She made three films with Grant. I don’t remember which. One they solved by billing them both together, one in the bottom right, and one in the top left. And that wasn’tPenny Serenade; I know that for sure because I’ve only seen it once. It was so sad, I could never watch it again. Their other two movies are hilarious, though, and she is particularly funny in The Awful Truth. I’ve seen that a number of times.
So, it may be Penny Serenade. I’m afraid to look up the opening sequence, though. Whichever of their films came first, is probably the answer. That would likely be the point at which he was much less famous than she was. She had been nominated for an Oscar in 1931.
Nope-- looks like my source was slightly mistaken. Just checked out trailers, opening sequences, and 1-sheets. It looks like Dunne has top billing in all the opening sequences; however, My Favorite Wife is plugged in the trailer as starring “America’s favorite comedian, Cary Grant,” and also, Irene Dunne, by the way, while the 1-sheet seems to be the place where the credit is split with the top/bottom - right/left scheme.
I suppose considering the course of Dunne’s career, while she enjoyed doing comedy, she didn’t want to be billed as a comedian, and be pigeon-holed, and also was sky-high at the time; Grant was still up-and-coming enough to take anything that boosted him.
According to Wiki and IMDb, Penny Serenade came out in 1941. So it was later in her career.
Penny Serenade is shown fairly often between 02:00 and 04:00 on CHCH in Toronto. I first saw it on Czech TV back in 1991–92, when the authorities were trying to wean the population off of watching mostly Russian movies. They built up an impressive library of old films in English with stars like Cary Grant, Gregory Peck, Jimmy Stewart, et al.
Irene Dunne was gorgeous, right up there with Ann Sheridan and Ava Gardner!
The movie starts, BTW, with a close-up of a 78 RPM record spinning on a turntable. Cary Grant then goes into the music shop where Irene Dunne works, and things proceed from there.
I probably have seen the other movies you mention as well; I just don’t have any immediate recollection of them.
Now that I think about it, the movie actually starts with a brief preview of Grant and Dunne breaking up to go their separate ways. It then segues into the spinning record.
Colonel Sanders also showed up on I’ve Got a Secret, circa 1964-65 (according to the comments, based on his age of 74). Again, no one seemed to recognize him.
As for it being a “classier” age, I’ve Got a Secret was on in the same period as What’s My Line, and was very similar in format, but it wasn’t nearly as formal or stuffy. Everyone was on a first name basis. The Mr. Cerf and Miss Francis stuff was really down to John Daly being a bit of a stuffed shirt, I suspect.
900 sounds like a lot but, dispersed over that huge of a distance, it is entirely understandable how some people never even saw one. Keep in mind that advertising in the old days was only a shadow of its intensity now.
Yep, Garry Moore was a lot more easygoing than John Daly, that’s for sure.
My favorite period of I’ve Got a Secret was the one with Steve Allen as host, where they did “The Twelve Days of Christmas” with a chorus of people drawn from NYC area phone books. Each one had a surname that more or less matched the lyrics of the carol.
As I remember, Bud Collyer was also a pretty classy host of To Tell the Truth.
When I was a kid in the 60s Kentucky Fried Chicken was sold by a regional burger chain called Gino’s (started by Hall of Fame NFL player Gino Marchetti). I remember the picture of the Colonel on the bucket of chicken (they also had a larger size they called a barrel of chicken), but we always called it Gino’s Chicken. Wasn’t until I moved away after college that I saw actual KFC stores.
I think where you were had some influence on degree of formality, and New York, probably the east in general, hung on longer than the west coast or the Midwest. I was a kid in NYC in the late 60s and early 70s. It was a punishable offense to call adults by their first names. Even the rare kid with a stepparent usually had some kind of nickname, or called them mom/dad or aunt/uncle as a title before their first names, never just a plain first name. Adults who had just met used titles, and people in the 20s & 30s used them with much older people.
IIRC, What’s My Line was broadcast from a location in NYC.
I don’t get this. As I said earlier to a similar comment, virtually nobody in New York would have ever encountered the Colonel or KFC in 1963, unless they had moved there from somewhere else or happened to catch one of those odd tv appearances. I’m guessing no more than 5% of the total population could have had a glimpse. And that especially includes the blue collar crowd, who got to travel less to the distant South or West then than today. KFC never came within hundreds of miles of NYC until 1970. What magic crystal ball would have given them his name or image?
The new “To Tell the Truth” occasionally slips a ringer into the show as one of the fakes - recently Paris Themmen was one of the fakes: a name and a face that you wouldn’t recognize, but he was “Mike Teevee” in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
In another memorable case, a woman who was an expert on disguise was the truth-teller in one round, and in a later round, she (in disguise) was one of the fakes.
IIRC (I was a pretty little kid), the old one was fond of bringing in the sibling of someone famous, who would look nothing like the famous person, and then bringing in two strangers who were dead-ringers for whoever it was. One of the panelists cottoned onto it (I don’t remember which one), and said she (I do have a vague memory that it was a woman), was voting for #n, because that one looked the least like [famousperson].
The other trick for “What’s My Line” is that there’s a significant chance that if the guest is a woman, the job is lumberjack, or police officer, a weight lifter or (gasp) a mayor, while burly male guests may be dress makers or florists.
To give you an idea of how hoity-toity the What’s My Line? panel was, I remember the episode where Art Carney (then on The Honeymooners) was the mystery guest. They were trying to narrow down what area of the entertainment business he was in. Do you sing? No. Have you appeared in the theater? No. Have you been in movies? No. Do you appear in nightclubs? No.
In a somewhat despairing voice, Dorothy Kilgallen said, “Well, what else is there?” Even though she was, at that very instant, making a television show, it never occurred to her to ask if the mystery guest was known for television.
There was another episode where they asked if the guest had been seen in the Broadway theater. She replied, “In the theater, but not on Broadway.” Kilgallen said, “Well, then you haven’t been in the theater, my dear.”
As I heard it, Sanders (who, as you say, was always trying to figure out ways to make money) ran a gas station that served chicken to its customers. Because they were just stopping for gas, he had to figure out a way to get freshly fried chicken to them quickly. He developed a pressure cooker method that resulted in very fast turnaround times (something like 7 minutes). He then started selling this system (which included his herbs and spices recipe) to other places, taking a commission on their sales. That’s how Kentucky Fried Chicken got started.
