall seems pretty pumped about one of the great motion picture "what-ifs" of all time -- a planned Leo Gorcey/Huntz Hall collaboration called "Space Nut" to be filmed in Puerto Rico!
Move over Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. The screen's greatest romantic team, Huntz Hall and Sandra Gould, pitch woo from back in the days when love letters travelled via snailmail and not email! Sandra, who was to later play the replacement "Gladys Kravitz" on the Bewitched TV series, entices Huntz to kiss her, despite the latter's protests that it would "ruin" his reputation.
Of the six original "Broadway-to-Hollywood" Dead End Kids, Bernard Punsly seemed to "fly under the radar" a bit, and may have been the original "Background Bennie" (as Huntz Hall liked to call the various actors who later populated the gang, but were relegated to the "background" with little -- or no -- lines to speak). Punsly, it seems, just didn't have the show-biz ambitions that the others exhibited; he was the first to leave the series but, as Leo Gorcey recalls in our 13th post here at the Bowery Bijou, Bernard was to emerge as perhaps the biggest success story of the gang!
Ask a fan who their favorite Bowery Boy is, and the results are generally polarized: about half pick Leo; about half pick Huntz (while a few pick Billy "Whitey" Benedict, and --fewer still -- the likes of Eddie "Blinky" LeRoy!). But most everyone is in agreement in their universal adulation for "Louie Dumbrowsky," the sawed-off, sputtering Sweet Shop proprietor played by Leo's real-life father, Bernard Gorcey! In our 10th post, Leo pays tribute to the thespian talents of the elder Gorcey, and remarks about the tragedy of his father's untimely demise in a car accident in 1955 -- an event that sounded the "death knell" to the popular series!
To quote Leo Gorcey (or was it Norm Crosby?), one of the "extinct pleasures" of having launched into the blog-o-sphere with the Bowery Bijou is making the acquaintance (via email) of such "foist"-class subscribers as Leonard Getz. Len, it turns out, is a real author who has completed a new book about the Bowery Boys, From Broadway to the Bowery, soon to be published by the prestigious McFarland house! The following is a promotional music video of the book, put together by El Kaye. In the spirit of Len's book, the video is likewise a terrific chronological celebration of the Dead End Kids, Little Tough Guys, East Side Kids and Bowery Boys! Be sure to stay tuned to the end "credit roll" to see how to obtain your personal copy hot off the press (this tome is sure to sell quicker than "triple-banana splits with double-whipped cream" at Louie's Sweetshop!). For more info about the book, click here:
Our 9th post summons Leo Gorcey before the bench, where he confesses to assaulting an unarmed toilet with a firearm! Actress Martha Raye also figures as an innocent bystander (or by-sitter, to be more precise) -- in this tragic tale that we call, Hot Lead & Cold Seat! It seems that once, on a personal appearance tour, Leo was appointed the treasurer of the gang's receipts. When the sum of their boxoffice take quickly ascended to the princely sum of $4000, Leo felt compelled to procure a gun to guard the loot. The next order of business was, quite naturally, for Leo to test-fire the heater, and the Dead End Kids' dressing room commode became the target of choice. A short while later in walks an unsuspecting Martha Raye into the same dressing room facility -- and suffers personal injury and untold mental anguish when she finds that the john has become a decided safety hazard!
In 1948 Universal Pictures struck boxoffice paydirt with the inspired idea of transplanting Lou Costello's brain in Glenn Strange as the Frankenstein monster. Just one year later at the low-rent Monogram Pictures, their copycat writers conspired to exchange Mr. Strange's brain with Huntz Hall's. The downward trend had, indeed, reached a freefall when Glenn Strange first met Abbott & Costello and wound up encountering the Bowery Boys in very short order! The occasion did, however, afford Glenn the opportunity of delivering the single greatest comic (!) performance of his lifetime when, as the hirsute gorilla-man "Atlas", he affects an uncanny pantomine of Huntz Hall as "Sach" -- replete with all the mincing steps and fey gestures! Thanks to his status as the reigning "coverboy" in Forry Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, Glenn Strange's visage holds the distinction of probably usurping Boris Karloff as the iconic image of Frankenstein to an entire generation of "Monster Kids" of the 1960's!
A change of pace for our 7th post, with a musical interlude for all you "culture vultures"! The Bowery Boys are crowned "Lords of the Jitterbug" in this prime example of Saturday Night Fever -- 1943 style! Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall and Bobby Jordan hit the dance floor, and the linoleum is left smoking! Leo's dance partner is his gorgeous real-life wife, Kay Gorcey; Bobby executes some hot-hoofing with Monogram Pictures glamor girl, Pamela Duncan, and; Huntz tears it up with a towering and unjustly uncredited amazon (Vince Barnett: "Hey, if she falls down, she'll be home!")
Ever notice the startling resemblances of Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Bobby Jordan and Gabriel Dell to John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison? Well, as a matter of fact, neither did we! In our 6th post, Huntz Hall steps up to the plate to make the quantum-leap comparison of the Dead End Kids to the Beatles! It all makes sense the way Huntz explains it; this is his personal take on the genealogy of the Dead End Kids, Little Tough Guys, East Side Kids and Bowery Boys!
Our 4th post features 4 minutes of funny schtick from the Bowery Boys latter "slapstick" period (1952-1956), with Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall as gun-slinging desperadoes, "The Lone Disarrangers", as well as party-crashers in a swanky NYC high-rise (Huntz is in top form impersonating a butler with a curious Bela Lugosi brogue!). This was culled from ancient broadcast VHS; we anxiously await the heralded release of the Bowery Boys package on DVD from Warner Home Video! Also featured in this clip is Bernard Gorcey (as the bartender, naturally) , Myron Healey and Tom Keene (as the Bad Guys), Mary Beth Hughes (as the Saloon Gal) and Marjorie Reynolds (as the object of Leo's affections).
Our 3rd post brings Leo Gorcey to the microphone once more, where he explains that, like Abbott & Costello and Martin & Lewis, discord often reared its ugly head amongst the The Bowery Boys (not to mention Leo and his five wives!).
For our momentous 2nd post (yup, that's two in one day -- the daily double!), we yield the floor to noneother than Leo Gorcey, who (somewhat incoherently, we must admit) discusses his famous screen characters: Spit, Muggs and Slip. This is yet another excerpt from The Bowery Interviews DVD, a homegrown work-in-progress that continues at a snail's pace (thanks, largely, to an ultra sub-Monogram budget and the annoying intrusions of having to make a living at a real job!).
We bid you welcome to the premiere post in The Bowery Bijou, wherein we celebrate the cinematic artistry of Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall and The Bowery Boys! Leading off is a video segment from a rare interview (circa 1964) in which Huntz Hall relates how The Bowery Boys once got an Academy Award nomination -- of sorts!