I recently got Henry Winkler’s autobiography, Being Henry: The Fonz …. and Beyond, out from the library. I grew up with Happy Days, though was a little young when The Fonz first started … but hey, reruns. Recently, I binged Barry, which is truly brilliant television and Winkler is an Emmy-winner as the drama teacher in the dark comedy/drama. And his guest appearances as the incompetent lawyer Barry Zuckerkorn in Arrested Development were always worth a laugh.
Of course, those are just a couple of things he has done during his ongoing career.
There were many projects and roles that he did that I had never heard of, and will never see.
But oddly, he left out his 1978 movie, The One and Only, which is very loosely based on the career of Gorgeous George, who was wrestling’s first television superstar.
Instead, Winkler talks about Heroes from 1977, which was his first movie role post-Fonz, and jumps to 1982’s Night Shift, directed by “Richie Cunningham” Ron Howard. His take on Heroes perhaps applies to The One and Only as well: “It was the beginning of a long period in my career when, whenever I tried to step outside of playing the Fonz, I just could not get out of my own way as an actor.”
Wondering what was up, the library provided me with two anecdotal memoirs by the director of The One and Only, Carl Reiner. Wouldn’t you know it, the amazing Mr. Reiner didn’t mention the film at all either. The One and Only falls in a timeline between two Reiner successes, Oh, God! with George Burns, and The Jerk with Steve Martin.
Naturally, I had to seek out more.
First was a viewing of The One and Only, which I found on YouTube, but if it isn’t there after this writing, maybe you can get a copy from your local library. JustWatch.com tells us that you can rent it a variety of ways, and it appears to be deep in the archives at Apple+ in the US. (And don’t confuse it with the other shows/movies with the same title, including TV series from 2021, a movie from 2002 with no one I recognized when I looked it up at IMDB.)
The One and Only is a period piece, though Winkler is decidedly not The Fonz. While his character here, Andy Schmidt, is also ultra-confident, it’s a lot more of a put-on than Arthur Fonzarelli. He flounders dramatically through life, making a big scene out of everything, even if things are not going his way.
“Like Heroes before it, The One and Only is an off-beat love story in which Winkler initially acts like a weirdo but then turns lovable in order to win his woman,” critiqued Gene Siskel in the Chicago Tribune at the time. “This similarity of story line suggests Winkler is pitching his feature film product at teen-age girls who want to fantasize that Winkler is romancing them.”
In this case, he is chasing Kim Darby, who was most famously the young girl in John Wayne’s True Grit.
There’s a reason Siskel was so beloved as a reviewer, and I find his take on The One and Only on point:
- “But then The One and Only is more concerned about titillating its 1978 audience than remaining true to its 1950s characters.”
- “Reiner must have felt the economic pressure to go for the easy box-office play of featuring Winkler in as many goofy situations as possible. As a result the momentum of the love story is lost.”
- “Much of the ad campaign for The One and Only focuses on Winkler as a bisexual ‘Gorgeous George’ type of professional wrestler. But you’ll be way off base if you think that’s what the entire film is about. Winkler turns to wrestling late in the film only after his acting career founders. He discovers that what he really loves and needs is the crowd’s roar of approval. It really doesn’t matter what he does, as long as he gets laughs and applause.”
Scenes from The One and Only.
Right, on to the wrestling, which was the whole reason I tuned in.
Hervé Villechaize as Milton the Midget is definitely the most memorable wrestling character, though the jokes about little people and homosexuals are very dated. “Life is shit,” says Milton the Midget at one point. “I’m a novelty.” Alan Lecker of The Californian noted that Villechaize “upstaged” the headliner. “Winkler could learn a lesson from Villechaize. While Winkler is running around trying to be funny, Villechaize is stealing the scene without saying a word and grabbing laughs with his impish grin.”
Gene Saks as the wrestling promoter Sidney Seltzer delivered plenty of great lines too. When the skinny, nebbish Winkler stumbles in, he’s told to leave: “We’ve got ushers bigger than you. Leave, I’ve got to take a crap.”
Instead of leaving, Winkler’s character somehow learns the wrestling business through a single, brief, goofy training session with Milton.
In the ring, he goes through a series of gimmicks, including “War Hero” Andy Smith, a hypnotist act, the Nazi Adolf Nitler, and finally, he becomes the Gorgeous George-like The Lover — though there’s a whole lot of Ricki Starr in there too.
Some of it rings true, like his bedroom talk to his wife: “That’s what it’s all about, getting that crowd to love you.” Or this gem: “You make a couple of bucks. You get to dress up in crazy costumes. The crowds go nuts.”
But most of it is laughable and not in a good way.
Educated wrestling fans will enjoy seeing names of the mid-1970s hamming it up, like Chavo Guerrero Sr. as Indian Joe and Gene LeBell as Buddy Gibson; don’t blink or you will miss Roddy Piper as Leatherneck Joe. And keep an eye out or Ed Begley Jr. as Arnold The King.
In retrospect, it’s enlightening to read some of the press that Winkler did promoting The One and Only (a reported $3 million in publicity, then a huge sum), including having to compare it to Heroes.
“In both films the man has a dream. At the end of the film he fulfills that dream, but it turns out to be totally different than he thought it would be at the beginning,” Winkler said in one nationally-syndicated piece. “Carl Reiner is a knowledgeable human being — a tasteful human being. He knows what’s funny and what’s human. I really enjoyed working with him.”
Winkler talked to the Montreal Gazette‘s Bill Brownstein, and was asked about finding respect for pro wrestling. “They fight for real and inflict as much pain on their opponents as they have animosity for them. But outside they are incredibly gentle,” he said. “Why, they could have broken every bone in my body, but instead they took great care of me.”
Scenes from The One and Only.
Head out to watch The One and Only and form your own opinion, but this last hatchet job by the well-known Peter Travers in the syndicated Sunday Magazine says a lot. He compared Winkler to another non-teenager playing young, John Travolta of Welcome Back, Kotter. Dismissing Heroes as a dud, he drove home his point:
“I am advocating that Winkler start making movies and stop making disasters like The One and Only, which are simply TV sitcoms in disguise. The One and Only plays it safe, and that’s one of the major reasons why it’s sorry. There’s not an unpredictable moment in it, except for the performance of Hervé Villechaize as a nasty midget. Otherwise, it’s TV time from the word go from Carl Reiner’s TV-based direction to Winkler’s TV born and bred performance,” skewered Travers.
Winkler “doesn’t make a move to adjust his broad TV style to the film camera. He comes on like gangbusters, selling every line like a pitchman for one of his TV sponsors. He doesn’t seem to have the foggiest notion that the movie screen blows up every gesture, exaggerates every line. His almost desperate attempt to please forces him to be something the Fonz would never be caught dead being on the small screen – uncool.”
RELATED LINKS
