by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was In the Navy, Abbott and Costello’s third film for Universal
(third film, period) and the immediate follow-up to Buck Privates (years later Martin and Lewis would follow the
same pattern, doing At War with the Army and then following it up almost immediately with Sailor Beware), though given the huge success of Buck
Privates Universal upped the budget
on this one and gave cinematographer Joseph Valentine a chance to create some
lovely atmospherics on a studio-set “exterior” representing a tropical
environment (a set Universal used again and again and again, including a later Abbott and Costello vehicle, Pardon
My Sarong). They also hired a more
prestigious romantic lead than the one from Buck Privates (Lee Bowman, who more commonly played villains):
Dick Powell, cast as “Russ Raymond, Radio’s Singing Heart Throb,” who’s tired
of celebrity life in general and being mobbed by his fans in particular. So he
decides to enlist in the Navy under his real name, Tommy Halstead, and spend
the next six years of his life (the length of his pre-war hitch) as just
another sailor. Only reporter Dorothy Roberts (Claire Dodd, usually cast as a
home-wrecking villainess but getting a chance to play a spunky comic role here)
is bound and determined to get photos of Russ Raymond, sailor, so she follows
him through the entire film, posing as a chambermaid at the “Conquistador
Hotel” in San Diego where he stays before he reports for training (the scenes
were shot at the Naval Training Center in San Diego and, though you only get a
brief glimpse of its exterior, the “Conquistador Hotel” is pretty obviously the
U.S. Grant) and going so far as to dress herself in (male) sailor drag and stow
away on the battleship U.S.S. Alabama when he ships out to Hawai’i.
Abbott and Costello play Smokey Adams and
Pomeroy Watson, Navy cooks (Pomeroy has survived a typically Costellan series
of comic screw-ups because a high-ranking admiral especially likes his cream
puffs) who end up on the Alabama with the rest of the principals (including the Andrews Sisters, once
again playing themselves and serving as a kind of all-around portable morale
booster — though Patty Andrews is also cast as Lou Costello’s unrequited love
interest: he’s written her that he’s tall, handsome and an admiral, and when
she finds out the truth she dumps him). It’s not as highly regarded as Buck
Privates, and the songs by Don Raye
and Gene DePaul aren’t as good as the ones from the earlier film (there’s a hot
number called “Gimme Some Skin” that the Andrews Sisters perform — given that
it’s a song about Harlem they could have done it in blackface, but they didn’t,
more’s the pity — but no swing or boogie songs comparable to “Boogie Woogie
Bugle Boy” or “Bounce Me, Brother, with a Solid Four”), but otherwise this is a
definite improvement. The director was Arthur Lubin (again) and the writing
credits go to Arthur T. Horman for the basic story and “book” portions and John
Grant for the hilarious Abbott and Costello special material (including an
exercise in New Math in which Costello “proves” that seven times 13 is 28) — and
later in 1941 life imitated art when superstar bandleader Artie Shaw suddenly
walked out on his career and joined the
Navy. (The real-life Navy pressed Shaw into service as a bandleader,
essentially making him what Glenn Miller was with the Army Air Force — but
while Miller’s service band played mostly at bases in Allied countries and got
to make Armed Forces Radio broadcasts and V-Disc records, Shaw’s actually
played in combat zones and is frustratingly undocumented on record.)
Ironically, before In the Navy Abbott and Costello had actually filmed a horror-comedy called Hold
That Ghost, but Universal production
head Cliff Work decided to put that production on hold and rush a second
service comedy out to capitalize on the success of Buck Privates — and after In the Navy was finished Hold That Ghost was revamped to include a romantic subplot and
songs by the Andrews Sisters (making that their third Abbott and Costello movie
in a row) and Ted Lewis’s band. Universal made In the Navy so quickly that it was already scheduled to be
released on May 30, 1941 even before Lubin started shooting it on April 7 — a
relentless schedule that got complicated by the fact that the Navy had been
given approval rights on the film and it couldn’t be released without the O.K. of
one Commander Bolton (Thomas Schatz’ book The Genius of the System tells this story but doesn’t give Bolton’s first
name), who didn’t like the first draft of the script and sent Universal a note
that the film must be “kept in the spirit of good, clean fun … it is a lampoon
from start to finish and must be kept in that spirit.” He specifically targeted
the elaborate brawl at a dance hall and asked that it be either shortened or
removed (it was kept in, heavily edited, but the original trailer included some
of the outtakes).
The biggest problem with the Navy was the final scene, in
which Costello’s character accidentally gives the Alabama’s captain a sleep-inducing drug, impersonates the
captain (in a ridiculous uniform that makes him look like Napoleon) and leads
the ship on an hilariously bungled set of maneuvers. This required a
complicated mix of live footage, stock shots and model work, all lined up by
Universal effects whiz John P. Fulton (the man who’d figured out how to make
Claude Rains, Vincent Price and Jon Hall invisible) and requiring extensive
post-production work on optical effects, which meant more time than usual
between the completion of shooting and the assembly of the shots into a
releasable sequence. The shoot was delayed by weather and then further delayed
by Commander Bolton, who saw the final sequence, went ballistic and said that
if the scene remained in the film he couldn’t approve it for release. So the
producer, Alex Gottlieb, called Horman and Grant back together and they decided
to rework the setup for the scene so that, instead of impersonating the drugged
captain, Costello took the drug himself and dreamed the sequence. (This actually brought In the
Navy even more in line with its
model, Buck Privates, in which
Costello had dreamed himself to be a captain in a similar, though much less
elaborate, scene.) The script was rewritten on May 17, 1941, the retakes were
shot on May 18, the re-editing was done May 19 and a print was flown across the
country to Washington, D.C. on May 20 for screening to Bolton and other Navy
officials. On May 21 director Lubin received a wire from the Navy Department
which read, “Your picture passed 100 percent. Have accomplished three weeks’
work in one day. Congratulations.” Later Bolton wrote Work that he found the
finished film “delightful,” and added, “The ingenious twist of having Costello
drink the sleeping potion eliminated the only possibly objectionable material.”
In the Navy is a fully professional
film whose smooth production finish belies the helter-skelter way in which it
was made, with Universal getting weird notes not only from the Production Code
Administration (which they were used to) but the Navy (which they weren’t),
opening with an odd scene in which Russ Raymond, America’s Singing Heart Throb,
is broadcasting with a “roo” moustache (which Dick Powell loses early on as
part of his just-another-sailor disguise) and an oddly visible growth of beard
that makes him look more like the Dick Powell who played Philip Marlowe in Murder,
My Sweet three years later than the
one who’d been Ruby Keeler’s nice young singing boyfriend in all those Warners
musicals in the 1930’s (including a previous Navy-themed film, Shipmates
Forever) — Powell was the “on his
way down” casting in this film to balance Abbott and Costello, who were clearly
on their way up; no one in Hollywood could have guessed that Powell would be
able to mount a comeback, or that he’d do so in a genre so different from musicals as film noir! As it stands, it’s a good mix of romance, music and
hilarious comedy, both physical and dialogue (later Abbott and Costello would
rely less on the great word-play routines John Grant cooked up for them and
more on slapstick, at which they weren’t as good) and in some ways a more
winning film than Buck Privates, thanks largely to Powell’s presence and also to the finely honed
performance by Claire Dodd, who was no doubt relieved to be playing something
than the “other woman” for a change!
