by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran the recently arrived
DVD of the last Abbott and Costello movie I didn’t have in the collection, The
Noose Hangs High, credited on imdb.com to
“Abbott and Costello Productions” and released in 1948 through Eagle-Lion
Films. Eagle-Lion Films what was what PRC (the plucky little “B” studio founded
in 1939 whose name really stood for Producers’ Releasing Corporation but whose
films were generally so bad — though with a few exceptions like Bluebeard,
Detour, Out of the Night, Lady in the Death House and Strangler of the Swamp — the wags in Hollywood called it “Pretty Rotten
Crap”) became when J. Arthur Rank bought it. Rank wanted a guaranteed U.S.
outlet for his prestige British productions and he called his new company
“Eagle-Lion” to symbolize the union of American and British interests in it. It
didn’t last long; within three years he sold it to United Artists, but its
first year of operation it had a huge hit on both sides of the Atlantic in
Michael Powell’s and Emeric Pressburger’s ballet film The Red Shoes. With Rank’s money, Eagle-Lion was able to hire
bigger (if not necessarily “A”-list) stars, and Abbott and Costello came to
them on a one-picture deal to make the film they could legally do once a year
for a company other than Universal. Indeed, they were able to get Lou Costello
and his mom, Lolly Cristillo (“Cristillo” was the original spelling of the name
until Lou simplified it when he went into show business), listed as producers!
They carried over director Charles T. Barton from their Universal films but
used a committee-written script with no fewer than seven credited writers:
Julian Blaustein, Bernard Feins, John Grant, Charles Grayson, Howard Harris,
Arthur T. Horman and Daniel Taradash. (Two of the writers had their names
misspelled on the credits: Feins became “Fins” and Taradash, later an Academy
Award winner for his adaptation of James Jones’ novel From Here to Eternity, became “Tardash.”)
Despite the credits to six
other writers, it’s clear the main author is John Grant, not only because he’d
been with Abbott and Costello even before their film career started (he wrote
“Who’s on First?” and the other famous dialogue routines A&C did on their
radio broadcasts) but because he liberally sprinkled the script for The
Noose Hangs High with excerpts from
previously performed Abbott and Costello material, including the famous routine
in which someone tries to explain to Costello that “a horse eats its fodder”
and Costello assumes that mean horses feed on their male parents. (Alas,
perhaps because of Production Code restrictions, the version here is missing
the funniest line of the original, when Costello responds to “a horse eats its
fodder” by saying, “What is he, a cannibal?”) When I looked up The Noose
Hangs High on imdb.com, the reviewer
called it “sub-par” and said the other Abbott and Costello films from the era —
most notably the ones in which they got to “meet” Frankenstein, Dracula, the
Invisible Man and the Mummy — were better. Leonard Maltin’s chapter on Abbott
and Costello in his book Movie Comedy Teams dismissed it as “inconsequential,” and even
Charles thought it was far from their best. I quite liked it, mainly for the
same reason the imdb.com reviewer didn’t: its virtual absence of a plot. Oh,
there’s a story of sorts: Abbott and Costello play window washers whose company
name, “Speedy,” gets them mistaken for messengers. As such, they’re hired by
bookie Nick Craig (Joseph Calleia in the sort of role he could have played in
his sleep, which sometimes it looked like he was doing here) to deliver $50,000
to a middleman who will in turn pay it to J. C. McBride (the marvelous British
comedian Leon Errol) to cover a bet McBride made with Craig and won.
Unfortunately, Our Heroes are scared by the two thugs Craig hired to tail them,
Chuck (the marvelous Mike Mazurki from Murder, My Sweet and the first RKO Dick Tracy) and Joe (Jack Overman), so they hide out in a
mailing room sending out samples of face powder to women. Costello stuffs the
$50,000 in an envelope and intends to put it in another envelope so he can mail it back to Craig, but he
loses it and instead it ends up in an envelope destined for Miss Van Buren
(Isabel Randolph).
