Why don’t you ever call? Gertrude Berg is the long-neglected mother of the modern sitcom.
It’s strange to think that the biggest television star of her time, a woman who was once voted the second-most trusted woman in America next to Eleanor Roosevelt (and who earned more money than the president’s wife) could be completely relegated to history’s dustbin. But that seems to be the case with Gertrude Berg. With her radio show (and later TV series) The Rise of the Goldbergs, Berg arguably created the modern sitcom, a family comedy that paved the way for everything from I Love Lucy to All in the Family and beyond. Yet the movie’s tagline, “The most famous woman in America you’ve never heard of,” seems about right. Archie Bunker and Lucy Ricardo have stuck around in the collective memory. Molly Goldberg hasn’t.
Aviva Kempner’s documentary, Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, doesn’t make any attempt to understand why that is. Instead, it’s content to simply tell Berg’s story and expose her to the generations that have been raised on the fruits of her labour. From the clips provided, it’s easy to understand Berg’s appeal — she introduces each week’s show by leaning out the window and welcoming America into her home with a warm, naturally motherly charm. The comedy mostly focuses on the malapropisms and misunderstandings that come naturally to immigrant families — the Goldbergs are first-generation American Jews, aspiring towards the American dream — and while it’s hardly edgy by modern standards, Berg did occasionally squeeze some controversial topics into her scripts. And they were hers — she wrote every word of dialogue in every episode of the show’s 27-year radio and television run by hand.
It’s inevitable that a career-minded woman in that era would be picked up as something of a proto-feminist icon, and Kempner makes a solid case for Berg on that front. As one of the film’s talking heads says, Berg really was the Oprah of her day, parlaying her character into cookbooks, endorsement deals, even a Broadway show. Her politics come across as largely incidental, though. Berg didn’t go out of her way to prove that women could write television; she simply wrote television. Likewise, her actions when accusations that one of her cast members was a communist had sponsors pressuring her to re-cast the role — she responded by threatening to encourage her fans to boycott the sponsor’s products, then spending a year trying to find another company to pick up the show — were more out of necessity and loyalty than ideology.
None of that takes away from Berg’s character, though, or from Kempner’s movie. Mrs. Goldberg makes up for a general lack of gravitas with a genuinely compelling subject, and it tells her story as straightforwardly as it can. It won’t boost Berg back up to Lucille Ball status, but at least it’s put her back in the cultural canon.
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