by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Killer Under the Bed I figured Charles deserved something more pleasant to watch, and I
found it for him in a DVD I had recently ordered from amazon.com called Abbott
and Costello Meet the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Never heard of that film before? Neither had I — and I thought I had
collected all Abbott and Costello’s 36 feature films, including the boxed set
of the 28 they made for Universal as well as either home recordings or DVD’s of
the eight they made elsewhere. As it turned out, though Abbott and Costello at
one time or another “met” just about every monster in the Universal horror
stable — Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, Dracula, the Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde, and the Mummy — they never officially made a film in which they met
the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The DVD turned out to contain the complete
(including the original commercials!) Colgate Comedy Hour broadcast by NBC-TV on February 21, 1954, which
despite the title was mainly a feature for skating star Sonja Henie. She was a
Norwegian figure skater who won the gold medal at the Winter Olympics three
times — 1928, 1932 and 1936 — and she managed to parlay these triumphs into a
film career. Her first feature, One in a Million, depicted her final triumph in the Winter Olympics
at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Germany (both the 1936 Winter and Summer Olympics took place in Nazi Germany!) along
with a fictional plot in which she’s nearly barred from competing in them by
false allegations that she’s turned professional. Henie gets three big skating
numbers in this one, all of them showing what “figure skating” was in the days
before it began to be about bigger, higher, twistier and more spectacular
jumps. In Henie’s day the skaters were obliged to skate so precisely they
traced figures in the ice — that’s where the name for the sport comes from —
and after each skater performed the judges would come onto the ice with
calipers to measure how exactly they had traced the required figures.
The big
attractions in this show are Henie’s big skates, the not terribly funny
“comedy” routines by Keefe Brasselle (just having come off playing Eddie Cantor
in a 1953 biopic — somehow Ida Lupino as director got a sensitive and
believable performance out of him in the 1949 film Not Wanted, her directorial debut, but in all his other
appearances, including this one, he comes off as such a boor you want to strangle
him) and host Gene Wesson, who duel each other to see who can come up with
worse “impressions” of famous stars of the day like James Stewart and Humphrey
Bogart. There was one genuinely
funny scene which spoofed both gangster movies set during Prohibition and the
rising price of coffee, in which an illegal speakeasy sells coffee and
Brasselle plays a gangland kingpin — an uncredited Carolyn Jones (later
Morticia Addams on the 1960’s TV series The Addams Family) gives a nice performance as Brasselle’s moll and
the obligatory “bad girl” in these productions. Abbott and Costello appear in
just one scene — though at least the producers hired their best writer, John
Grant, to write it for them — in which they are supposedly touring the
Universal prop department and come into contact with a living Frankenstein’s
monster (played by Glenn Strange, who’d previously played him in Abbott
and Costello Meet Frankenstein and the two
immediately preceding “serious” Frankenstein movies from Universal, House
of Frankenstein and House of
Dracula — incidentally Strange doesn’t get
a screen credit but he is
announced as part of the cast at the end by a speaking voice that mangles his
name as “Glenn Strangle”!) and a living Creature from the Black Lagoon (Ben
Chapman, who played the terrestrial scenes in the original Creature
from the Black Lagoon while Ricou Browning
played the underwater scenes — Chapman was replaced by other actors in the two
subsequent Creature films but Browning, a champion swimmer, did the aquatic
parts of the role in all three). Their scene is funny, though the main gag is
the old chestnut from all the Abbott and Costello horror comedies — when
Costello tries to write the list of props he wants from the Universal prop
department both the inkwell and the pen move about on the desk under their own
power, while when Abbott comes in the scene reverts to normal and the inkwell
and jar with the pen in it both stay put — and its relative unimportance
actually gets played as a gag at the beginning, in which Costello says,
“Welcome to the Sonja Henie Show.
“You mean the Colgate Comedy Theatre,” Abbott replies. “Same difference,” a dispirited Costello groans.
