by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched a
movie together: Who Done It?, the next in sequence in the boxed set of the complete Abbott and
Costello on Universal and a quite funny film. It was the first film Abbott and
Costello ever made that was not a musical — by 1942 Universal was convinced that their star comedians
could carry a movie and draw an audience without having to drag in the Andrews
Sisters, Dick Powell, Martha Raye or Ella Fitzgerald to warble a few songs —
and though it was a pretty straightforward murder mystery with comedy (and the
sometimes awkwardly structured script by Stanley Roberts, Edmund Joseph and
John Grant doesn’t combine the mystery and comedy elements all that well —
instead they just kind of sit on each other), it’s also a screamingly funny
film from Abbott and Costello’s first introduction (they’re counterpeople at a
delicatessen and Costello is trying to make a customer the limburger-cheese
sandwich he’s ordered, only he’s so overcome by the fumes he keeps passing out
and finally has to put on a gas mask to make the sandwich) to their final
climax, a shoot-out on the roof of the radio building where the action has
taken place. It has a cast that almost counts as all-star by Universal
standards — the “straight” (in both senses) leads are Patric Knowles as Jimmy
Turner, a professor who’s turned amateur radio writer and whose scripts have
won him the job replacing burned-out writer Marco Heller (the marvelous
character actor Jerome Cowan) on the GBS network’s big program, Murder at
Midnight; and Louise Allbritton as
Jane Little, Turner’s old girlfriend and now the producer of Murder at
Midnight.
The cast is filled with
eccentrically cast character actors as well: Thomas Gomez as GBS owner Col. J.
R. Andrews (a pretty obvious takeoff on General David Sarnoff, the founder and
head of NBC), Ludwig Stössel (billed without his umlaut) as Dr. Anton Marek,
who’s not only Col. Andrews’ personal physician but also a Czech war refugee;
Mary Wickes as Juliet Collins, a secretary at GBS whom Chick Larkin (Bud Abbott)
asks his friend Mervin Q. Milgrim (Lou Costello) to romance in order to get
them an “in” selling their radio script to GBS (and when they perform their
script for her, one half-expects her to pull the old gag of hiring them, making
them think their piece works as serious drama, then putting it on the air as a
comedy); and William Gargan and William Bendix as the two cops who pull the
case when Col. Andrews is killed, electrocuted by his own microphone during a
broadcast. Later Dr. Marek is found murdered as well, and though this isn’t one
of Abbott and Costello’s service comedies the motive was trendily war-related:
Col. Andrews, who had served as a military cryptographer during World War I,
has noticed that certain lines in a broadcast that’s ostensibly just a series
of trivia are actually code giving away the sailing times and routes of
American convoys so German U-boats can sink them, and he works with Dr. Marek
because the decoded messages are not in English and Marek, a linguist as well
as an M.D., can translate them.
Not particularly surprisingly, the killer turns
out to be someone who’s otherwise barely in the movie (and whose character is
otherwise so unimportant I can’t even remember his name), but the revelation of
“who done it?” is more beside the point than usual in a film memorable for its
fine comedy routines, including the “watts-volts” dialogue in which Abbott is
attempting to explain to Costello the basics of electronic physics and Costello
fails to see the connection between watts and volts, and works up to the
punchline, “Next thing I know you’ll be telling me watts’ on second base!” (later
there’s an in-joke in which Abbott’s and Costello’s characters hear Abbott and
Costello do the “Who’s On First?” routine on a portable radio and talk about
how they’ve never liked them) as well as a scene in which Abbott and Costello
disguise themselves as acrobats and crash a theatre in the radio building (at
first I wondered who would have put an acrobat act on radio, but then I realized this was a room in the
building that was operating as a theatre for live acts and wasn’t connected to
the broadcasting company) and the stunt work is amazing (both Abbott and
Costello did a lot of their own stunts, and what they didn’t do themselves they
had their brothers, Norman Abbott and Pat
Costello, doing for them so you didn’t get the credibility-jarring mismatches
in appearance between stars and stunt doubles that have marred quite a lot of
movies).
There’s also a good slapstick scene in which A&C escape the radio
building because cops Gargan and Bendix are in hot pursuit of them (there’s a
great scene in which Gargan is tricked by Costello into handcuffing himself,
and a follow-up scene in which Gargan has been let out of the handcuffs by Mary
Wickes but A&C continue to taunt him because they don’t know that), only
they have to sneak back in so Costello can claim his prize on the Wheel of
Fortune program (and the “topper”
of that gag is that the I.D. Costello uses to prove his identity is his old
Girl Scouts membership card!) and a nice ending that goes on a bit too long but
has some ingenious gags of its own, including Costello improvising a slingshot
to shoot out some of the letters on a lighted rooftop sign that reads, “VOTE
FOR TOWNSEND PHELPS,” so it forms the message “SEND HELP” — and after the
villain is safely caught Costello throws something else at the sign so the “S”
and the “HELP” parts of the sign burn out and we’re left with the word “END” to
signal that the film has indeed ended. (I miss the words “The End” at the end
of today’s films.)
