by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I ended the evening by
watching the next in sequence in the Abbott and Costello boxed set: Here
Come the Co-Eds, a 1945 Universal film
produced by their long-time writer, John Grant — oddly, since the film relied
almost exclusively on slapstick for its laughs and didn’t have any of the
marvelous bits of word-play (including the famous “Who’s on First?” routine)
Grant had written for them. It was also a bit on the long side for an Abbott
and Costello vehicle — the running time was a full 90 minutes and much of it
was taken up by the featured musical guests, comic singer Peggy Ryan (who plays
a dumb college girl — it’s indicative of the 1930’s and 1940’s movie attitude
towards higher education that that’s not a contradiction in terms — who falls hard for, of all people, Lou
Costello) and Phil Spitalny and His Hour of Charm All-Girl Orchestra, featuring
Evelyn and Her Magic Violin. Evelyn was actually quite good — her rendition of
Sarasate’s “Zigeunerweisen” (which two years later was the source for the song
“Golden Earrings,” performed by Marlene Dietrich in her Paramount film of that
name) is impressively virtuosic and blessed with a lot more finger vibrato than
a modern-day violinist would be allowed to get away with — but Spitalny (who
quite obviously wasn’t female)
led a pretty draggy orchestra that alternated between lush string-driven
instrumentals, a cappella vocal
choirs from his musicians (actually quite nice, though a little of the
all-woman a cappella choir sound
goes a long way) and one number where they break out jazz instruments and
attempt to swing. (They’re O.K. in that department but Ina Ray Hutton and Rita
Rio wouldn’t have lain awake nights worrying about the competition, and the
International Sweethearts of Rhythm would have eaten them alive!)
Anyway, Here
Come the Co-Eds is a typical Abbott and
Costello vehicle in which they start the movie working as taxi dancers in a
dance hall — frankly I wasn’t aware that any of these establishments provided
male partners for women who
wanted someone to dance with and couldn’t or wouldn’t go on dates, but there
they are, only they have a mixup with both the management and the cops and they
need to find somewhere to hide out in a hurry. Abbott’s character is called
Slats McCarthy and Costello’s is called Oliver Quackenbush (how he got away with playing someone named Quackenbush
while Groucho Marx couldn’t in A Day at the Races is a mystery; maybe it was because Costello, unlike
Groucho, wasn’t impersonating a doctor in the film), and the gimmick is that
one of the female taxi dancers at the ballroom is Slats’ sister Molly (Martha
O’Driscoll), whom he’s trying to promote into a bigger entertainment career.
One way he’s done that is to plant a story in a magazine called Pic (obviously patterned on the real-life Life) that her dream is to attend all-female Bixby
College. Bixby’s progressive dean, Larry Benson (Donald Cook), decides to offer
her the college’s annual scholarship on the ground that at least once it should
go to someone who couldn’t afford to attend the college without it.
Unfortunately, his progressive ideas are being sabotaged by the college’s
principal funder, Jonathan Kirkland (Charles Dingle), whose daughter Diane
(June Vincent) is in love with Dean Benson. Kirkland père is determined to run Bixby the way it was run when
his mother, grandmother and great-grandmother went there (as Charles pointed
out, the film’s title is a misnomer: a co-ed is a woman student at a
gender-mixed college, but Bixby’s student body is all-female and therefore none
of its students are co-eds), and he sabotages Benson’s innovations at every
turn and at one point threatens to close the college down altogether by calling
in the $20,000 in loans it owes him. Abbott and Costello end up working at Bixby
as caretakers under the supervision of a loathsome character named Johnson (Lon
Chaney, Jr., who the same year this film was made played the Wolf-Man opposite
Martha O’Driscoll in a much more typical vehicle for him, the horror omnibus House
of Dracula), who takes an instant dislike
to them and gives them both a hard time.
The essence of the film is a series of
big slapstick set-pieces, starting at the ballroom when every time a woman
picks Costello as her dancing (or, in one case, just necking) partner, a
near-sighted man (Richard Lane) comes along, accuses Costello of trying to take
his wife away from him, knocks him into a potted plant, then puts on his
glasses and realizes the woman Costello is with is not his wife (the topper occurs when Costello explains
to Abbott why he keeps getting knocked over and a woman, thinking Costello is
seriously accusing Abbott of taking away his wife, knocks Abbott into the plant); a nice scene in which Abbott and
Costello suddenly realize the car they’ve stolen is a police cruiser (they
return it, then accidentally set it on fire — a gag Laurel and Hardy could have
made more of but it’s still pretty funny); a scene at the college in which
they’re trying to clean up a kitchen and end up getting their hands and feet stuck
in molasses, bread dough and other sticky substances; a neat variation on the
crap-game sequence in Buck Privates
in which Costello swallows Chaney’s loaded dice and Chaney and Abbott use him
as a human dice cup, with an X-ray machine (they’re in the college’s
fluoroscope room) telling them how the dice inside Costello’s stomach landed; a
wrestling match in which Costello is supposed to fight “The Masked Marvel” and
win $1,000 which Abbott can then bet on the Bixby team to win its big
basketball game against rival Carlton (they’re 20-to-1 underdogs and therefore
this will give Abbott the money to pay off Kirkland’s loans and save Bixby),
which seems O.K. because the Marvel (Sammy Stein) is an old friend of Abbott’s
and agrees to throw the match — only at the last minute the Marvel has to drop
out because he’s O.D.’d on banana splits and Chaney’s character replaces him
(wearing a skin-tight all-black costume with white rings around the eyes and
mouth — he looks like a were-skunk and seems surprisingly athletic, though I
suspect the already bloated Chaney had a stunt double for this sequence); the
basketball game itself, for which Chaney’s character works out a fix with the
gamblers and the Carlton team to import ringers — a professional women’s
basketball team called the Amazons — for the second half of the game; and a
final chase scene in which Abbott and Costello are fleeing with the $20,000 in
a boat, though they’re not anywhere near the water: the boat is on a four-wheel
trailer that’s detached from its hitch and A&C are using its sail to make
it go on dry land.
It’s a nonsensical movie but also a very funny one; as I’ve
noted before (including in the early 2000’s after the American Movie Classics
channel, back when it still was a
movie-classics channel instead of a dumping ground for John Wayne, James Bond
and quirky original series like Mad Men and The Walking Dead,
ran most of the A&C films and I recorded them then), compared to their
predecessors in movie comedy — Chaplin, Keaton, Langdon and Lloyd in the silent
era; Laurel and Hardy on both sides of the silent-sound transition; and the
Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields in the 1930’s — Abbott and Costello weren’t that good, but compared to everyone and everything that’s
happened in movie comedy since, they’re utterly hilarious!
