by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles came home early from work
last night and we had a late-night supper and watched another movie after the
Ken Burns Country Music episode: Hellzapoppin’, a 1941 Universal production starring the comedy
team of Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson. In 1938 Olsen and Johnson had suddenly
become Broadway stars with a zany revue that took their old vaudeville act and
built it up into an evening-long performance that mercilessly attacked the
audience’s funnybones. The gags in the stage version of Hellzapoppin’ weren’t confined to the stage: in one of the most
famous bits a man would walk through the theatre lobby as the audience was
waiting for the doors to open carrying a small potted plant and calling, “Mr.
Jones? Mr. Jones?” Periodically the same man would walk through the theatre
with a plant, again calling, “Mr. Jones?,” and each time the plant would be
larger — until at the end of the show, as the audience filed through the lobby
to go home, the man would be stuck in the middle of a giant potted tree, still
yelling, “Mr. Jones?” The show featured a lot of stuffed birds flying overhead
on wires, as well as one of those air blasts they used to have at fun houses in
which a woman who was unlucky enough to be standing under it when it went off
would have her dress blown over her head. One older woman whom that happened to
during the stage run responded by flailing away with her umbrella at everyone
in sight — and it got such a big laugh that Olsen and Johnson assigned a cast
member to repeat the gag in future performances. Hellzapoppin’ was the prototype of the Rowan and
Martin’s Laugh-In of the late 1960’s and
early 1970’s (Dan Rowan admitted as much in an interview; he’d seen the stage
version of Hellzapoppin’ as a boy
and never forgot it) and a lot of frenzied, frantic sketch comedy since. At one
point Olsen and Johnson announced plans to make a movie of it and come as close
as they could on film to the craziness of the stage show, but instead of going
that route they sold the film rights to Universal — who concocted a weird
hybrid of Olsen and Johnson zaniness with a conventional love triangle and the accoutrements of standard movies, while simultaneously making fun
of what they were doing to shoehorn Hellzapoppin’ into screen conventions.
The film opens with its best
scene, an elaborate production number set in Hell, with stereotypical devils
singing a song about the joys of doing bad (though their evil is a predictably
sanitized Production Code-safe version of evil) — the funniest part of the
number is when they seal live humans into oil drum-sized cans labeled “Canned
Guy” and “Canned Gal” — when suddenly a taxi pulls up and out come a whole
bunch of live animals followed by Olsen and Johnson. “That’s the first cab
driver who’s taken me exactly
where I told him to go!” Johnson says. They do a number of other gags —
including one in which they resolve a fare dispute with the cab driver (whose
meter issues out a receipt similar in length to the ones that come from the CVS
chain nowadays) by waving at his cab and thereby causing it to blow up. Then
they turn to the camera and ask that the film be rewound. The projectionist is
a relative of theirs and is played by Shemp Howard (brother of Moe and Curly of
the original Three Stooges and later a Stooge himself), who’s sharing a
projection booth with his girlfriend — the same actress who played the
formidable café owner in W. C. Fields’ Never Give a Sucker an Even
Break, made the same year (1941) — and who
in one scene traps Olsen and Johnson on opposite sides of the screen since he’s
unable to frame the film properly after he and his girlfriend had an argument
and ended up throwing spools of film at each other, causing them to unravel.
Then we learn that we’re on the lot at Universal Pictures and Olsen and Johnson
are having an argument with the director assigned to their film (Richard Lane),
who’s called in a writer named Selby (Elisha Cook, Jr. playing one of the
ineffectual milquetoasts he got stuck with until his part as Wilmer in The
Maltese Falcon revitalized his career) to
work in a love story and a continuity plot into Hellzapoppin’. The plot Selby comes up with is set at a Long
Island estate and involves a rich family, the Rands: father Andrew (Clarence
Kolb), mother (Nella Walker) and daughter Kitty (the personable Jane Frazee).
