Crazy House (Universal, 1943)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night when my husband Charles came home from work early, I looked for a movie I could run us in the time between his arrival and Stephen Colbert’s show. I found a movie for Charles and I to screen from the batch I had just received from a grey-label video source: Crazy House, Universal’s 1943 follow-up to Ole Olsen’s and Chic Johnson’s Hellzapoppin’. Olsen and Johnson were two veteran vaudeville comics who, after years of touring on the vaudeville circuits and occasionally making O.K. movies, had suddenly grabbed the brass ring of stardom when they debuted a longer version of their vaudeville act on Broadway called Hellzapoppin’ in 1938. The show made a huge hit with the Broadway public and got filmed by Universal in 1941 in an oddly schizoid movie that at once chopped and channeled the show into movie conventions and made fun of themselves for doing that. Though any hopes Olsen and Johnson might have had for movie stardom were short-circuited by the simultaneous arrival of Abbott and Costello on the Universal lot – there’s even a gag about that in Crazy House in which Olsen and Johnson take over the intercom of Universal studio head N. G. Wagstaff (Thomas Gomez), and announce, “Universal’s most sensational comedy team is here!” Wagstaff replies, “Oh, Abbott and Costello! Send them right in.”

As with the film of Hellzapoppin’, the opening of Crazy House is the best thing in the movie: as various Universal personnel receive the warning that Olsen and Johnson are coming, they flee the studio. One group of people duck into the set of an air-raid shelter, presumably for a Universal film about the London Blitz, only to dash out again when a skunk follows them into it. On a set from the film Sherlock Holmes and the Spider Woman, Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes receives an interjection from Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson about to give him a warning. “I know, Watson. Olsen and Johnson are here.” “How did you know?” Watson asks. Holmes replies, “I am Sherlock Holmes. I know everything.” The sequence climaxes with the entire Universal security force assembled in front of the gates of the studio to keep Olsen and Johnson from breaching their perimeter and getting into the studio – only to be foiled when the duo roll up a pair of giant cannons and turn themselves into human cannonballs, turning into animated cartoons as they fly into the studio and land in Wagstaff’s office. He books a crane to remove them after telling them that not only are they fired, so is Edmund “Mac” MacLean (Patric Knowles), who worked as an assistant director on Hellzapoppin’ and was slated to direct their next picture.

The three decide to produce the movie themselves, renting studio space from a gang of crooks headed by S. E. Hanley (Richard Lane) and featuring such reliable character actors as Donald Cook and Billy Gilbert (blessedly without his fake German accent and his famous sneeze) and relying for capital on Col Thaddeus Merriweather (Percy Kilbride), only we soon learn – though Olsen and Johnson do not, of course – that he’s a harmless but thoroughly broke eccentric who likes to pretend to have millions. Hanley and his gang soon learn that Olsen’s and Johnson’s supposed backer is broke, but decide to go along and allow the film to be made so they can seize it and sell it themselves when it’s finished. Olsen, Johnson and MacLean form a company called “Miracle Productions” – their promotional slogan is, “If it’s worth seeing … it’s a Miracle” – and start to work assembling a cast, including carhop Marjorie Nelson (Martha O’Driscoll) who MacLean is attracted to both professionally and personally (though, natch, when he first approaches her about going to dinner with him to discuss being in his movie, she thinks he’s just making a pass at her). Mac changes her name to the ridiculous “Marjorie Windingham” and makes her the female star after she sings a swing version of the song “Jealous” at the carhop.

They also sign comedienne Cass Daley, whom Leonard Maltin in his chapter on Olsen and Johnson in the book Movie Comedy Teams described as “a road-company version of Martha Raye,” and who basically assaults the camera in her two big production numbers (one of which depicts her as a woman who’s unemployed because she resisted her boss’s advances – there are an awful lot of #MeToo moments here for a film made in 1943!), only instead of the real Cass Daley they sign her untalented cousin and stand-in, Sadie Silverfish. They try to break Sadie’s contract by subjecting her to an exercise regimen and wearing her out – but, unbeknownst to them, the real Cass Daley substitutes for her cousin and does the number, only just before that Mac had ordered the film to be removed from the cameras so they actually didn’t get the number. (That’s the sort of plot point that always bothers me.) Filming wends its way through 54 days of production and some elaborate, impressive production numbers featuring a wide assemblage of talents, including singer Leighton Noble and his band, dancers Tony and Sally DeMarco, Marion Hutton (Betty Hutton’s similarly-voiced sister) and the Glenn Miller Singers (Miller was still alive when this film was made but he was leading his Army Air Force band during World War II and the folks he’d left behind had to figure out some way to make a living in his absence), and the prize for me, Count Basie and His Orchestra.

