Sometimes an enduring Saturday Night Live sketch will leapfrog its inspirations on the way to all-time classic status. Such is the case for beloved guest host Christopher Walken’s “The Continental,” which draws its toxic ladies’ man comic power from a real-life TV show of the same name.
Broadcast for two short stints on both CBS and ABC from 1952 to 1953, that The Continental was the brainchild of one Renzo Cesana, a marginal Italian actor (his most high-profile role being the priest in pal Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli) who successfully pitched that his radio turn as a suave Lothario purring continental come-ons to female listeners would make for great, similarly escapist television.
On the short-lived series, Cesana’s mannerisms laid the groundwork for SNL’s 40-years-later parody with almost perfect one-to-one detail. Cesana’s character (like Walken’s, only ever known as “The Continental”) greets his initially reticent female guest with offers of a cigarette (which he deftly lights alongside his own in one suggestive motion), a tour of his strategically seductive bachelor lair, and, of course, a glass of waiting chilled champagne. (Cesana does not pronounce his preferred libation as Walken’s “sham-panya,” but in his cajoling cadence, the word emerges with similarly louche disreputability.)
All these moves are played out from the subjective point-of-view of that week’s lucky seductee, a stylistic choice that unintentionally heightens both the woman’s helplessness in Cesana’s love-trap and the Continental’s genuine creepiness as he applies his decidedly foreign wiles toward another conquest.
Cesana’s Continental was the Latin Lover stereotype as Spanish fly for quietly dissatisfied post-WWII housewives, a pre-internet exercise in ASMR sexual reverie. (After the show’s cancellation, non-singer Cesana released audio versions of his character’s moves, which really have to be heard to be believed.)
It was Tom Davis, one of SNL‘s original writers and former comedy partner of Al Franken, who presumably mined childhood memories of this bewildering stylistic TV outlier to craft Cesana’s implicitly predatory accented swinger into a vehicle for Walken when he hosted Saturday Night Live for the first-time on January 20, 1990.
While forgotten by the world and completely unfamiliar to the overwhelming majority of ’90s SNL viewership, Cesana’s The Continental had, in its day, been recognized for the comically lascivious enterprise it was, with parodies appearing everywhere from MAD Magazine to the comedy of Red Skelton and Jerry Lewis. (In cartoon form, the show’s on-the-make subjective camera saw even noted animated female-stalkers Pepé Le Pew and Popeye’s Bluto take a turn in the velvet smoking jacket.)
Another trait Walken’s “The Continental” shares with many breakout SNL hits is an unassuming beginning. On Walken’s hosting debut, “The Continental” didn’t appear until after “Weekend Update“—a later slot than the recurring sketch would occupy in all of Walken’s subsequent six other hosting stints. (The actor’s to-date last hosting gig in 2008 was the only one to ditch “The Continental” entirely, perhaps suggesting that either the host or the show saw the sketch as played out.)
It should also be recalled that, in 1990, Walken was not yet the proven go-to comedy stylist he is today (where the infamously intense actor’s mannered cadence can be enjoyed in everything from Hairspray to The Country Bears). By 1990, Walken—after early powerhouse turns in The Deer Hunter and The Dead Zone—was plying his trade in wild-eyed criminal masterminds, like Bond villain Max Zorin in 1985’s A View to a Kill and the terrifying father-monster in 1986’s At Close Range. Back then, unlike the grandfatherly weirdo he has become, Walken’s reputation for charismatic danger imbued The Continental’s questionable charms with an undeniable menace.
And from the beginning, that implied menace was an inextricable part of the joke.
In that first outing, Walken’s playboy still partakes of the young Walken’s glinting charisma as he entices his unseen guest with hit-and-miss ardor. The gag that the woman keeps lunging for the apartment door only to have Walken heave into view blocking her path partakes of the sexual politics of the sketch’s 1950s source material, but otherwise, this Continental sticks to basics. A smoke, a view from the balcony, and of course, “sham-panya” are the lead-up to a face-down massage before the successful escape. (A popular behind-the-scenes video showing that the damsel in distress is actually a cameraman sporting a pair of silky arm-length satin gloves—thus explaining the heroine’s formidably beefy wrists—can’t undo the sketch’s queasy spectacle of potential sexual violence.)
In later iterations, as is the way of all recurring SNL bits, Walken’s seducer would become broader and blunter in his machinations. (And the silky introduction by Phil Hartman, persisting long after the SNL legend’s 1998 murder, lends an eerie timelessness to the proceedings.)
Roofies, two-way mirrors, and crudely erotic artwork all work to elicit proportionally rougher rejection from his never-seen victims, their climactic acts of physical self-defense eliciting what became Walken’s “Wowie-wow-wow-wow!” catchphrase, the poor woman’s panic only stoking The Continental’s arousal.
As with the beats of the sketch, Walken’s performances gradually leaned hard into the gag: The actor’s already mannered speech (and happy reliance on cue cards) spinning out into the self-parody that marks much of late-career Walken’s more mainstream work. Every pronouncement and gesture thus draped in self-aware quotation marks, “The Continental” suffered the fate of nearly all such greatest hits recurring sketches and became a parody of itself, thus leaving the ludicrously creepy ghost of Renzo Cesana to bask in its improbable cultural resurrection.
