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And anything I mean, I'm not foolhardy enough to say
I had few expectations of Expresso Bongo (1959) except that it starred Laurence Harvey and a friend whose tastes I trust thought I would like it. It has just hit my nonexistent top ten of favorite musicals. It's a show-biz satire that hasn't dated a whit of industry cynicism in six decades and a snapshot of theatrical Soho that's ancient history now; half of its numbers are diegetically staged and the rest the audience never sees coming. Both in tone and the cruising speed of its dialogue, it plays like Damon Runyon got into a fender-bender with the British New Wave. And it is so Jewish—adapted by Wolf Mankowitz from his hit stage musical of the same name, directed by Val Guest né Grossman—that I am just as glad to have seen it with chopped liver and whitefish salad in the house, because it's a lot harder to drop by a delicatessen these days.
For all that he reinvented his outsider's edginess as an acceptably foreign flamboyance, excusing his temper as Slavic moodiness and giving out his birth name as the romantically émigré "Larushka," Laurence Harvey was born Hirsh Skikne in Joniškis in Lithuania, better known pre-war as the shtetl of Yanishok, and "small-capital big-hoper" Johnny Jackson is exactly the kind of character that a Galitzianer would call a Litvak—a sharp dealer, a skeptical customer, the kind of clever clogs who, as Sholem Aleichem once penned it, repents before he sins. A long-legged live wire in his wide boy's suit, he's introduced five-finger-discounting himself a handful of trade magazines from a newsstand by claiming he'll return them in the morning and so disarming the owner of his favorite deli by actually paying for his six salt beef and two smoked salmon on rye that one eloquent flight of injured innocence later he's able to touch the man for the same fiver back. He turns on a dime, talks even faster, shrugs with his entire body without seeming to move at all. His hair is the short dark brush of the fur of a cat. He's always code-switching, but his essential register is Yiddish under East End English under a kind of professional pseudo-RP that would love to cut glass and mostly has to settle for Windex. Any schmuck in the entertainment business can deploy the term correctly, but it takes a landsman to come out with a line like "I should have realized that luck can be so undiscriminating, it could even happen to me!" Litvak or no, Johnny is functionally impossible to discuss without resorting to taxonomies like luftmentsh, shlimazl, and gonif. We are given to understand that he's a decent jazz drummer, but what we chiefly see him pursue is an extraordinarily unsuccessful career as the manager of two-bit acts like the delinquent rock of the "Beast Rhythm Group," which wouldn't get within hailing distance of the hit parade if Tommy Steele died tomorrow. His girlfriend has a steady job at the Intime Theatre, where you've come to the right place if you ever wanted to see some really bored strippers in tartan pasties jiggling to a burly-brass rendition of "Loch Lomond," but if she's not careful in a few years Sylvia Syms' Maisie King is going to find herself with an acute case of Adelaide's Lament. As she reminds Johnny, "You're always finding talent that turns out to be untalented." It is thus inevitable that in the one instance to the contrary, it pans out bupkes. Over the course of the film, we watch our sympathetic antihero luck into and then fuck up out of the discovery of a bongo-bashing unknown named Bert Rudge, who being played by Cliff Richard is soon launched to overnight stardom as teen idol "Bongo Herbert" and a much hotter property than Johnny has any hope of keeping his hands on without getting burned. He's a nice small shark in his pool of strip clubs and coffee bars, but he's just not a macher or a mamzer on the level of Meier Tzelniker's Gus Mayer, the pepcid-popping A&R manager of Garrick Records who plays Aida to soothe his stomach while he pushes the latest "rock dreck," or Yolande Donlan's Dixie Collins, the fading American film star whose world-weary intentions toward the wide-eyed Bongo are a poignant mix of comeback opportunism and wistful affection—perhaps not even on the level of Bongo himself, innocently climbing the rungs of his benefactors with never a look back or down. If there's a moral to this self-inflicted irony, it's the not quite exit line delivered by Johnny with such cynical relish that he almost makes it sound to his credit: "The whole world loves a big agent, Maisie, but a small one's anybody's whore."