Kitty, the ingénue lead, is in love with penniless playwright Jeff Hunter
(Robert Paige), who’s hoping to produce a show at the Rands’ estate (they have
an outdoor theatre like the one in Gold Diggers of 1935) that will attract the attention of a Broadway
producer and enable him to make enough money to marry Kitty without feeling
like a gold-digger. The plot is complicated by the fact that the Rands already
have a 1-percenter in mind for their daughter to marry, Woody Taylor (Lewis
Howard), the usual ineffectual creep, only Woody and Jeff are friends so Jeff
doesn’t want to take Kitty away from Woody even though Jeff is the one Kitty
wants.
There’s also a much more entertaining subplot involving Chic Johnson’s
sister Betty (Martha Raye, who had no trouble fitting into a zany comedy!) who
has the hots for Pepi (Mischa Auer), a penniless but authentic mittel-Europan count who’s posing as a fake count because, as he explains, if he were found out
to be a real one the novelty would wear off and none of the rich Americans
would be amused by him anymore. Pepi chases Betty when he thinks she has money;
when he finds out she doesn’t he doesn’t want anything to do with her, only she still chases him and sings him several songs — including one in which
Raye phrases surprisingly sensitively and romantically on the verse before
coming out on the chorus with all guns blazing at full volume and deliberately
off-center pitch. There are some huge production numbers, including Raye
singing “Watch the Birdie” (by Don Raye and Gene DePaul, as are all the songs
in the film except the oldie “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee”) in front of some stylized photography of divers in
the Rands’ pool that made me think they were deliberately parodying Leni
Riefenstahl’s Olympia, as well as
a water ballet filmed from overhead with the dancers in kaleidoscope formation
that had me joking, “Busby Berkeley, call your plagiarism attorney.” There are
quite a few shots that break the frame, and some pretty bizarre gags —
including an amazing scene in which Olsen, Johnson and Raye have a conversation
in front of archery targets totally oblivious to the fact that an undercover
detective (Hugh Herbert) hired by Andrew Rand to stake out his party and keep
Jeff from getting near his daughter is firing a crossbow at them. This is
actually one of Hugh Herbert’s most delightful roles — usually I find him
pretty oppressive, but get him out of the ghetto of “comic relief” roles in
Dick Powell musicals at Warner Bros. and pair him with genuinely great
comedians like Olsen and Johnson or W. C. Fields and he’s a lot funnier. Not
only does he wear a series of preposterous disguises throughout the film, in
one scene he keeps coming out from behind a tree and has a different disguise
on each time. “Don’t ask me how I do it, folks,” he tells us.
Hellzapoppin’ also has an early scene in which, walking through
the Universal lot, Olsen and Johnson see several sets — including one in which
a sled labeled “Rosebud” is hanging from a wall. Johnson recognizes it and
says, “I thought they burned that thing” — making him and Olsen almost
certainly the first people to parody Citizen Kane and establishing that Orson Welles’ classic, though
a box-office failure, attracted enough attention that a comedy team at
Universal could make fun of it and be reasonably assured that their audiences
would get the joke. There’s also a scene at the Rands’ party in which the
Frankenstein monster — played by stunt double Dale Van Sickel — serves as
bouncer and tells someone menaced by an unwanted guest, “May I be of
assistance?” (Apparently this was the first time anyone other than Boris Karloff played the Monster on
screen — though it’s possible Van Sickel or someone else had doubled for
Karloff in his three Frankenstein
movies.) I first heard of Hellzapoppin’ from Leonard Maltin’s book Movie Comedy Teams, and he lamented the compromises made to turn it
into, if not a normal movie, at least a weird hybrid of normal movie and comedy
onslaught — “The opening scene makes fun of Hollywood’s insistence on changing
successful stage shows, while the rest of the film proceeds to do exactly
that,” he wrote — but Hellzapoppin’
is still a very funny film and
well worth watching. The DVD we were watching was a grey-label release —
there’s no name or logo of the issuing company — which I stumbled on at the
Amazon.com Web site, but the transfer quality was excellent (doing full justice
to Woody Bredell’s surprisingly atmospheric cinematography, a far cry from the
plain, flatly lit camerawork of Universal’s W. C. Fields and Abbott and
Costello vehicles) and this will certainly do until Universal Home Video
packages all four of their Olsen and Johnson movies together the way they did with
the first four Bob Hope-Bing Crosby Road movies (please?).
