Before
there was Joan Rivers, there was Rose Marie—and she is still with us.
Initially, she was billed as “Baby Rose Marie.” The child star belted out
Sophie Tucker standards for fans like Al Capone, but as she aged into
adulthood, she started to integrate comedy into her act. It was a heck of an
act that would take her from vaudeville and network radio to television,
Broadway, and Vegas. Rose Marie herself takes stock of her life and career in
Jason Wise’s snappy documentary profile, Wait
for Your Laugh (trailer
here), which
opens this Friday in New York.
Perhaps
you only remember Rose Marie from The
Dick Van Dyke Show, but that is okay. It is one of the few old sitcoms that
still holds up. She and her partner in quips, Morey Amsterdam are two big
reasons it still has an edge. Yet, her career goes back to the prohibition era,
when she was a child performer on radio—when radio was the most significant
form of entertainment going.
She
segued nicely into torch-signing and night club gigs, as soon as she was old
enough to be served in them. It was there that she met her future husband, big
band trumpeter Buddy Guy. As one might expect from a portrait of the
tart-tongued performer, there are a lot of laughs in WFYL, but the heart of the film focuses on her once-in-a-lifetime
romance with Guy.
Guy
was a musician’s musician and a sideman’s sideman, who was the first trumpeter
for Kay Kyser and Bing Crosby’s bands at the height of their popularity. He was
a studio work-horse, so it warms the hearts of us big band fans to hear about
their deep abiding love for each other. Unfortunately, it also chokes us up to
hear how he was taken from her far too early, as the result of a mysterious blood
infection in 1964, at the peak of her visibility on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Even today, over sixty years later, Rose
Marie is clearly still crazy in love with him.
Of
course, life would go on, but the classic Carl Reiner show would eventually
end. Consequently, Rose Marie would have to constantly reinvent herself to keep
working. While the first half-hour of WFYL
could be a companion film to Ken Burns’ Prohibition
and Jazz, it evolves into a show
business survival story, very much like Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work. Perhaps Rose Marie was not top-of-mind yesterday,
but you are sure to admire her when you how doggedly she kept at it, including
work as a Hollywood Squares regular,
co-starring on The Doris Day Show,
and her later cartoon voice-overs. (Oddly enough, there is no mention of her
cameo in Witchboard, starring 80s
icon Tawny Kitaen.)
Most
of Rose Marie’s story comes straight from her, looking straight into the camera
and delivering like she is back on-stage at Slapsy Maxie’s. Yet, Wise further
livens up the film with stylized recreations of her encounters with key figures
she met along the way, such as Bugsy Siegel. Plus, her old crony Peter Marshall
also supplies some supplemental narration.
There
is a ton of pop culture history in Wise’s doc that is endanger of being
forgotten in the age of Netflix and Amazon, but this film brings it back in
nostalgic waves for anyone old enough to remember seeing any of her shows
syndicated on broadcast television. Highly recommended for the eternally hip, Wait for Your Laugh opens this Friday
(11/3) in New York, downtown at the Angelika Film Center and in Midtown at the
Landmark 57 West.