I'm not sure the film needs a moral, though, when it's got so much else going for it, like the neon-jazzed tracking shot of the credits which dips in and out of the arcades and nightspots of Old Compton Street, slyly locating some actors' names in lights and others in a jukebox while leaving the crew to the fine print of pinball machines, menu boards, and the personal services section of a newsagent's window. Even when it's Shepperton instead of Soho, the world of Expresso Bongo is as live and hustling as its characters, quick-changing to match a musician who wants to be an agent, a stripper who wants to be a singer, a star who doesn't mind becoming one and a star desperate not to stop. The Intime advertises "10 Beautiful Girls with No Beautiful Clothes" and the tableaux vivants that Maisie introduces five shows a day are not exactly the heyday of the Windmill, though I admire where their Caesar is wearing her laurel crown. The Rudge household is so kitchen sink you could be sick in it, then "New York, Hollywood, and Las Vegas" glitzes in with Dixie Collins and her entourage who are just a more rarefied class of touts and spielers than one meets outside the Casino Cinerama or the Club 100. Gilbert Harding, playing himself, first does an investigative report on the "typical expresso bar" of the Tom-Tom where the Shadows provide the house music and then chairs a Saturday night panel on "this astonishing phenomenon of our time" which Johnny shamelessly snake-oils into a promotion for the debut single of the newly minted Bongo Herbert. I might as well admit here that I have no affinity for any of his numbers in this film, even though the EP collecting them topped the UK charts the next year; I feel I am correctly appalled by the outrageous calculation of the mother-loving proto-Christian rock "The Shrine on the Second Floor," but otherwise I find Richard-as-Bongo curiously anodyne for a rebellious teen sensation, like an Elvis impersonator from the waist up. The character numbers, however, are magnificent little blasts of pure theater, from the klezmer-inflected double-patter of "Nausea" to the wry swing of "Worry-Go-Lucky Me" to the bittersweet ballad of "You Can't Fool You." None of them lasts much more than a minute; all are lyrically nimble, musically versatile, and the film blinks in and out of their vaudeville with so little warning that it is both funny and logical that Johnny and Mayer almost get run over at the conclusion of their first duet because in the real world if you stand at the center of a crowded intersection long enough to trade rhyming barbs about classical music vs. pop, sooner or later you will become a road statistic. A marvelous bust-up argument between Maisie and Johnny is staged over the telephone from their separate flats, which look like two different locations until a visual joke sets them side by side in parallel at which point it becomes clear to the audience that it's not a split screen but a split set, exactly as it might have been done onstage; they ring off angrily and go back to reading as if they were ignoring one another in the same room. The film is always this off-kilter, always at the last minute pulling itself back before it can settle into any one recognizable key. The satire never softens, but the edges never overtake the comedy, and the characters remain more people than the lesson of their rise and fall demands. Johnny chases after any talent except the one under his nose, deer-eyed blonde Maisie with her small, sweet voice that she dreams of training into "a new Judy Garland" and her unembarrassed habit of walking around town in nothing but a slip under her coat because "there's not much point in putting my things on at the theater if I've got to take them all off again here." He's a wheeler and a dealer and the fifty percent beneficiary of one of the most unscrupulous contracts ever drawn up in a field not known for over-profiting its artists and it's impossible not to feel for him when he has to exit a balcony via the deflating route of a workman's ladder rather than stalking disdainfully like a real person out the door. Dixie jokes for the press about her five husbands and her innumerable lovers like the overblown cougar she knows she's seen as, but her mouth tightens delicately as she watches Bongo doze in the sun and she stares down his "spivvy manager" with the steel of a woman who's been in the Hollywood machine since her own eighteen-year-old days. Bongo is beautiful and young and opaque and we don't know if his thirteen weeks in New York will make him internationally immortal or just a cute flash in the pan. The arc of the universe, even in the movies, doesn't always bend obviously.
