Behind the Eight Ball (Universal, 1942)

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

After showing Charles The House of Fear I thought of running Behind the Eight Ball (notice there’s no hyphen in the title), a 1942 Universal vehicle for the Ritz Brothers, the three-person comedy team who had fled 20th Century-Fox after they resented being cast in a rehash of an old-dark-house mystery called The Gorilla. They settled with the studio, made one more film there at the end of the 1930’s (Pack Up Your Troubles, an uncredited remake of Laurel and Hardy’s 1932 film of the same title, with the boys trying to find the surviving relatives of a girl left orphaned by World War I) and then decamped to Universal for a semi-respectable musical called Argentine Nights, an obvious knock-off of 20th Century-Fox’s Down Argentine Way (though Argentine Nights was actually released six weeks earlier) but still a reasonably budgeted and entertaining movie. In 1942 the Ritz Brothers returned to Universal and shot three back-to-back “B” movies, each only an hour long: Behind the Eight Ball, Hi’ya Chum and Never a Dull Moment. “It is difficult to see what the Ritz Brothers and Universal saw in each other at this time,” historian Leonard Maltin wrote in his book Movie Comedy Teams. “On the Ritzes’ part, they had rebelled at Fox because of the ‘B’ pictures they were doing, yet the type of ‘B’ Universal offered them made the minor Fox efforts look like colossal endeavors. As for Universal, they already had two comedy teams under contract – Abbott and Costello, and Olsen and Johnson – and why they needed a third is a mystery.” Behind the Eight Ball – which Charles and I were watching on a grey-label source taped off the air from WQTV, Channel 68, in Boston, the same source as our copy of Hi’ya Chum, though since then I’ve been able to trace an official release from the Universal Vault Series – is usually considered the best of the three.

We had watched a previous copy that had glitched to a stop after the first 3 ½ minutes, but from it I had got the impression this was essentially a third version, a comedy remake, of The Last Warning/The House of Fear. The only real similarity is that in a revue called Fun for All being staged at a remote New England theatre on the sort of dark and stormy night that in Universal movies is more often associated with the creation of the Frankenstein monster, the featured guest star is killed. The producer, Joan Barry (Carol Bruce), sends for another featured guest star to perform the next night – and he, too, is killed in the middle of the show. Not surprisingly, she’s having a good deal of trouble recruiting anyone to take the place of the dead performers – while the Ritz Brothers are working as waiters in a fancy nightclub and keep looking for the chance to perform. They do, but get fired, so they end up taking the job with Joan Barry even though their predecessors have been killed.

We’ve seen a homeless-looking man outside the theatre skulking around in the rain during each murder, and for about the first half-hour the movie is mostly centered around romantic intrigues between the cast members interspersed with some surprisingly good and well-done swing dance numbers to songs by Don Raye and Gene DePaul. The cast also features a big band led by Sonny Dunham, who had spent the 1930’s as a featured trumpet player with Glen Gray’s Casa Loma Orchestra. In the early 1940’s he left Gray and went out on his own, obviously noticing how successful Harry James’ band had been and deciding to emulate it. (The one other film appearance I’ve seen of Dunham is a three-minute “Soundie” – a short film meant to be played in a “Panoram,” a sort of video jukebox – in which he and his female vocalist play Hoagy Carmichael’s “Skylark,” one of James’s biggest hits.) Behind the Eight Ball was directed by former Keystone Kop Eddie Cline, who by the early 1940’s had risen to direct W. C. Fields in The Bank Dick and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, two acknowledged comedy classics, from a script by Stanley Roberts and Mel Ronson called Off the Beaten Track (which might well have been a better title for the film). The best-known of the Raye-DePaul songs is a novelty called “Mr. Five-by-Five,” based on the nickname for Count Basie’s blues singer Jimmy Rushing, who was so short and stout that, as the song suggests, “He don’t measure no more from head to toe/Than he do from side to side.” (In 1958, as a guest vocalist with Benny Goodman’s band at the Brussels World’s Fair, Rushing himself would sing “Mr. Five-by-Five.”) While the best version by far of “Mr. Five-by-Five” was the hit record by singer Ella Mae Morse with Freddie Slack and his band – released the same year as the film, 1942 – Carol Bruce’s rendition in the film is quite serviceable, and she and Dick Foran make a nice and unoppressive romantic couple.

Raye and DePaul also give the Ritz Brothers one of their most genuinely funny comic songs, a spoof of the Charles Atlas “I was a 97-pound weakling” ads which ends with one of the Ritzes ostensibly lifting the other two, one in each hand. “They’re really on wires,” he jokes, and so they turn out to be as the number fades out with two Ritzes seemingly hanging in mid-air. The film gets more interesting as it progresses and it takes on a topical connection to World War II: the good guys discover a short-wave radio set and realize that the reason the theatre’s performers have been killed is to drive the whole troupe away so the Nazi spies can radio U.S. military secrets to their bosses in Berlin. But who is the killer? It turns out to be Danny (Johnny Downs), an anti-social and attitude-heavy clarinetist in Dunham’s band (though Dunham tells the other characters he’s not a regular member of his group and got hired only for this gig) who’s rigged a gun inside his clarinet that will fire every time the player hits high C. As for the homeless guy – a red herring if there ever was one! – he turns out to be a dancer hoping for a slot in Barry’s show, though Charles was expecting him to be a government agent staking out the place to catch the spies. Behind the Eight Ball is hardly a great movie, but it’s a lot of fun and blessedly ends straightforwardly without the sort of trick gag that ended Hi’ya Chum (which Laurel and Hardy could get away with but the Ritz Brothers couldn’t).