by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After From Caligari to Hitler I wanted something considerably lighter, and I ended up screening
Charles the companion piece to The Time of Their Lives on disc eight of the Universal Home Video 14-DVD
boxed set of the complete Abbott and Costello at Universal (which constitutes
28 of their 36 feature-length films): Buck Privates Come Home. As the title suggests, this is a sequel to their
star-making hit from 1941, Buck Privates, which was the highest-grossing box-office hit made in the U.S. that
year (a considerable accomplishment when you consider that was the year of Citizen
Kane, The Maltese Falcon, Sergeant York, How Green Was My Valley, Here Comes
Mr. Jordan and quite a few other
acknowledged masterpieces). The original Buck Privates had been such a mega-hit largely due to its
topicality — it began with newsreel footage of President Franklin Roosevelt
signing the draft bill into law in October 1940 (the first time the U.S. had
ever had a draft in peacetime) and showed Abbott and Costello as ultra-raw
recruits who join the Army by accident and, of course, spend several reels picturesquely
screwing up. In this sequel, set in the year it was made — 1947 — Abbott and
Costello play the same characters, “Slicker” Smith (Bud Abbott) and Herbie
Brown (Lou Costello), who have somehow survived the war in Europe and, after a
six-minute prologue of clips from the original Buck Privates (including the famous screwed-up drill sequence that
Abbott and Costello largely improvised on set, and which during the war was
included in a Japanese propaganda film aimed at their servicemembers to show that ours weren’t so
dangerous) we meet them on a troop transport going home.
The
about-to-be-discharged men are singing a song called “We’re Going Home” — which
later gets parodied at various points (the Andrews Sisters, who provided such
appealing musical numbers as USO entertainers in the original Buck
Privates, are sorely missed here) — only
when Abbott and Costello finally get home the only career they have to go back
to is their old one of selling bootleg ties on the streets of New York. Alas,
their old nemesis as both police officer before the war and drill sergeant
during it, Collins (Nat Pendleton, in his final film), got back his old job as a cop and is soon chasing them. The film
is mostly a brilliant set of comedy sequences instead of a coherent story, but
to the extent the movie has a
plot it’s about Abbott’s and Costello’s attempts to keep a French war orphan,
Evey LeBrec (Beverly Simmons — they could have come up with a more appealing
French character name for her, but Simmons is refreshingly unsentimental and
un-Shirley Temple-ish at a time when, though Temple herself had aged out of kid
roles, her example had set the template for the depiction of virtually all movie children), in the U.S. rather than let her be
deported back to France, where she’d end up in an orphanage because she has no
family members left. They’re aided in this by aspiring race-car driver and
designer Bill Gregory (the almost terminally dull Tom Brown) and his
girlfriend, Lt. Sylvia Hunter (Joan Fulton, a.k.a. Joan Shawlee and a
considerably spunkier and more appealing heroine than usually got cast in roles
like this), whom Our Heroes met on the boat coming home and who agreed to take
charge of Evey until she could be sent back to France.
The big comic scenes
include one in which Costello accidentally sets off a booby-trapped grenade
(it’s concealed inside a camera) and has to throw it out of a porthole on board
ship so it will explode harmlessly in the water; one in which a banquet table
that was supposed to be supported by two sawhorses but in fact has only one
under it (Costello mistakenly took the other away) is precariously balanced and
ends up propelling a cake, slingshot-style, into Nat Pendleton’s face; one in
which Costello becomes the target in a game of tug-of-war between Abbott and a
jealous man on the other end of a tenement block who accuses Costello of
messing with his wife — Costello is on a blanket he suspended from a
clothesline to make a D.I.Y. hammock and, after a restful night’s sleep, he
awakens and suddenly realizes he’s suspended over an alley several floors below
— and a great slapstick chase scene in which Costello is at the wheel of
Gregory’s super-car, driving it down city streets, in and out of buildings, and
at one point ending up with an advertising billboard around his neck whose
broad, flat surface generates enough lift that he at least briefly flies. (The
special effects in these scenes are excellent and completely convincing, a far
cry from the abysmal process work that marred several similar chase scenes in
Laurel and Hardy’s movies at Hal Roach Studios in the early 1930’s.) There’s
even a marvelous scene in which Costello gets to enact his heartbreak at being
about to lose Evey to the government bureaucracy that insists she has to be
sent back — a flash of the sort of pathos that, if they’d pursued it more,
would have made Abbott and Costello even greater than they were. Buck
Privates Come Home is a sure-fire laugh
machine, lacking the richness of The Time of Their Lives (which had been a box-office flop) but at least
allowing us to see Abbott and Costello truly work as a team again — apparently
they’d settled the feud that had left them refusing to speak together during
the production of Little Giant
and The Time of Their Lives
unless they were acting a scene together, and had forced the writers of those
films to accommodate them by giving them as few scenes together as possible!