The ending of Expresso Bongo is actually very sweet, in the irrepressible way of so many trickster tales. Busted back down to band work after losing Bongo's contract, Johnny is readying himself for a tour up north to pay the bills, reassuring Maisie who has to get back to the club in time for the late show with a deep cut of a joke against himself: "That's all right. Being seen onto a train at night makes me feel like an immigrant." They are still shlepping the luggage of his drum kit as far down the street as they can when they are accosted by Martin Miller's "Kakky," a frail little character we've encountered before, generally when no one has time to spare for him. He's another refraction of the figure of the Jewish mogul, albeit a sort of ghostly, cautionary one. Decades ago he was on top of the British film industry with the Korda-esque spectacle of The Private Life of Omar Khayyam; these days he's a penniless schnorrer with a questionable grip on the time whom Johnny slips ten-shilling notes like the soft touch he tries to pretend he isn't. Now, like a magician in a new suit with his old briefcase under his arm, Kakky presses on the lovers an enormous flourish of cash which pays back those last five years of charity down to the sixpence. He's sold the stage rights to his famous picture. It's being made into a musical and he's producing. Johnny is only half-listening, finally making his declaration to Maisie: "I love—your voice." It's a bit of a dodge and it's as close as he can come to the two truths together and she wries her mouth a little, but she hears it; she kisses him and takes the money for safekeeping and heads off for another night of reminding the punters not to handle the bits and just then the penny drops out of Kakky's cheerful prattle of what he's looking for in a leading lady, "a sort of a period Judy Garland, you understand?" Down goes the luggage on the sidewalk. Up on the soundtrack comes the brash percussive jazz. Into Johnny's voice comes the confident Litvak Yiddish as his arm goes around the old producer's shoulder and away they stroll into the nighttime bustle of Soho, the wide boy back on his feet again and something in it this time for Maisie, too. Who knows how it'll end, but you try keeping a Menakhem-Mendl down. Like I said, a nice Jewish movie.
I must thank![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
moon_custafer for alerting me to its existence. You could double-feature it with Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and sprain something, probably your faith in humanity, or you could just take it on its own half-flash, half-documentary terms. The cinematography by John Wilcox looks its black-and-white best at night, the choreography by Kenneth MacMillan provides some hepped-up teenage swing at the Tom-Tom and some authentically apathetic bump-and-grind at the Intime, the supporting cast is an embarrassment of character talent including Avis Bunnage and Wilfrid Lawson as the Rudges, Hermione Baddeley as a short-sighted local streetwalker and Eric Pohlmann as the long-suffering deli proprietor, Susan Hampshire playing a nitro-voiced deb like a kind of female Freddy Eynsford-Hill, and even Mankowitz himself as a sandwich man heralding the end of the film. I have liked Laurence Harvey ever since The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and, honestly, The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962), but I genuinely thought he was one of the people who had redacted their Jewishness from their public persona: not if he took a role like Johnny Jackson. It almost feels like a dare, an inside joke, more code-switching. I am delighted. Also I wouldn't call him a great singer as opposed to an expressive sprechstimmer with some light baritone range, but I was still charmed by all three of his songs. I wish I could get a cast recording for the film as opposed to the stage musical or the Cliff Richard EP. It would total half an hour with incidental music if it was lucky, but I'd cough up for it. All right, Johnny, I hope you appreciate that you don't exist and you've still sold me on something that doesn't exist, either. This phenomenon brought to you by my astonishing backers at Patreon.
For all that he reinvented his outsider's edginess as an acceptably foreign flamboyance, excusing his temper as Slavic moodiness and giving out his birth name as the romantically émigré "Larushka," Laurence Harvey was born Hirsh Skikne in Joniškis in Lithuania, better known pre-war as the shtetl of Yanishok, and "small-capital big-hoper" Johnny Jackson is exactly the kind of character that a Galitzianer would call a Litvak—a sharp dealer, a skeptical customer, the kind of clever clogs who, as Sholem Aleichem once penned it, repents before he sins. A long-legged live wire in his wide boy's suit, he's introduced five-finger-discounting himself a handful of trade magazines from a newsstand by claiming he'll return them in the morning and so disarming the owner of his favorite deli by actually paying for his six salt beef and two smoked salmon on rye that one eloquent flight of injured innocence later he's able to touch the man for the same fiver back. He turns on a dime, talks even faster, shrugs with his entire body without seeming to move at all. His hair is the short dark brush of the fur of a cat. He's always code-switching, but his essential register is Yiddish under East End English under a kind of professional pseudo-RP that would love to cut glass and mostly has to settle for Windex. Any schmuck in the entertainment business can deploy the term correctly, but it takes a landsman to come out with a line like "I should have realized that luck can be so undiscriminating, it could even happen to me!" Litvak or no, Johnny is functionally impossible to discuss without resorting to taxonomies like luftmentsh, shlimazl, and gonif. We are given to understand that he's a decent jazz drummer, but what we chiefly see him pursue is an extraordinarily unsuccessful career as the manager of two-bit acts like the delinquent rock of the "Beast Rhythm Group," which wouldn't get within hailing distance of the hit parade if Tommy Steele died tomorrow. His girlfriend has a steady job at the Intime Theatre, where you've come to the right place if you ever wanted to see