by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night our “feature” was the Abbott and Costello film Lost
in Alaska, the next in sequence in the
Universal boxed set of the 28 (out of their 36 films total) movies they made at
their main studio. It’s an odd movie that’s got some good moments even though
it’s not one of their best and one could tell that by this time the old
formulae were getting pretty threadbare through overuse. The film starts in San
Francisco in the 1890’s, where prospector Nugget Joe McDermott (a virtually
unrecognizable Tom Ewell under a lot of scraggly facial hair in an attempt to
make him look hard-bitten) is attempting to commit suicide because, even though
he has discovered a mine worth $2 million, it means nothing to him without the
love of his girlfriend Rosette (Mitzi Green, the spectacularly talented child
star of the early 1930’s who appeared in such children’s classics as Tom
Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Little
Orphan Annie, was in the original 1932 film
version of the Gershwin musical Girl Crazy, played herself as the girl who solves the mystery in the all-star
1931 short The Stolen Jools and
did a great number parodying Erich von Stroheim and George Arliss in the 1934 musical
Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round;
after that film she went to Broadway and starred in the original production of
the Rodgers and Hart musical Babes in Arms, after which she stayed on Broadway, married director
Joseph Pevney, returned to Hollywood with him when he won a contract at
Universal and got persuaded to make a comeback in this movie, her first
on-screen role as an adult; alas, she did very little additional work and died
tragically young in 1969 at the age of only 48). Nugget Joe disappears — he’s
actually planning to take a ship back to the Klondike to try to reconcile with
Rosette, who in the meantime has won a job singing at the saloon owned by Jake
Stillman (Bruce Cabot, whose career should have got off to an auspicious start
with his portrayal of Fay Wray’s human boyfriend in King Kong had RKO known what to do with them — his Kong role should have made him RKO’s Clark Gable but in
two years they were giving him one stereotyped gangster role after another in a
failed attempt to make him their James Cagney instead, and here he’s doing the
same schtick) and the admiration
of a number of Alaska prospectors with whom she plans to do a different sort of
gold-digging. But when the San Francisco authorities learn of his
disappearance, they decide he’s been murdered and blame volunteer firefighters
George Bell (Lou Costello) and Tom Watson (Bud Abbott) — the origins of their
names in Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Thomas Watson, generally
recognized as the inventors of the telephone, is one of the wittiest parts of a
script by Martin A. Ragaway and Leonard Stern (based on a story by Elwood
Ullman) that doesn’t have very many of them. (The director is the Boy Named
Jean Yarbrough in his last of five films with the comedy team.)
It’s yet
another Abbott and Costello movie you remember more for its parts than its
whole, including a scene in which the attorney Abbott and Costello — who
escaped the San Francisco authorities by joining Nugget Joe on his return to
Alaska — try to hire is literally
lifted off the street by a rope with one end tied as a noose just when Our
Heroes are trying to convince him the job they’re offering him is perfectly
safe; another in which Costello wins a small fortune at the roulette table
while he’s barking numbers to Stillman in an attempt to interrogate him, then
loses it all and has no idea he was ever ahead in the game; and a scene in
which, literally “lost in
Alaska,” they’re trying to fish and end up hooking a seal (though if the seal
had spoken to them à la the Bing
Crosby-Bob Hope Klondike spoof Road to Utopia the gag would have been even funnier!). Mitzi
Green’s two songs (I have been unable to find out any information about them
online, though imdb.com and the Wikipedia page on Lost in Alaska both list the young Henry Mancini as having worked,
uncredited, on this film and I suspect these were his contributions), one of
which, “I’m Just a Country Gal,” she sings in Stillman’s saloon in Skagway,
Alaska; and one, “A Hot Time in the Igloo Tonight,” as part of a preposterous
outdoor Native American festival in the middle of the Yukon (which also
features a variant of the famous crossed-swords dance from the stage musical Brigadoon that was unfortunately left out of its film), are
utterly delightful and add immeasurably to the entertainment value of this
film. (She’s clearly making fun of the Western-chanteuse roles Marlene Dietrich and Mae West had played in
previous Universal films, and even gets a bit of a parody of Dietrich’s “See
What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have” from Destry Rides Again.) Alas, the movie just peters out with an odd scene
in which, having loaded Nugget Joe’s whole fortune on a dogsled, they lose it —
it sinks into a hole in the ice and ends up in the ocean — and the film ends
surprisingly inconclusively and we miss the Last Laugh-style ending I was hoping for (also used in the very
best comedy ever made about the Klondike, Chaplin’s 1925 The Gold
Rush), in which Bud, Lou, Nugget Joe and
Rosette (who turns out to be a good girl after all) would have returned to San
Francisco in grand style, throwing their money around, with all suspicions of
murder against Bud and Lou of course ended by the appearance of their “victim”
alive after all and, what’s more, their good friend!
