Buck Privates (Universal, 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Buck Privates, the second film made by Abbott and Costello and the first in which they starred — and an enormous hit (it grossed $4 million, more than any previous film in Universal’s history and more than How Green Was My Valley or Citizen Kane, on an investment of $180,000) that basically had it all: surprisingly lavish production values (though much of the mock-battle footage was clearly stock from Universal’s newsreels), sprightly music (the Andrews Sisters are in the film and are featured almost as prominently as Abbott and Costello are!) and an unexpectedly topical theme. In October 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt signed America’s first peacetime conscription bill in its history, and the bill was predictably controversial, especially among the still-powerful isolationists who wanted no part of the European or Asian wars. Roosevelt saw U.S. entry into World War II as inevitable and wanted us to be prepared, and as part of the war-preparation effort he asked the movie studios to make films illustrating life in the Army for the new draftees and promoting both voluntary enlistment and cooperation with conscription.

Among the movies that got produced in response to the U.S. government’s call were this one, Great Guns (a virtual copy of Buck Privates made at 20^th Century-Fox with Laurel and Hardy instead of Abbott and Costello; left to their own devices Laurel and Hardy could probably have made a considerably funnier service comedy, as they had in 1932 with the first half of Pack Up Your Troubles, but they were given their marching orders by the “suits” at Fox and the result was a film that’s basically Buck Privates, only not as good) and Caught in the Draft (a Paramount comedy that starred Bob Hope and was probably more influential for the future direction of his career than it was as a movie in its own right: in order to promote it, Paramount booked Hope to perform live at two Army bases, including Fort Ord near Monterey, California; and Hope enjoyed the experience of performing at Army bases so much he literally did it for the rest of his career!)

Service comedies from Hollywood pretty much followed the same formula, and this one is no exception: it’s essentially three parallel tracks — a romantic plotlet in which Army “hostess” Judy Gray (Jane Frazee) is torn romantically between arrogant rich bastard Randolph Parker III (Lee Bowman) and his former valet, Bob Martin (Alan Curtis); Parker arrogantly expects his influential father to get him out of the ranks and into a cushy job in Washington, but dad decides to leave him in the Army thinking it will make a man out of him — which, of course, it does — plus Abbott and Costello essentially playing the comic relief (two small-time con men who join the Army to get away from the cop who’s chasing them, only to find that the cop, played by Nat Pendleton, is in the Army too and is, of course, their drill sergeant) and lots of music not only from the Andrews Sisters (this is the film that introduced their song “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” a hit for them at the time and later for Bette Midler in 1972) but from Jane Frazee (singing a quite lovely romantic ballad called “I Wish You Were Here”) and Lou Costello (a quite funny novelty in which he’s stuck in the kitchen with Shemp Howard — who before he got tapped to replace his brother Curly in the Three Stooges worked with quite a few other legendary comedians, including W.C. Fields in The Bank Dick and Olsen and Johnson in Hellzapoppin’ and Crazy House — and fantasizes that he’s a captain).

Indeed, Charles thought the music held up better than any other element in the film — though the Abbott and Costello verbal routines are still very funny (their main writer, John Grant, got a “special material” credit, and deserved it) and it was nice to see their first one, in which Costello claims never to have played craps before but his command of such gambling lingo as “fade it” and “let it ride” “outs” him — and in which for once it’s Costello who takes Abbott’s bankroll and not the other way around (though Abbott cons Costello back and gets the money in a later scene). I’ve had mixed feelings about Abbott and Costello; as a kid, watching these movies when San Francisco’s Channel 7 showed them early Saturday mornings, I thought they were hilarious; later I thought Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers were a good deal funnier; then in the early 2000’s when American Movie Classics (in their death throes as a classic movie channel before they went all John Wayne or James Bond all the time) showed quite a few of the Abbott and Costello features, my reaction was that maybe they weren’t funnier than Laurel and Hardy or the Marx Brothers but they’re a damned sight funnier than just about anyone who’s done movie comedy since.

Leonard Maltin’s book Movie Comedy Teams, published in 1970 and revised in 1974, was appreciative of Abbott and Costello but also zeroed in on their main weakness: “[W]ith few exceptions, the team never strove to portray realistic characters in their films. If they had any flaw, this was it. They always provided laughs, but they could never establish the bond that made Laurel and Hardy so popular with audiences; they never convinced their fans that the two guys they were playing were real people, worth caring about.” (Neither did the Marx Brothers, but the Marxes made themselves such figures of anarchistic wish-fulfillment they didn’t need to.) Still, Buck Privates holds up pretty well; the drill sequence (in which Costello not only can’t tell his left from his right but, in its funniest gag, gets tired of being told to put his rifle on his left shoulder, then on his right, then on his left again ad infinitum and whines to the drill sergeant, “Will ya make up your mind?”) was apparently largely improvised (and, according to one imdb.com commentator, was shown by the Japanese army as an alleged example of their enemy’s incompetence!), and though the gags are so old Aristophanes probably would have rejected them as too clichéd, they’re still funny.