some really bored strippers in tartan pasties jiggling to a burly-brass rendition of "Loch Lomond," but if she's not careful in a few years Sylvia Syms' Maisie King is going to find herself with an acute case of Adelaide's Lament. As she reminds Johnny, "You're always finding talent that turns out to be untalented." It is thus inevitable that in the one instance to the contrary, it pans out bupkes. Over the course of the film, we watch our sympathetic antihero luck into and then fuck up out of the discovery of a bongo-bashing unknown named Bert Rudge, who being played by Cliff Richard is soon launched to overnight stardom as teen idol "Bongo Herbert" and a much hotter property than Johnny has any hope of keeping his hands on without getting burned. He's a nice small shark in his pool of strip clubs and coffee bars, but he's just not a macher or a mamzer on the level of Meier Tzelniker's Gus Mayer, the pepcid-popping A&R manager of Garrick Records who plays Aida to soothe his stomach while he pushes the latest "rock dreck," or Yolande Donlan's Dixie Collins, the fading American film star whose world-weary intentions toward the wide-eyed Bongo are a poignant mix of comeback opportunism and wistful affection—perhaps not even on the level of Bongo himself, innocently climbing the rungs of his benefactors with never a look back or down. If there's a moral to this self-inflicted irony, it's the not quite exit line delivered by Johnny with such cynical relish that he almost makes it sound to his credit: "The whole world loves a big agent, Maisie, but a small one's anybody's whore."
I'm not sure the film needs a moral, though, when it's got so much else going for it, like the neon-jazzed tracking shot of the credits which dips in and out of the arcades and nightspots of Old Compton Street, slyly locating some actors' names in lights and others in a jukebox while leaving the crew to the fine print of pinball machines, menu boards, and the personal services section of a newsagent's window. Even when it's Shepperton instead of Soho, the world of Expresso Bongo is as live and hustling as its characters, quick-changing to match a musician who wants to be an agent, a stripper who wants to be a singer, a star who doesn't mind becoming one and a star desperate not to stop. The Intime advertises "10 Beautiful Girls with No Beautiful Clothes" and the tableaux vivants that Maisie introduces five shows a day are not exactly the heyday of the Windmill, though I admire where their Caesar is wearing her laurel crown. The Rudge household is so kitchen sink you could be sick in it, then "New York, Hollywood, and Las Vegas" glitzes in with Dixie Collins and her entourage who are just a more rarefied class of touts and spielers than one meets outside the Casino Cinerama or the Club 100. Gilbert Harding, playing himself, first does an investigative report on the "typical expresso bar" of the Tom-Tom where the Shadows provide the house music and then chairs a Saturday night panel on "this astonishing phenomenon of our time" which Johnny shamelessly snake-oils into a promotion for the debut single of the newly minted Bongo Herbert. I might as well admit here that I have no affinity for any of his numbers in this film, even though the EP collecting them topped the UK charts the next year; I feel I am correctly appalled by the outrageous calculation of the mother-loving proto-Christian rock "The Shrine on the Second Floor," but otherwise I find Richard-as-Bongo curiously anodyne for a rebellious teen sensation, like an Elvis impersonator from the waist up. The character numbers, however, are magnificent little blasts of pure theater, from the klezmer-inflected double-patter of "Nausea" to the wry swing of "Worry-Go-Lucky Me" to the bittersweet ballad of "You Can't Fool You." None of them lasts much more than a minute; all are lyrically nimble, musically versatile, and the film blinks in and out of their vaudeville with so little warning that it is both funny and logical that Johnny and Mayer almost get run over at the conclusion of their first duet because in the real world if you stand at the center of a crowded intersection long enough to trade rhyming barbs about classical music vs. pop, sooner or later you will become a road statistic. A marvelous bust-up argument between Maisie and Johnny is staged over the telephone from their separate flats, which look like two different locations until a visual joke sets them side by side in parallel at which point it becomes clear to the audience that it's not a split screen but a split set, exactly as it might have been done onstage; they ring off angrily and go back to reading as if they were ignoring one another in the same room. The film is always this off-kilter, always at the last minute pulling itself back before it can settle into any one recognizable key. The satire never softens, but the edges never overtake the comedy, and the characters remain more people than the lesson of their rise and fall demands. Johnny chases after any talent except the one under his nose, deer-eyed blonde Maisie with her small, sweet voice that she dreams of training into "a new Judy Garland" and her unembarrassed habit of walking around town in nothing but a slip under her coat because "there's not much point in putting my things on at the theater if I've got to take them all off again here." He's a wheeler and a dealer and the fifty percent beneficiary of one of the most unscrupulous contracts ever drawn up in a field not known for over-profiting its artists and it's impossible not to feel for him when he has to exit a balcony via the deflating route of a workman's ladder rather than stalking disdainfully like a real person out the door. Dixie jokes for the press about her five husbands and her innumerable lovers like the overblown cougar she knows she's seen as, but her mouth tightens delicately as she watches Bongo doze in the sun and she stares down his "spivvy manager" with the steel of a woman who's been in the Hollywood machine since her own eighteen-year-old days. Bongo is beautiful and young and opaque and we don't know if his thirteen weeks in New York will make him internationally immortal or just a cute flash in the pan. The arc of the universe, even in the movies, doesn't always bend obviously.
