Hi’ya Chum (Universal, 1943)

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

Following two Lifetime movies in a row, I felt my husband Charles and I could both use something a lot lighter. So I reached for Hi’ya, Chum!, second of three one-hour “B”-movies the Ritz Brothers made in 1942 and 1943 for Universal. The Ritzes had begun at 20th Century-Fox, where they were frequently featured players in Alice Faye’s big musicals and then got a few films where they were featured. Charles once called them a bizarre attempt to hybridize the Marx Brothers or the Three Stooges, but unlike those other brother-based comedy teams the Ritzes didn’t create characters discernibly different from each other. You can watch a Ritz Brothers movie and, unless they address each other by name, not know for the life of you which Ritz is which. Their career had spiraled down from 20th Century-Fox to Universal, where they’d at least got to make their studio debut in a reasonably budgeted and quite trendy musical called Argentine Nights, co-starring the Andrews Sisters in their first film. Then Universal, who already had Abbott and Costello under contract and therefore didn’t need other comedy teams, palmed off the Ritzes on three ultra-low-budget movies, each lasting over an hour.

The first was Behind the Eight Ball, which appears to have been a combination remake and spoof of one of Universal’s quirkier movies, The Last Warning (1929), a late silent with one brief talking scene (though the currently available print on a Universal Blu-Ray doesn’t include it) about a jinxed theatre where an actor mysteriously died in the middle of a performance. A new producer takes over the theatre a year later, recruiting all the surviving cast members, only the actor playing the part his predecessor was playing when he died himself gets killed during the show. Universal had already remade it as The House of Fear (1939), and they seem to have recycled the plot for something that was at least intended as a comedy and which introduced the great Don Raye-Gene DePaul song “Mr. Five-by-Five.”

Hi’ya Chum was the immediate follow-up and turned out to be one of those movies where the credited screenwriter, Edmund L. Hartman (sometimes he was billed with another “n” at the end of his last name, but not here), seems less to have written the script than merely compiled it from stacks of hoary old movie clichés. The film begins with one of its funniest sequences, in which a ballet class is being taught by one of the Ritz brothers while the other two incompetently cut up in drag as part of a line otherwise composed of womyn-born women. (Charles had joked about Vera West’s gowns credit that she’d be designing gowns for the Ritz Brothers – little did we know that they’d do their drag routine in the opening scene, albeit in tutus instead of gowns!) Alas, this performance is the last night of a revue that has played to a few people sitting well apart from each other on folding chairs, and the producer pays off $15 for each cast member and sends them on their way.

The Ritz Brothers – or, as they’re called in this film, the “Merry Madcaps” – and the show’s two female stars, Sunny Lee (Jane Frazee) and Madge Tracy (June Clyde), set off in an ancient Model “T” Ford (Laurel and Hardy had made the Model “T” de rigueur transportation for movie comedy teams) bound for Hollywood even though the Madcaps have received a telegram saying their moth-eaten act is decidedly not welcome there. Alas, their car (such as it is) makes it only as far as Mercury, California, a former ghost town that has suddenly become a boom town again because the local mines have been revived to produce mercury, important in making explosives for World War II. This gives Hartman(n) a chance to revive all the boom-town gags, particularly the ones about inflation, Universal had done in their version of The Spoilers the year before. It also gives producer Howard Benedict the chance to use Universal’s ample supply of Old West standing sets – even though this film takes place in 1942 (imdb.com dates it as 1943, but 1942 was the copyright date).

It’s somewhat unusual for an early-1940’s comedy to have just one credited writer, but Hartman(n) had a lot of unseen and unknowing collaborators since he grabs just about every clichéd situation from a million previous film scripts to fill in gaps in his plot and jump in to take over when the preceding clichéd scene or situation ran out. We have the mechanic who impounds the Ritzes’ car and demands $1,000 in mechanic’s liens and storage charges to redeem it (in one delightfully preposterous scene they “cut” him for it, double or nothing, using not playing cards but various breads on a sandwich, only the mechanic turns up a slice of pumpernickel raisin bread and wins). The Ritzes also try to finagle a free meal in the café for the Mercury mine workers by complaining about the steaks being too tough – only the cook quits in disgust at being insulted and the Ritzes and their women friends are deputized to replace him. Then it turns out that the workers’ café is the subject of an underhanded takeover bid by villain Terry Barton (Edmund MacDonald, complete with “roo” moustache just to make sure we know he’s a bad guy) and his mumbling sidekick Eddie Gibbs (Lou Lubin). They want the café to open a casino – they need a pre-existing building because wartime priorities won’t allow them to build a new one – and when the women, who have actually become the restaurant’s legal owners, won’t sell, Barton opens anyway in an unoccupied private home on the edge of town and start their business of fleecing the miners of their well-gotten gains.

Of course the casino is being run crookedly, but the Ritzes outwit Barton’s staff by rigging the games to win – until the obligatory scene in every movie about gambling in which the holders of a lucky streak bet it all on one last throw of the dice (or turn of the wheel, or draw of the card) and lose it all. (The snake-eyes that come up on the dice with which they’ve been playing craps are cleverly animated to become a pair of rolling eyes.) Nonetheless, Barton pays the Ritzes off, hoping they’ll take the money and go to Hollywood as originally planned so he can keep ruining the town and impoverishing its workers, but in the meantime Sunny has fallen in love with the restaurant’s organizer (and amateur piano player and singer) Tommy Craig (Robert Paige, reunited with Frazee from the cast of Abbott and Costello’s Buck Privates two years earlier, a far more successful film commercially and also a much funnier one). Craig, who’s also the mining company’s resident chemist, invents a chemical that when sniffed sends the victim into uncontrollable laughter, and he uses this to break up the attempt of Barton and his goons to wreck the restaurant – though there’s a Laurel-and-Hardyesque tag scene in which the gangsters threaten to tie the Ritzes to metal weights and plunge them into the water, and that’s exactly what happens to them at the end – though, despite being totally submerged, they’re still able to breathe … and talk. Hi’ya Chum is a pretty silly movie, one of those comedies in which we get the impression that not all the laughs are intentional, and yet it’s one of those movies that does what it set out to do – though Charles was laughing as much at the auspices under which we were watching, someone’s home-video tape from UHF Channel 68, WQTV, in Boston, whose logo appeared periodically superimposed at the bottom of the picture.