End of the Trail (Columbia, 1932)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The night before last Charles and I had screened a movie I’d been curious about since I saw a clip of it on a retrospective in the early 1970’s: End of the Trail, an extraordinary 1932 production that was probably the first period Western in American history that presented Native Americans sympathetically. (The only predecessor I can think of is The Vanishing American, a silent made at MGM in 1925 and starring Richard Dix — and based, like End of the Trail, on a story by Zane Grey — and The Vanishing American was a contemporary story rather than a period Western like End of the Trail.) The star was Tim McCoy, a Hollywood cowboy whose films had been bread-and-butter releases for MGM in the late silent era; he was working his way down the Hollywood food chain and by 1932 had settled in at Columbia, where he made a long string of “B” Westerns like Two-Fisted Law (with John Wayne in a supporting role!) and this bizarre outlier, set in the same heady time and place — the Great Plains in the 1870’s — PBS covered in their recent documentary on General George Armstrong Custer.

McCoy plays Army cavalry captain Tim Travers (it was quite common for McCoy and other Western stars to play characters with the same first name as their own), who as the movie opens is being thrown out of his regiment and the Army itself for having sold modern guns to the Arapahoe Indians that live in the area of the outpost where he’s stationed. Travers denies the charge but makes it clear, in the first of a number of surprisingly forthright (if rather didactic) speeches in Stuart Anthony’s script that make it clear just what the whites did to the Indians in settling the West, and in particular how they made treaties with the tribes and then routinely violated them, that he sympathizes with the Indians and shares their resentment that the latest treaty, which guaranteed them a reservation in the northern Dakota territory in perpetuity, has already been broken by American gold miners who are flocking to the Black Hills and crossing through the reservation while the Army is protecting the miners instead of the Indians.

His epaulets are torn off the sleeves of his uniform (a weird sort of symbolic castration reused in the 1960’s TV series Branded, which starred Chuck Connors as an officer thrown out of the Army for allegedly having shown cowardice in battle) and then the uniform jacket is taken away, and Travers leaves the post with his young son (Wally Albright) and Sergeant O’Brien (Wade Boteler), who though he hasn’t been thrown out of the Army under false pretenses accompanies Travers nonetheless. A raiding party of U.S. cavalrymen — Travers’ former colleagues — attacks him and O’Brien, and a stray bullet kills Travers’ son. (Today we’d casually and cruelly call that “collateral damage.”) With nowhere else to go, Travers and O’Brien seek sanctuary among the Arapahoes, who take them in and make Travers part of their war council. Travers pleads with them to make peace with the white man or face inundation by more white settlers than they can either fight off or live with, but the whites provoke a confrontation, the Indians storm the fort, and Travers reports to his old commanding officer, Col. John Burke (Lafe McKee) and offers himself as the only person who can talk the Indians out of annihilating the fort with their far superior numbers. Travers duly emerges from the fort carrying a white flag, the troopers cease firing and so do the Indians — and then one shot rings out from the fort, from the mortally wounded Major Jenkins (Wheeler Oakman), who it turns out was the man who had actually been selling guns to the Indians and had set up Travers for the fall.

Travers is wounded but fortunately the Indians don’t take the bait and resume the attack; instead there’s a tag scene in which the Indians agree to return to the reservation and Col. Burke announces that he will be the new Indian agent to administer the territory. End of the Trail also features an attraction between Travers and Luana (Luana Walters, who later had some far less illustrious credits like the anti-marijuana movie Assassin of Youth and the wretched 1942 Bela Lugosi vehicle The Corpse Vanishes), though even in a movie this nervy writer Anthony and director D. Ross Lederman didn’t dare an interracial romance — but that (and an annoyingly racist reference to the Indians as “half-children”) only slightly mar a remarkable film that deserves its reputation as essentially the 1932 “B” version of Dances with Wolves. (Charles pointed out a remarkably similar bit of dialogue in both films, as the white army man living with the Indians pleads with them for peace because if they attack, the whites will flood the territory with new settlers and take away what little land they have left.) According to one message board contributor on imdb.com, McCoy personally participated in the oral history project in the 1920’s in which survivors of the battle of the Little Big Horn — on the Indian side, the side that had survivors — were interviewed for the only first-hand accounts we have of it.