Miss Van Buren is apparently bedridden and is giving her
maid/caregiver Carol Blair (the personable Cathy Downs, who looks as undercast
in her role as Patricia Morison was in the petty villain roles they were giving
her at Universal before she escaped to Broadway and the female lead in the
premiere production of Kiss Me, Kate) a hard time. When the powder ad arrived with the $50,000 in it, Miss
Van Buren specifically tells Carol she can do anything she likes with the
envelope’s contents — and so Carol treats herself to a shopping spree including
renting a new apartment, buying a new car (a convertible whose top keeps coming
down and whose hood keeps flying up at the most inopportune moments) and of
course, being a woman in a 1948 movie, treating herself to tons of new
fashionable clothes. Our Heroes track down the mailing list of people the face
powder samples were sent to, and trace Carol and try to get the money back — at
one point, having heard that J. C. McBride never loses, they decided to put the
remaining $2,000 on a 30-to-1 longshot in the next day’s horse race — which
they watch on a TV screen in a nightspot with the au courant name “The Television Club” — only they bet the
money on “Lolly C.” (a horse deliberately named after Costello’s real-life
mother) while, unbeknownst to them, McBride has switched his own bet to the
eventual winner, Lucky George. Worried that Craig’s thugs are going to catch up
to them and knock them off, Abbott and Costello decide to get themselves
arrested so they’ll at least be in police custody instead of out on the open
where Craig and his thugs can get them — only, in the film’s funniest scene by
far, everything goes wrong for them. They
throw a rock through a store window — and get congratulations from the store
owner for proving the window wasn’t unbreakable, as the man who sold it to them
(and who’s the one who actually ends up arrested) had told him. They try to
steal a coat from a man who’s carrying it — only the man stole the coat himself
and thinks Costello is merely the rightful owner stealing it back. Eventually
they hit on the idea of running up a huge tab at the Copper Club, the city’s
most expensive restaurant, and then getting themselves arrested when they
refuse to pay for it — only McBride, who’s known to Our Heroes only as “Julius
Caesar” (they assume he thinks he’s the Roman one and he’s crazy — “Well, I’m
Brutus,” sneers Costello — but
that’s just what the “J. C.” in his name stands for, and he ultimately loses
$50,000 to Carol at some incomprehensible game, she pays off Craig, Craig pays
off McBride, the cops show up and arrest the gangsters just as they were about
to plunge Abbott’s and Costello’s feet in cement and throw them off the dock, Carol
and McBride pair off and everything is more or less happy at the end.
But, even
more so here than in most A&C movies, the plot is merely pretext for a lot
of great John Grant dialogue routines (including one in which Abbott fools
Costello into betting $10 that he isn’t here — “Are you in Chicago?” “No.” “Are
you in Philadelphia?” “No.” “Are you in St. Louis?” “No.” “Then if you’re not
in Chicago, and you’re not in Philadelphia, and you’re not in St. Louis, you
must be somewhere else. And if you’re somewhere else, you’re not here.” Then
Costello pulls it on Mike Mazurki, and when Mazurki accuses Costello of
stealing his money, Costello says, “If I’m not here, how could I take your
money?”), and the supporting cast is better than usual. Cathy Downs is a personable
young woman who seems like she should have had more of a career than she did —
she seems like she could have been a good femme fatale in films noir as well as a comedy ingénue — and besides Calleia, Errol and Mazurki,
the film also features Fritz Feld in a great routine as a psychiatrist who
thinks he’s losing his own head when he sees Lou Costello’s head poking through
his floor. (Costello’s head got there via a crazy dentist with a chair that
elevated so high that it pushed Costello’s head through the ceiling and onto
the floor of the psychiatrist’s office just above.) While hardly a patch on the
great early-1930’s Marx Brothers Paramount classics — Monkey Business, Horse
Feathers, Duck Soup — The Noose Hangs High scores with a similarly irreverent attitude
towards the whole idea of plot and story continuity, and while not much of Noose is laugh-out-loud funny it is quite amusing throughout.
