I’m From Arkansas: 1940s Romantic Comedy Music Film (3/5) (1944)

1944 www.amazon.com Watch the full film: thefilmarchived.blogspot.com Elmer Goodfellow Brendle (March 25, 1890 — April 9, 1964) was a vaudeville comedian turned movie star, best remembered for his dialect schtick as a Swedish immigrant. His biggest role was as “Single-0” in the sci-fi musical Just Imagine (1930), produced by Fox Film Corporation. His screen name was pronounced “El Bren-DEL.” Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to an Irish mother and German immigrant father, Brendel, unlike his stage and film character, was not Swedish. He spoke standard American English without a trace of any other accent, yet entered vaudeville in 1913 as a German dialect comedian. Because of the anti-German sentiment brought about by the sinking of the Lusitania, Brendel developed a new character, one he would portray on stage and in films for the rest of his career: a good-natured, simple Swede, often called “Oley,” “Ole,” or “Ollie.” During the 1910s and early 1920s, he appeared with his wife, vaudeville star Flo Bert, doing a married-couple routine. It was during this period that he coined his trademark lines, “Yee vizz!” and “Yumpin’ yiminy!” In 1926, he signed a contract with Famous Players Film Company and appeared in eight films there over the next two years, most memorably as the comic relief in Wings (1927) with Clara Bow and Buddy Rogers, a film which won the first Academy Award for Outstanding Production (an award that is comparable to today’s Best Picture Oscar.) Brendel …