See My Lawyer (Universal, 1945)

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

After Song of the South I looked for something relatively short and unsentimental, and I found it in See My Lawyer, the fourth and weakest of comedy team Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson’s vehicles for Universal in the 1940’s. Olsen and Johnson were vaudevillians who had toured for years and occasionally stopped in Hollywood to make movies – three for Warner Bros. in the early 1930’s and two for Republic in the mid-1930’s – when their careers suddenly went into superstar orbit when they mounted a Broadway revue called Hellzapoppin’ in 1938. They signed with Universal to do a film of Hellzapoppin’ in 1941, but any hopes they might have had of long-term movie stardom were dashed by the almost simultaneous arrival of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello on the lot. Though they weren’t great character comedians, Abbott and Costello could at least play roles and fit themselves into standard plots, which Olsen and Johnson really couldn’t; most of their Universal productions cast them as themselves and depict them as entertainers doing the same sort of no-holds-barred rambunctious comedy they had become famous for on stage. What’s more, the “suits” at Universal decided that an entire feature-length movie of pure Olsen and Johnson comedy would wear out its welcome for audiences quickly, so they filled out their films with guest stars and elaborate musical production numbers.

See My Lawyer was based on a 1939 Broadway musical by George Abbott about a team of impecunious attorneys, Charlie Rodman (Alan Curtis), Joe Wilson (Richard Benedict) and Arthur Lane (Noah Beery, Jr.). In the opening scene they’re shown cooking a morning meal on a stove that otherwise is hidden in one of their desks, and they quickly close the stove into the desk while the meal is still cooking – obviously one of the writers (Edmund L. Hartmann and Stanley Davis) had seen the virtually identical opening sequence of the Marx Brothers’ 1941 film The Big Store. They’re accosted by process server Otis Fillmore (Ed Brophy), who represents finance companies out to repossess their furniture and law books – though given what we know about companies named “Acme” from the Road Runner cartoons, when the repo guys show up and their uniforms are emblazoned “Acme Furniture Co.,” we figure, “It probably wasn’t such great furniture anyway.” The scene then shifts to an elaborate nightclub built to resemble a circus in which Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson are holding forth with an elaborate show featuring guest stars, many of whom are announced with sign boards as in a real circus.

Olsen and Johnson have an invitation from an unnamed movie studio to star in a big musical with a $5 million budget, but to take the job they need a release from their contract with the nightclub’s owner, B. J. Wagonhorn (Franklin Pangborn at his prissiest, though simply running a New York nightclub seems a comedown when in his previous film. Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, he was production manager for an entire movie studio!). Wagonhorn informs them that he has them under contract for the next 12 years and he has no intention of letting them out of that ultra-long-term commitment. It just happens that Joe Wilson’s sister Betty (Grace McDonald) is a dancer in Olsen’s and Johnson’s show – and though she’s merely in the chorus they think she’s good enough for a featured spot. Naturally, when Olsen and Johnson tell her they’re looking for legal help in breaking Wagonhorn’s contract, she recommends the law film that includes her brother and whose two other partners are both after her – with Curtis the obnoxious bastard who thinks he can marry her just by asking and Beery the one she’s really in love with. Olsen and Johnson decide that the way to break their contract is to insult the customers and pull nasty slapstick stunts on them – and to be the “pigeons” in this routine the studio hired people like Vernon Dent and Emil Sitka who’d performed similar services for the Three Stooges, as well as a young actress named Ruth Roman who’d go places later but in this early credit gets a face full of mud. The result is that 39 irate customers file suit against Wagonhorn and all hire Rodman, Wilson and Lane to represent them – and Wagonhorn retaliates by agreeing to sell the nightclub to Olsen and Johnson without telling them they’ll be taking on the lawsuits as well.

Fortunately, Olsen and Johnson originally bribed all 39 clients to file the suits in the first place, and they’re able to get them to drop the actions – only a 40th plaintiff materializes in the person of Otis Fillmore, who not only takes his suit to court but hires his mother (Mary Gordon, who played the landlady Mrs. Hudson in the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies) as his attorney and brings along a violinist to add emotion to his sob-story testimony. The courtroom scenes are as loony-tunes as the rest of the movie – in one sequence Olsen and Johnson bring an elephant into the courtroom as a witness because “an elephant never forgets,” but when the elephant takes the stand its interpreter announces to the court, “He says he can’t remember anything.” Of course, this being an Olsen and Johnson movie, the elephant takes a drink of water with its trunk and later spews it in the face of the judge. Olsen and Johnson ultimately persuade the judge to move the trial to their club in order to show him that they offer responsible and entirely safe entertainment, and while they have their revenge on Otis Fillmore (via a collapsing staircase that turns into a slide), the film ends with a big production number, Grace MacDonald and Noah Beery, Jr. pair off (Beery Jr. was actually a quite handsome and personable actor, but he’s shown off a good deal better in a 1945 Universal “B,” The Crimson Canary, in which he plays a jazz musician accused of clubbing his band’s singer to death with his trumpet) and Olsen and Johnson end their problematic but often screamingly funny film career.

Leonard Maltin, in his chapter on Olsen and Johnson in his 1970 book Movie Comedy Teams, disliked See My Lawyer because of its plethora of guest stars, but some of them are quite appealing. Nat “King” Cole shows up with his original trio and enlivens the movie much the way Count Basie did in a previous Olsen and Johnson film, Crazy House, though I was a bit disappointed that the two numbers the group performs, “The Man on the Little White Keys” and “Fuzzy Wuzzy,” have ensemble vocals by all three members. One of the surprises when I acquired the Nat “King” Cole boxed set Hittin’ the Ramp, which contained all the recordings Cole made prior to signing with Capitol Records in 1945, was that the King Cole Trio was primarily an ensemble vocal group and we had to hear dreary arrangements of songs as medium-tempo jive numbers when what I was hoping for and expecting was either jazz instrumentals or vocals by Cole alone. A singer billed simply as “Yvette” with a vaguely French accent shows up and does a version of the Sammy Fain-Irving Kahal ballad “I’ll Be Seeing You” (my choice for the definitive version of this song is the one Billie Holiday recorded for Commodore in 1944, though Yvette scores by doing the song’s almost never-performed verse; today most people who know this song at all recognize it as Liberace’s theme), but I’ve been unable to find any information about her online because all my searches keep turning up other people named Yvette.

The other guests include flamenco dancer Carmen Amaya (who’s quite good) and two other dance groups, the Rogers Adagio Trio (two men and one woman who gets slammed around by both her male partners in what’s essentially a fusion of an apache and a gang-rape) and another group consisting of six people who dance, juggle, do acrobatics and stun the audience with the sheer strenuousness and skill of their act. I’m not sure whether those were the Hudson Wonders, the Cristianos Troupe or the Six Willys – after a while all the acrobatic dancers, as fun to watch as they are, tend to blur together – and there’s also the Four Teens, an O.K. vocal group but one whose members look considerably older than teenagers on screen. (Then again, that’s true of a lot of alleged “teen” movies.) Overall, See My Lawyer is a mess but at least a gloriously entertaining mess and a souvenir of the era of what I call the portmanteau movie, in which producers combined various elements into their movies so there’d be something in it each potential audience member would like. Today producers go the other way and “narrowcast” their productions to attract one and only one kind of audience member – and I miss the portmanteau movie even though, as here, sometimes the juxtapositions got pretty strained sometimes!