 End of the Trail is a film that was pretty obviously influenced by those researches, and though the script gets a bit preachy at times the case it makes against the American whites for their treatment of the Native population is one that’s only become familiar since the late 1960’s and early 1970’s via the revisionist histories of people like Dee Brown, Vine DeLoria, Jr. and Howard Zinn. It’s also a quite well-made movie, far above the standards of a typical “B” Western; Lederman is a director I’ve made fun of in the past (in reference to one of his series crime “B”’s from the 1940’s I joked that you should never trust a director whose name looked like it should have “D.D.S.” after it) but he’s superb here, keeping the pace slow and the tone elegiac — and McCoy’s performance is also far ahead of the work he turned in on most of his projects. When he points out the abuses the whites in general and the Army in particular have wreaked on the Indians, his tone is anguished and breathtakingly sincere, and when he’s living among the Indians he portrays — at least as ably as Kevin Costner did 48 years later — a man really at home on neither side, burdened not only by grief at the loss of his son at the hands of his fellow whites but concern that the Indians he genuinely loves and cares about will be swamped by the white settlers and they’ll either be killed en masse (there’s a quite remarkable speech in the movie by one of the officers that actually seems to advocate genocide!) or forced to give up the only way of life they’ve known. Even McCoy’s age — he was 41, and though he was in good shape for his age the years are visible on his face — adds to the careworn demeanor he projects through most of the film.

The most baffling things about End of the Trail are how on earth Tim McCoy and his producer, Irving Briskin, got it greenlighted, and what audiences who showed up at Saturday matinees expecting a normal, generic Tim McCoy Western made of it. The print we were watching (a commercial DVD release from VCI Entertainment) was missing the original opening and end titles — instead there was a rather crude 1950’s drawing that proclaimed the film as a production of something called “Gail Pictures” (and denied us the chance to see that marvelously cheesy Statue of Liberty logo Columbia used in the early days) — but it was in excellent shape otherwise, and it was a marvelous opportunity to see a movie so obscure it isn’t listed in the American Film Institute Catalog at all (their only listing for End of the Trail in their 1931-1940 catalog is of a 1936 production, also a Columbia Western, but starring Jack Holt and having a totally different plotline from this one) and deserves to be considerably better known.

The Road to Singapore (Warner Bros., 1931)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I picked a film from our backlog of TCM recordings called The Road to Singapore, not the 1940 musical with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope that kicked off the “Road” series (and is quite entertaining and funny even though the second one in the series, The Road to Zanzibar — the second and last one directed by frame-breaker Victor Schertzinger — is even better) but a 1931 Warners white-imperialists-in-the-tropics melodrama starring William Powell. He plays Hugh Dawltry (though spelled differently, the last name is pronounced the same as that of the Who’s lead singer, Roger Daltrey, and the American Film Institute Catalog for some reason misspells the name as “Dawltrey”), who as the film opens is returning to his plantation on the Pacific island of Khota. The plantation is being foreclosed on — at least I thought that was the meaning of the sign on its front gate announcing an auction (and incidentally giving the correct spelling of Dawltry’s last name), though later on Hugh moves back onto the plantation and seemingly doesn’t have any trouble staying there (maybe he returned with enough money to get himself out of hock) — and Hugh is thrown out of the Gymkhana Club in absentia because he shamed the members by running off in the first place with another man’s wife.

This time he’s pursuing Philippa March (Doris Kenyon), wife of local doctor George March (Louis Calhern, two years before he played the principal bad guy, Ambassador Trentino of Sylvania, in the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup), while George’s sister Rene (Marian Marsh) — “Renée” would be the usual form of that name for a woman — is pursuing Hugh. Worried that his sister is going to get mixed up with that rotter Hugh Dawltry, George insists that she accompany him as he goes out of town to treat a patient — only that leaves the field open for Hugh to seduce, or at least attempt to seduce, George’s wife Philippa. They end up … well, even in the relatively liberal “pre-Code” era of 1931, the filmmakers (director Alfred E. Green and writer J. Grubb Alexander, adapting a novel called Heat Wave by Denise Robins via a previous stage version by Roland Pertwee) can’t spell it out that they actually made it to the bedroom, but they might as well have because when George returns he naturally assumes they did, especially after he finds the note Hugh wrote Philippa inviting her over to his place. (The note is shown in three separate inserts at different stages of the film, reflecting its importance to the plot.) In the end, in a resolution that makes this (at least briefly) seem more like a movie from the second-wave feminist era of the 1970’s than the 1930’s, Philippa gets on a boat for Singapore (that’s the only “road” there we’re going to see!) and walks out on both her husband and her lover, and George confronts Hugh and tries to shoot him but can’t bring himself to do so. The End.

