Bilko doesn’t date. The 143 episodes here are as deathless as Fawlty Towers’ 12, but occupy a very different place at the sitcom’s peak. When writer-producer Nat Hiken put Phil Silvers’ inveterate gambler and conman in charge of a motley platoon in the peacetime backwater of Fort Baxter, Kansas in 1955, it was a New York Jewish comic partnership as happy as S.J. Perelman’s with the Marx Brothers. Hiken ensured his series was shot in New York, where he knew Silvers from card games, to keep a crackling energy unavailable in Hollywood studios.
Its original title, You’ll Never Get Rich, was replaced by The Phil Silvers Show. Both are as apt as the Bilko everyone knows it as. None of Bilko’s money-making schemes ever quite come off. But Silvers gave his character a harrying, tireless hunger for the con; aggressive yet charming, maniacally quick-talking yet in a flash unctuously smooth. Bilko leaves his victims dazed much as Ali did, succeeding by the unpredictability, speed and number of his verbal jabs. In what were essentially live performances, a rapid-fire, academic-vocabulary-dense monologue on a stunned psychiatrist’s couch is a bravura test of Silvers’ comic timing. So is an episode in which Bilko becomes barrack-room lawyer for a chimpanzee the US Army has carelessly enlisted.
Bilko’s interaction with his platoon is equally crucial. Though greatly admired by Larry David, Bilko’s Fort Baxter is a working-class environment lost in recent sitcoms such as Seinfeld, and follows the World War Two platoon film formula of a rich range of characters. From pug-faced Private Doberman to Bilko’s loyal henchmen Rocco Barbella and Steve Henshaw, to Palmer and Sugarman, pre-Civil Rights black regulars never used for racist comedy, they all memorably orbit Ernie Bilko. “Nobody can bring people to life like he does,” Hiken remembered in wonder at his star’s effect on the rest. President Eisenhower was a big fan, joining much of his nation in loving a wholly irreverent show set in the US Army at the Cold War's height.
Extras include audition tapes, Silvers interviews and a BBC doc.
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