Basie participates in two big numbers, one of them on “Tropicana,” a minor-key Latin-style song quite different from Basie’s usual material – though he plays a short solo on it that’s beautiful (and there’s a bit of solo trumpet as well, probably from Buck Clayton). “Tropicana” is danced successively by a Latin troupe, a Black company (with Basie playing under an improvised band shell reading “Count Basie’s Block Party”) and a white one (with Leighton Noble’s band quite a dramatic come-down from Basie’s as a swing outfit!). The other big number featuring Basie is “Got a Pocketful of Pennies,:” which also includes a chorus by the Delta Rhythm Boys, a Black ensemble that tried to adapt the sound of a gospel quartette to secular music; they get several appearances in the film and are a lot of fun, and I was especially amused to see their accompanist’s little piano side by side with Basie’s full-sized one. Though it doesn’t sustain the hilarity of the opening sequence, Crazy House is a marvelously funny genre-bending film that (like W. C. Fields’ Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, made two years earlier, also at Universal) is a sort of comic version of Fellini’s 8 ½ before there was an 8 ½.

The ending takes place in a courtroom in which Hanley is suing Olsen and Johnson for ownership of the film – and of course Olsen and Johnson a) insist on acting as their own attorneys and b) royally screw things up – until Mac pleads with the judge to allow him a week to edit the film, preview it and sell it to the highest bidder among the major studios. (One week seems an awfully short post-production time even for 1943, though perhaps Mac was editing the film as he went along.) Eventually the preview occurs – only Mac discovers that Hanley sent over just the opening reel of the film and blank leader on the other seven reels – so in order to keep the audience in place Olsen and Johnson improvise. They have Marjorie pick up the song she was singing at the end of reel one and continue it “live” (an interesting variation on the ending of Singin’ in the Rain eight years later), and when they see Allan Jones in the audience they call on him and he sings his big hit, “The Donkey Serenade.” (The lyrics seem undecided as to whether the song’s animal is a donkey or a mule – the infertile hybrid of a donkey and a horse.) Eventually Mac finds the rest of the film, the preview continues and Olsen and Johnson rig up an electrical device to shock Wagstaff of Universal and leap out of his chair when they announce that the first studio head who bids $1 million for the film will get it. Everything looks happy until Johnson draws back a curtain to reveal a young man and a young woman locked in an embrace. He aims his cane – which conceals a rifle – at them and shoots them dead, and when Olsen asks him why he did that Johnson says, “This is one picture that isn’t going to have a happy ending!”

I’m a bit more familiar with Crazy House than the rest of the Olsen and Johnson oeuvre because in the early 1980’s I made a home recording of it on a Beta machine, which lasted long enough for me to dub Basie’s two numbers onto audio cassette and incorporate them into a Basie mix I later transferred to CD. I hadn’t seen it in years but it was every bit as delightful as I remember it, even though after watching the one surviving episode of the 1949 Olsen and Johnson TV series Fireball Fun-for-All I decided that a little of their humor goes a long, long way and it was probably just as well that in their four films for Universal (Hellzapoppin’, Crazy House, Ghost Catchers and See My Lawyer), the studio leavened the humor with musical interludes that gave viewers’ funnybones a much-needed rest and were frequently quite good in themselves. Leonard Malton bitched in his book Movie Comedy Teams about how Olsen and Johnson’s Universal films were filled with “brassy music that is no longer listenable” – well, I guess I just like swing better than he does because I find the musical interludes not only listenable but welcome as respites from the successive Olsen and Johnson comedy assaults. Also worth noting is the running gag of Shemp Howard (brother of Moe and Curly Howard of the Three Stooges, eventually a Stooge himself and also character comedian in films starring greats like W. C. Fields) as a salesman who keeps walking on the set with preposterous items for sale and even more preposterous sales claims for them: “Wanna buy a stove? It’s hot!” and “Wanna buy a pillow? Nothing down!” Crazy House is a start-to-finish delight and I still wish Universal Home Video would put together all four of the films Olsen and Johnson made for that studio and release them as a boxed set of DVD’s the way they did with the first four Bob Hope-Bing Crosby Road movies.