Bazooka

Tonight I watched a musical western from 1936, Rhythm on the Range, starring Bing Crosby, Frances Farmer, Bob  Burns and Judy Canova.  The Sons of the Pioneers provided some of the music. Devotees of The Big Lebowsky will recall that the film opens with "Tumbling Tumbleweeds" by the Sons of the Pioneers--the most famous of the original Sons was Roy Rogers, who has one or two (sung) lines in this early film. In the credits, well, his name wasn't Roy Rogers yet.

This must have been a well-attended film in its day, because it invented a common word.

Bob Burns (more a stand-up comic than an actor) is the victim of a practical joke in the movie involving a metal funnel. He grabs the funnel, attaches it to pipe and then turns the whole thing into something like a trombone. He plays it and asks Bing if he likes the sound. "All I heard was bazooka," Bing says. Burns continued to use the bazooka on stage and so on. Soon World War Two began, and an anti-tank weapon needed a nickname. . . .

Two major films have been made about Frances Farmer, whose career was interrupted by schizophrenia.