by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I eventually ran a movie last night, a download
from archive.org called All Over Town, a
1937 film for Republic that was the second and last film made for them by the
comedy team of Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson. “Not in the wide open spaces nor in
the depths of the vast wilderness,” reads the printed foreword — thereby
eliminating the two most common settings for Republic movies! — “but in a
remote section of Manhattan Island struggle the last of their tribe … the true
vanishing Americans.” The true vanishing Americans turn out to be vaudeville
performers, living at a boarding house owned by the battle-axe Mrs. Wilson
(Blanche Payson, one of those formidably butch landladies in 1930’s Hollywood
movies whose fearsome demeanors made it hard to believe that there had ever
been a Mr. Wilson), who’s trying
to eject her newest tenants, Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson (playing themselves, or
at least using their own names for their characters à la Laurel and Hardy), not only for being behind on
their rent but also for harboring “Sally, the World’s Only Singing Seal” (she
doesn’t actually “sing,” she just bites a set of taxi horns in succession to
produce something vaguely resembling a melody), who’s a key part of their act.
Olsen and Johnson hear about a potential job at the Eldridge Theatre, and they
and singer/songwriter/pianist Don Fletcher (Harry Stockwell, a tall, rail-thin
juvenile with an oddly shaped face that probably kept him away from major
stardom — he was originally slated for the romantic lead in the Marx Brothers’ A
Day at the Races and actually performed on
the live tryout tour the Marxes did to hone the material before they made the
actual film, but by the time it became a movie the better-known Allan Jones had
replaced him) set out for said theatre, only to find that it’s been boarded up
for two years, ever since an actor was murdered by a mysterious assailant
during rehearsals for an upcoming show, and the place has acquired a reputation
for being both haunted and jinxed.
The theatre is owned by Joan Eldridge (Mary
Howard), who inherited it from her late father (no, he wasn’t the guy who was
murdered!) but owes money on it to William Bailey (Eddie Kane, the detective
from The Stolen Jools, playing
essentially the kind of role Walter Woolf King and Douglass Dumbrille played in
the MGM Marx Brothers movies), who’s trying to get her to sell the theatre to
investor Pete Phillips (Otto Hoffman). Thanks to a conversation Don overheard
at Mrs. Wilson’s, he’s convinced that Olsen and Johnson are oil millionaires,
and so when they go to Joan’s theatre she thinks they have the financial
wherewithal to back her in a show that will enable her to pay off the money she
owes Bailey and save the theatre — only Bailey and Phillips have them
investigated and find out the only money they had was $150 they got from
selling a gas station they owned. The behind-the-scenes personnel — including
Franklin Pangborn in a typical (for him) but still marvelous turn as an
insufferably queeny costume designer (there’s a particularly funny scene in
which he’s illustrated his new design to Olsen and Johnson, he says the dress
is going to be “cut on the bias,” and they haven’t the slightest idea what he’s
talking about) — are about to walk, and so are the cast members, when Don
persuades them that the only way they have of getting paid for the work they’ve
already done is to mount the show without pay and hope it hits big enough to
make them what they’re owed.
The troupe demonstrates one of the show’s big
numbers (a song featuring Olsen, Johnson and Sally the seal that Olsen and
Johnson wrote themselves), only as the number is winding down a mystery
assailant points a gun through a curtain and fires it, killing Bailey. Phillips
has his men seize the sets and costumes, and when Olsen and Johnson ask how
they’re going to be able to do a show without them, he sarcastically says,
“Over the radio — where they can’t see you!” Olsen and Johnson take him up on
the suggestion and sell a radio sponsor, MacDougal’s Mackerels, on a broadcast
in which they will launch a new series by revealing Bailey’s murderer on the
air — even though they have no idea who that is. At one point Olsen persuades
Johnson to confess to the crime himself — they’re fearful that they are responsible, because the killing happened right as
Sally, with her nose, “shot” a blank-loaded pistol as the climax of their act —
only Johnson can’t get the confession straight (instead of “I killed him
because he was a rat,” he keeps saying, “I killed him because I was a rat”) — and it ends with a weird scene in
which the police corner the criminal (Phillips, as if you couldn’t have guessed
— even though his motive remains on the obscure side) while the show’s band
plays a merry tune and Olsen, like Groucho Marx at the end of Monkey
Business, provides a sports-style
play-by-play description of the shootout.
All Over Town is one of those movies that seems less written than compiled from the memory banks of old-movie clichés — though
Jerome Chodorov, brother of fellow writer Edward Chodorov and a man with some
estimable credits in his own right, including the original 1944 documentary
version of Memphis Belle and both
versions of My Sister Eileen, is
one of the credited writers along with Richard English, Jack Townley and
“comedy construction” for James Parrott — and in his book Movie
Comedy Teams Leonard Maltin says the “general reaction” to
All Over Town when it was new was
that compared to it, Olsen and Johnson’s previous Republic feature, Country
Gentlemen, “was a gem” — but, perhaps because its plot is more trivial and therefore works better
as a frame for disconnected gags than the situation comedy of Country
Gentlemen, it strikes me as a much funnier
movie and a better showcase for the talents of its stars. Part of the
improvement may have been from the wholesale raid Republic staged on the
talents that had helped make the Laurel and Hardy classics for Hal Roach — the
director was James W. Horne, “comedy constructionist” James Parrott had also
directed Laurel and Hardy at Roach and was the brother of Roach star Charley
Chase, and to play MacDougal Republic borrowed the brilliant character comedian
James Finlayson (though they put a singularly ugly toupee on him and only
revealed his true baldness at the very end) — while they wisely avoided making
Olsen and Johnson lovably dumb in the Laurel and Hardy manner. Republic
generally husbanded their stars well — Gene Autry and Roy Rogers worked there
virtually forever and they kept their biggest star of all, John Wayne, for a
surprisingly long time even while he made movies for bigger studios (Wayne quit
Republic in 1952 because he was tired of being assigned movies with studio
owner Herbert Yates’s light-o’love, Vera Hruba Ralston) — but after the
box-office disappointment of All Over Town (a title explained only in the very last scene, in which the announcer
of the broadcast says that the next show in the series will be heard “all over
town”) Republic fired Olsen and Johnson.
This proved to be a spectacularly
ill-timed move, because just a year later, in 1938, Broadway impresario Lee
Shubert hired the team to headline a comedy revue called Hellzapoppin’ that turned out to be the biggest hit of their
career, a show that ran for three years and essentially anticipated the 1960’s
TV show Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In
in the sheer relentlessness of its humor and the way it threw its gags at the
audience both figuratively and literally from all directions. Olsen and Johnson
got a film contract from Universal and shot four films for them in the early
1940’s, and while as a screen team they never reached the heights of their
studio-mates Abbott and Costello, the four Universal Olsen and Johnson vehicles
(Hellzapoppin’, Crazy House, Ghost Catchers and See My Lawyer) deserve reissue as a two-DVD boxed set along the
lines of the first Bob Hope-Bing Crosby Road movies. All Over Town has intimations of the no-holds-barred style of
humor that later made Olsen and Johnson Broadway stars — including a routine
they couldn’t have done on stage, in which, fearing that Sally the seal has
swallowed the murder weapon, they take Sally and Inspector Murphy (Fred
Kelsey), the police officer investigating the case, on a roller-coaster ride to
get her to cough it up again (and the three homo sapiens naturally end up dizzy and nauseous while Sally eats
it up and wants to stay on the roller-coaster!) — as well as the wince-inducing
puns that are funny in spite of themselves: when Olsen announces that Sally was
born on Christmas day, Johnson says, “Yeah, she’s a Christmas seal.”