The ending of Expresso Bongo is actually very sweet, in the irrepressible way of so many trickster tales. Busted back down to band work after losing Bongo's contract, Johnny is readying himself for a tour up north to pay the bills, reassuring Maisie who has to get back to the club in time for the late show with a deep cut of a joke against himself: "That's all right. Being seen onto a train at night makes me feel like an immigrant." They are still shlepping the luggage of his drum kit as far down the street as they can when they are accosted by Martin Miller's "Kakky," a frail little character we've encountered before, generally when no one has time to spare for him. He's another refraction of the figure of the Jewish mogul, albeit a sort of ghostly, cautionary one. Decades ago he was on top of the British film industry with the Korda-esque spectacle of The Private Life of Omar Khayyam; these days he's a penniless schnorrer with a questionable grip on the time whom Johnny slips ten-shilling notes like the soft touch he tries to pretend he isn't. Now, like a magician in a new suit with his old briefcase under his arm, Kakky presses on the lovers an enormous flourish of cash which pays back those last five years of charity down to the sixpence. He's sold the stage rights to his famous picture. It's being made into a musical and he's producing. Johnny is only half-listening, finally making his declaration to Maisie: "I love—your voice." It's a bit of a dodge and it's as close as he can come to the two truths together and she wries her mouth a little, but she hears it; she kisses him and takes the money for safekeeping and heads off for another night of reminding the punters not to handle the bits and just then the penny drops out of Kakky's cheerful prattle of what he's looking for in a leading lady, "a sort of a period Judy Garland, you understand?" Down goes the luggage on the sidewalk. Up on the soundtrack comes the brash percussive jazz. Into Johnny's voice comes the confident Litvak Yiddish as his arm goes around the old producer's shoulder and away they stroll into the nighttime bustle of Soho, the wide boy back on his feet again and something in it this time for Maisie, too. Who knows how it'll end, but you try keeping a Menakhem-Mendl down. Like I said, a nice Jewish movie.
I must thank
moon_custafer for alerting me to its existence. You could double-feature it with Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and sprain something, probably your faith in humanity, or you could just take it on its own half-flash, half-documentary terms. The cinematography by John Wilcox looks its black-and-white best at night, the choreography by Kenneth MacMillan provides some hepped-up teenage swing at the Tom-Tom and some authentically apathetic bump-and-grind at the Intime, the supporting cast is an embarrassment of character talent including Avis Bunnage and Wilfrid Lawson as the Rudges, Hermione Baddeley as a short-sighted local streetwalker and Eric Pohlmann as the long-suffering deli proprietor, Susan Hampshire playing a nitro-voiced deb like a kind of female Freddy Eynsford-Hill, and even Mankowitz himself as a sandwich man heralding the end of the film. I have liked Laurence Harvey ever since The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and, honestly, The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962), but I genuinely thought he was one of the people who had redacted their Jewishness from their public persona: not if he took a role like Johnny Jackson. It almost feels like a dare, an inside joke, more code-switching. I am delighted. Also I wouldn't call him a great singer as opposed to an expressive sprechstimmer with some light baritone range, but I was still charmed by all three of his songs. I wish I could get a cast recording for the film as opposed to the stage musical or the Cliff Richard EP. It would total half an hour with incidental music if it was lucky, but I'd cough up for it. All right, Johnny, I hope you appreciate that you don't exist and you've still sold me on something that doesn't exist, either. This phenomenon brought to you by my astonishing backers at Patreon.
