Never a Dull Moment (Universal, 1943)

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

Last night’s “feature” was Never a Dull Moment, third and last of the 60-minute “B” movies the Ritz Brothers made at Universal in 1942-43 in the last gasp of their filmmaking career. In his chapter on the Ritz Brothers in his book Movie Comedy Teams, Leonard Maltin wrote, “Whenever Hollywood decides to use this all-purpose title for a movie, it sems the film is duller than usual. In the Ritz Brothers’ case, their energetic antics kept the film from being dull, but at the same time they couldn’t keep the film from being anything but limp.” I had seen this and the first in the sequence, Behind the Eight Ball, decades ago in a KTLA Channel 5 showing in the wee hours of one morning in the early 1980’s and then never encountered them again until I bought grey-label DVD’s of them and the one in between, Hi’ya, Chum, and screened them with my husband Charles. I was pleasantly surprised by Never a Dull Moment, which on this go-round seemed to be in some respects the best of the three.

It helps that this one actually has a coherent storyline, courtesy of writers Stanley Roberts and Mel Ronson (who also wrote Behind the Eight Ball): a prestigious New York nightclub owner plans to host an engagement party for a wealthy dowager’s grandson, only he’s really a gangster and he’s planning to steal her famous and virtually priceless necklace, and to do this he hires a gang of out-of-town hitmen and gets the Ritz Brothers by mistake. I didn’t say it was a great plot line, but at least it made this film seem less like a revue and more like an actual movie. Universal also got the best supporting cast of the three films: George Zucco as the crooked club owner, Tony Rocco, playing a straight villain and bringing his usual authority to the role; the fine character actress Elizabeth Risdon as the dowager, Mrs. Schuyler Manning III (the sheer grandiloquence with which the other characters pronounce her name become one of the film’s funniest running gags); Frances Langford as the club’s band singer and fiancée of Manning’s grandson (or was it her son? I forget, though visually it looks like two generations have passed between them, not just one); Mary Beth Hughes as Flo Parker, the femme fatale and super-talented pickpocket whose skill at lifting things off unsuspecting people (including her fellow members of Rocco’s gang) rivals that of Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 masterpiece Trouble in Paradise; and Franklin Pangborn at his absolute nelliest as Sylvester, the club’s manager, who recoils in abject fear at the sight of a gun. Referencing the 1970’s dance diva from San Francisco of the same name, I joked, “This Sylvester isn’t a drag queen – just a queen.” About the only weak cast member is an animated mannequin named Stuart Boyd Crawford as the descendant of Mrs. Schuyler Manning III who’s supposed to be engaged to Julie Russell.

Along the way Frances Langford gets to do two genuinely great songs from the 1920’s, “My Blue Heaven” and “Sleepy Time Gal” – though in an odd throwback to the unwitting genderfuck of a lot of 1920’s records (when music publishers insisted on songs being sung with the same lyrics whether it was a man or a woman singing, which led to such oddities as Bing Crosby singing “There Ain’t No Sweet Man That’s Worth the Salt of My Tears” and Red McKenzie complaining he “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man”), she sings these songs originally written for males without changing the words. When she gets to the last chorus of “My Blue Heaven” – “Just Molly and me/And baby makes three” – we wonder if she and Molly are a Lesbian couple and they’ve adopted that baby. The Ritz Brothers don’t enter until the second reel – until then it’s Franklin Pangborn who’s given us the most laughs – and they get to do two numbers of their own, including a quite elaborate and entertaining spoof of opera, that unlike some of their other song-and-dance routines are genuinely funny.

Never a Dull Moment is hardly a great film, but it’s a quite clever and pleasant one, and I mentioned to Charles before we watched it that there’s a scene early on in which the Ritzes pose with a giant prop steak. Leonard Maltin published a photo of this scene in his book and captioned it, “Five points to anyone who can figure out this still.” Charles, even before we watched the movie, correctly guessed it was part of a scene spoofing wartime rationing (once I gave the game away by answering his question of when the film was made: 1943), and the gag payoff is one of the Ritzes telling the movie audience, “Don’t get excited. It’s only a fake,” and demonstrating that by knocking at it with his hand. The director of Never a Dull Moment was Edward Lilley, who had been the director of at least one of the rump Ziegfeld Follies presented after Florenz Ziegfeld’s death in 1932, when Ziegfeld’s widow, Billie Burke, licensed the name to Ziegfeld’s hated rival, Lee Shubert, to get out from under the reported $4 million in debt he had left her when he croaked. He came out to Hollywood apparently hoping to direct big-budget musicals and instead got signed to Universal, where he got stuck in the “B” department doing things with titles like Allergic to Love, Babes on Swing Street, My Gal Loves Music and Swing Out, Sister! (My Gal Loves Music is noteworthy for the appearance of a woman billed only as Trixie, a sort of human seal who could balance a giant beach ball on her nose.) One imdb.com “Trivia” commentator insisted that during the dance specialty Grace Poggi does with her partner, Igor Dega, you could see her nipples sticking out through the top of her costume – but either my eyes, the low resolution of the print we were watching, or both made it impossible for me to tell.