Life with the Lyons

I'd never previously heard of this radio and TV phenomenon from 1950's. I watched the 1954 film to go along with the "House of Hammer" podcast. Whilst was initially amusing, I soon found it transformed to wearing.

Ben Lyon (Ben Lyon) moves to a house in Marble Arch, London with his wife Bebe (Bebe Daniel), daughter Barbara (Barbara Lyon) and idiot son Ben (Ben Lyon). They move in on a short-term lease ahead of purchasing the property from house proud Mr Hemingway (Hugh Morton). A series of calamities befall them as they try to convince Hemingway that they are responsible enough to take on the house.

Effectively this was a feature length pilot for the series that followed on the BBC soon afterwards. The real-life family transfer their act from the radio to this visual medium and to a degree its successful. None of them are tasked with being particularly good actors, so their broad performances don't jar because nobody in the film is downplaying anything. It's not so much a film as a collection of vignettes, introductions, skis in the hall, clean the chandelier, cook a meal, build a water feature. Often, they involve an amount of physical slapstick comedy, but mostly, as you might expect from the radio origin there's a lot of verbal gags, witticisms, and asides. There's not much consistency in main character Ben, who seems capable of buying a house but doesn't seem to know that you need to peel apples for an apple pie. Molly Weir, of "Rentaghost" and The Vaselines fame has a role in the film as the Lyon's Scottish Housekeeper, it too is a broad performance but fits in with the film.

I felt the film was relatively charming and amusing in the first few minutes, but for me, it quickly became a bit of a drag and I turned on the characters - particularly the ridiculous children pretty quickly. (by the way, Ben repeatedly turning down Belinda Lee - you should be so lucky).

Based on their hit radio show, Bebe Daniels and Ben Lyon starred in this British "Ozzie and Harriet" type show about "Life with the Lyons" with their two children, Barbara and Richard. On radio and TV, this series ran from 1950-61.

Mild situation comedy with the family trying to move into a new house in London amid eccentric servants, crabby landlord, and the teenaged kids' friends.

The real fun here is seeing the charming Ben Lyon and Bebe Daniels 20 years after they left Hollywood (after making hundreds of silent films and talkies). They're funny and have great chemistry. Lots of little inside jokes about their Hollywood careers and their years in England. At one point Bebe is dragging a trunk into the house when she asks Ben what's in it? Fourteen reels of HELL'S ANGELS he quips as she rolls her eyes. Of course that was Lyon's biggest talkie hit, a 1930 film in which he starred with Jean Harlow and James Hall.

The kids aren't bad either. Barbara plays a dim 19-year-old who's always in love and always stating, "I'll die! I'll just die!" when her parents don't do as she wants. Richard plays the younger, geeky brother, a game partner for his dad's loopy ideas like building a fish pond in the back yard.

Followed by a sequel: THE LYONS IN Paris.

Ben Lyon, Bebe Daniels, and their two children move into a new house. There are still some things to settle: faulty electricity, poor drains, and the owner has neither signed the 75-year lease nor handed over the keys

Daniels and Lyon moved from the US to Great Britain, at first because their American film careers were drying up, and they had offers in England. Then, when the Second World War started, they were among the few American entertainers to stick it out. They were enormously popular on stage, screen and radio, first with Vic Oliver. They came back to the US after the War. Ben worked at 20th Century-Fox, and Bebe tried producing, but that didn't pan out. So they resettled in Britain and started a new radio program in 1951, in a show reminiscent of THE ADVENTURES OF OZZIE AND HARRIET, in which they played broadly comic versions of themselves, and their children did the same. This movie, and THE LYONS ABROAD, was a segue into turning the radio program into a TV show. It was successful, and they didn't retire from regular broadcasting until 1961.

I can see why. It's an easy, comfortable sort of movie, one in which they pull a few sight gags that wouldn't have played on radio -- Steven Hill, as a singing cowboy, enters their foyer on his horse; a chandelier doesn't work, and when Ben rewires it, the radio plays, and the chandelier flickers in sympathy with the door bell. Bebe plays her role midway between Gracie Allen and Penny Singleton, and Ben is the confident bumbler. It's not great comedy, but as a visual version of the radio show, and a try-out for the TV show, it works just fine.