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I love this whole review, but this is the line that I want to copy and paste just to savour.
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Thank you!
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I am glad to be able to provide pertinent information! It isn't his own accent—Yiddish was Harvey's first language, but he learned his English in Johannesburg, not the East End; he used Mankowitz himself as a vocal reference model for Johnny—but it felt very credible to me, especially the ways in which it shifts.
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Anyway, I guess I owe thanks to John Cooper Clark, for alluding to this musical in “Post-War Glamour Girl” and thereby leading me to discover its existence.
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I appreciate it being available on YouTube! I don't know how I'd have seen it otherwise, absent the luck of TCM or—not this year—a film festival.
I think I decided it would interest you right about the moment in the deli scene where I went from cringing slightly and thinking "Johnny picks up everybody's accent and I'm not sure if his attempts at ingratiating himself don't come off as mockery" to realizing "No, wait, that's Johnny's original accent and he suppresses it most of the time."
Yes—you can tell it's really his because it comes out sometimes in conversations with people who don't share it and because sometimes even in contexts where you would expect it he pulls out one of his other voices instead. Trying to stand on his rights with Mayer, for example. No dice.
Anyway, I guess I owe thanks to John Cooper Clark, for alluding to this musical in "Post-War Glamour Girl" and thereby leading me to discover its existence.
I should listen to that. He had a spot in Urgh! A Music War (1981), although I think not in the print that I saw with
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2. Aaaah oh my God this sounds like Guys and Dolls dropped acid with Billy Wilder and Gloria Swanson while, in the background, someone either scammed or felt up the lapsed high school percussionist playing the bongos on the sidewalk to make weed money. Which is to say, these were very evocative language choices and I adore that you made them all.
3. You were right! The Jewish cultural lens was entirely valid and this is a super interesting epoch from which/to which to gaze!
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Everyone should get fuzzy-lined clogs this year! Especially since I suspect it will stretch part of the way into next year, in the same way I am not entirely confident we ever cleared March.
Which is to say, these were very evocative language choices and I adore that you made them all.
Thank you! I regret nothing.
You were right! The Jewish cultural lens was entirely valid and this is a super interesting epoch from which/to which to gaze!
I realized while explaining it to my mother this evening that this movie reminds me slightly of The Heart of New York (1932) in that it was obviously seen by non-Jewish audiences, but it still feels like it was made for people who would get the Yiddishkeit. An inside job.
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I can't remember when I found out! According to the biography I have just started reading, he would never deny it if asked point-blank, but otherwise seems to have gone to some trouble to ensure no one did the asking, changing not just his name but the story behind his name, playing up his Lithuanian heritage as if to advertise himself a foreigner, but a glamorous—goyishe—one. But he played Johnny. I should really see Room at the Top (1959).
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"Things are back to normal--and they're never fair." --But I could tell from your review and from what I was seeing that the characters really take them in stride, and I think I really like the Maisie character--she does seem genuinely sweet.
I liked your description of Bongo Herbert's unselfconscious opportunism: "innocently climbing the rungs of his benefactors with never a look back or down" --heh!
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I'm so glad! I know it's not the pre-Code spirit when the British film industry had an entirely different set of generations and movements and censorship boards—it's more realistically the Yiddishkeit—but maybe especially these days, there's something about its resilient cynicism I just really appreciate.
"Things are back to normal--and they're never fair."
A line with some resonance, yes.
--But I could tell from your review and from what I was seeing that the characters really take them in stride, and I think I really like the Maisie character--she does seem genuinely sweet.
She is, and I like that she's not dim or a doormat because of it. She gets one of the script's best kiss-off lines when Johnny is trying to apologize without really apologizing: "Oh, now, look, Maisie doll, I've been working very hard, I'm under a lot of tension—" and as fast as Cagney, Maisie fires back, "Well, stay under and drown!"
I liked your description of Bongo Herbert's unselfconscious opportunism: "innocently climbing the rungs of his benefactors with never a look back or down" --heh!
Thank you!