by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I dredged up something I’d downloaded from archive.org last
August: Country Gentlemen, a 1936 film
from Republic that starred the vaudeville comedy team of Ole Olsen and Chic
Johnson, helpfully identified with their photos in the film’s opening credits
so we can tell which one is which. The American Film Institute
Catalog identifies this as their first film
— which it wasn’t: they’d made three for Warner Bros. in 1930-31 (Oh!
Sailor Behave, Fifty Million Frenchmen and Gold
Dust Gertie) — though it’s a considerably
better movie than Gold Dust Gertie,
the only one of their Warners films I’ve actually seen. In 1938 Olsen and
Johnson would break through to a much bigger audience with their Broadway hit Hellzapoppin’, which was essentially a nonpolitical live version
of the later TV show Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, and they would make four films for Universal in the
early to mid-1940’s (Hellzapoppin’, Crazy House, Ghost Catchers and See My Lawyer) that would be well worth reviving as a two-DVD
boxed set.
Country Gentlemen is a
surprisingly dark comedy that casts Olsen and Johnson as a couple of swindlers,
J. D. Hamilton and Charlie Williams, who in the opening scene are forced to
flee New York City ahead of the police, who are about to arrest them and shut
down their phony gold-mining operation. At one point Hamilton tells Williams
their gold-mine bonds aren’t going to be worth anything until 50 million years;
then he says they won’t be worth anything until 15 million years, and Williams
said, “That’s a relief. I thought you said 50 million years.” They drive cross-country
with their former secretary, Gertie (Joyce Compton), and Gertie’s dog Snuffy
(played by “Prince, the Great Dane” — I joked that in his next movie he was
billed as “the dog formerly known as Prince”), stowing away in their
convertible, and they end up on the outskirts of Los Angeles in a town called
Chesterville, whose main attraction for the con artists is a large veterans’
hospital with a lot of veterans who have just received their bonus checks,
which Our Anti-Heroes are predictably anxious to relieve them of.
They also
meet widow Louise Heath (Lila Lee, mother of A Chorus Line writer James Kirkwood, Jr.) and her son Billy (Sammy
McKim), and they start drilling an oil well outside of town, never expecting
actually to strike oil — though of course they do, and while they’ve sold the
entire oil well to the veterans, their gold bonds also turn out to be for a genuinely valuable and
productive mine — thereby providing a predictably happy ending for a comedy
that otherwise is surprisingly dark, notably in the scenes towards the end in
which the angry veterans, sure that Hamilton and Williams have stolen all their
money, advance on them in an angry mob and actually string them up to poles,
ready to lynch them, until one of the veterans throws a stick of dynamite down
the supposedly dry-hole oil well, causing it to gusher. The film steals from a lot of other comedians, including Laurel and Hardy (when
I saw Gold Dust Gertie one of my
reflections was how much funnier that film would have been with Laurel and
Hardy in it — though Country Gentlemen wouldn’t have worked with Stan and Ollie because the
characters needed to be sharp, not stupid) and the Marx Brothers, but it’s
still quite charming and amusing, and Lila Lee turns in a sensitive,
sympathetic performance as the decent woman caught up in the stars’ schemes
that makes one wonder why her career went downhill so fast when sound came in.
