by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was the next Abbott and Costello
movie in the sequence, Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd, which was their second and last film for Warner
Bros. (through an “independent” production company called Woodley Productions).
Sources differ on just how these two films, Jack and the Beanstalk (a sort-of adaptation of the classic fairy tale
which began and ended in black-and-white but the fantasy part was in color à
la The Wizard of Oz) and Abbott
and Costello Meet Captain Kidd, got made
and why. One source on imdb.com says it was because Abbott and Costello wanted
to make films in color and Universal wouldn’t give them the budget (in the
early 1950’s it still cost about twice as much to make a film in color as in
black-and-white); another said that it was a way of creating nest eggs for both
Abbott and Costello, since each of the films would be owned by one of the star
— Jack and the Beanstalk was to
be Costello’s and Captain Kidd
was Abbott’s — though as things turned out Jack and the Beanstalk slipped into the public domain and Captain
Kidd didn’t. Producer Alex Gottlieb (who
had made Abbott and Costello’s star-making films for Universal in the early
1940’s) wisely hired Charles Laughton to play Captain Kidd, since Laughton had
already played him in a 1945 film directed by Rowland V. Lee from a script by
his brother Robert, and while having little to do with the life of the real
Captain Kidd it was a quite entertaining film, well balanced between serious
action drama and camp, despite some major overacting from the cast (even a
normally restrained performer like Randolph Scott, playing the good-guy
romantic lead, got some teeth marks on the scenery). Abbott and
Costello Meet Captain Kidd contains six
songs by Bob Russell and Lester Lee — when the first one came on, a choral
number in which Captain Kidd’s crew sings his praises, Charles joked, “Ah!
Abbott and Costello in The Pirates of Penzance!” He wasn’t far wrong; though Russell and Lee are
hardly in Gilbert and Sullivan’s league as a songwriting team, they came up with
some fun songs (considerably better than the lame ones they wrote for Jack
and the Beanstalk), and Alex Gottlieb’s
casting people came up with two nice-voiced singers to play the romantic leads:
Irish tenor Bill Shirley as Bruce Martingale and big-band singer Fran Warren,
billed as making her movie debut, as his love interest, Lady Jane. (Warren had
sung with the Claude Thornhill band a decade earlier and been the vocalist on
their biggest hit, “A Sunday Kind of Love.”)
The problem with this movie is that
virtually nothing happens; the
characters simply chase each other around sets both representing ships and
shore, and though I nodded off during much of the movie Abbott and Costello
seemed in the parts I did see
more like comic-relief sidekicks in an operetta than stars. The script was
credited to Howard Dimsdale and John Grant, but it doesn’t seem like Grant had
that much to do with it because he was A&C’s go-to guy for “Who’s on
First”-style wordplay and there’s virtually nothing of that sort of thing here.
The director was Charles Lamont, who by then was making most of A&C’s films
at Universal too, and like the rest of the movie he’s O.K. without being
especially inspired. Oddly, it’s only at the end of the film that Dimsdale and
Grant have Charles Laughton and Lou Costello impersonate each other — had they
done it earlier and had Costello fearful both of Kidd killing him and of the
authorities capturing and executing him as a pirate, they would have had the
basis of a film both more entertaining and more funny than the one they made
— though the close-up of Costello imitating Laughton’s pursed-lip scowl is
still a lot of fun and worth having. The plot, in case it matters, casts Kidd
and female pirate Anne Bonney (Hillary Brooke, as good as a villainess here as
she was as Professor Moriarty’s partner in crime in the 1945 Basil
Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes film The Woman in Green) as sometime partners, sometime rivals (and Brooke’s
relative restraint compares favorably to Laughton’s overacting, which not
surprisingly is even worse here than it was in his more-or-less “serious”
previous performance as Kidd) as Kidd and his crew search for buried treasure
on “Skull Island” (one wonders where are the living dinosaurs and the 50-foot
ape, since “Skull Island” was also the name of the locale of the original King
Kong and its direct sequel, Son
of Kong) and the two nice young kids
playing the romantic leads finally
get together.
Oddly, though one of the reasons this film exists is so Abbott
and Costello could make films together in color, the process was SuperCinécolor
(their budget wouldn’t stretch as far as three-strip Technicolor and
Eastmancolor, the process that studios were allowed to name after themselves as
“WarnerColor,” “Metrocolor,” etc., wasn’t generally available yet) and the
color on the print we were watching (from Turner Classic Movies’ Abbott and
Costello marathon at the end of 2012) was badly faded to the point where
certain scenes looked awfully black-and-white to us. It seems strange that the
current holders of the Warners catalog spent the money to do a vivid color
restoration on Jack and the Beanstalk but have left this one, which isn’t in the public domain, to rot. This film is more
evidence that the bloom was off the rose for Abbott and Costello big-time — one
of the funniest gags is one in which Lou Costello looks out the porthole of
Kidd’s ship and gets drenched with water (a nice variant on the “’Tain’t a fit
night out for man nor beast” gag from Clyde Bruckman’s savagely funny 1933 short
The Fatal Glass of Beer with W.
C. Fields), but even there the writers couldn’t resist the old A&C chestnut
of having Costello call Abbott, who opens the porthole … and nothing happens.
The consensus of the critics in 1952 was that Charles Laughton was over the
hill and through as an actor — and certainly he did nothing to change that
perception the next year, when he turned up as King Herod in the Rita Hayworth
Salomé (based on an alternate
version of the story also used by Massenet in his opera Herodïade, in which Salomé does her dance to ransom John the
Baptist in hopes of receiving him alive, and Herod double-crosses her and
presents him to her dead instead) and overacted so relentlessly he was just
about as funny in this presumably “serious” context as he is in Abbott
and Costello Meet Captain Kidd. Fortunately
Laughton had at least two great performances in great movies in the last decade
of his life — as attorney Sir Wilfred Robarts in Witness for the
Prosecution (1957) and U.S. Senator
Seabright “Seab” Cooley in his last film, Advise and Consent (1962).