The Road to Singapore is a pretty silly and meaningless movie plot-wise, and Doris Kenyon and Marian Marsh look so much alike it’s almost impossible to figure out why William Powell’s character is attracted to one but not the other, but as Charles pointed out it’s a good example of how far Hollywood’s directors and writers could push the envelope of traditional morality as long as they twisted the story’s logic enough to remain in at least technical compliance with the Production Code. What’s more, it’s a stunningly atmospheric movie (and it was nice to see a good-quality print of something after having suffered through those scratched, grainy, washed-out things we’ve been downloading from archive.org!), beautifully photographed by Robert Kurrle (Gloria Swanson’s dissatisfaction with him during the making of her 1927 film Sadie Thompson, also a film about the Pacific Islands, is hard to understand from his great work here) and directed by Green with far more of a visual sense than he usually showed even though they probably went no further west than Catalina, Hollywood’s all-purpose stand-in for the South Pacific back then. The Road to Singapore is also one of those early sound films that didn’t have a background score; instead source music supposedly being played by native musicians is used to heighten certain scenes, much the way Hawai’ian music was used in the 1931 Charlie Chan film The Black Camel — pounding native drums add to the emotional power of the confrontations between the leads and one early scene features a native band playing some odd-looking plucked string instruments. A lot of this film actually gains from not being drenched in the big, expansive Hollywood scores that eventually became de rigueur in films like this!

Secrets of Eden (Craig Anderson Productions, SOE Films, Lifetime, 2012)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

This morning I watched the Lifetime TV-movie Secrets of Eden — “Eden” in this case being a small town in Vermont whose main industry, if you can call it that, is selling overpriced antiques to tourists — and it begins with voice-over narrations by a young minister who’s just been hired to take over the church in Eden (just what denomination of Christianity is unspecified, but it’s one that does total-immersion baptisms since one figures prominently in the plot) and a young woman who isn’t identified but turns out to be Katie Hayward, daughter of Alice (Sonya Salomaa) and George Hayward. George is the owner of a chain of sporting-goods stores and he and Alice have what seems from the outside to be a perfect marriage, but behind closed doors he regularly beats her. She finally gets up the courage to throw him out of the house after one particularly brutal assault — she makes his departure the condition for her not pressing charges against him — largely because through this period she’s been going through “pastoral counseling” from Pastor Stephen Drew (John Stamos), and after George leaves (though they’re still married) she and Stephen get hot ’n’ heavy with each other and have a sexual affair (shown by director Tawnia McKiernan in a hot bit of soft-core porn that’s considerably more exciting than the rest of the movie!), only Pastor Drew has guilt feelings about the affair and breaks it off on the night the two were supposed to take their first out-of-town trip together.

This leads Alice to decide to invite George to move back in and attempt a reconciliation — while they’ve been apart he continued to e-mail her poems (apparently he’s quite the romantic when he’s not beating her up) and he also bought their daughter Katie an expensive pair of sports shoes to help her as a soccer player. Only Alice, who’s been reconnecting with her spiritual roots in the Christian church and also developing some new ones with Heather LaRoche, local antiques dealer and New Ager who’s written a book called Angels and Aurascapes (“Aurascapes” is also the name of her shop). She decides to be baptized in Pastor Drew’s church; George has a jealous hissy-fit over that and gets even crazier after it’s happened. He demands to know what she was wearing when she did the total immersion, and when she says, “A long shirt over a bathing suit,” he accused her of making a public spectacle of herself and thereby embarrassing him, which leads him to a fight in which he ultimately strangles her to death. Then we hear a shot and see a flash from the house, and at first the killings are reported as a murder-suicide until someone from the Eden police’s CSI unit (or whatever they call it) figures out that the gunshot that killed him went in at an angle that could not possibly have been a suicide shot.

The police immediately fasten onto Pastor Drew as a suspect, and prosecutor Catherine Benicasa (Anna Gunn — she’s described on the imdb.com page for this film — which lists only five of its actors — as a police detective but that’s not how she comes across in the film; indeed, given her blonde hair, severe demeanor and utter conviction in Drew’s guilt, she strikes me as a portrait of what Nancy Grace must have been like before she quit her job as a prosecutor and joined Fox News) goes after him with about as much professional detachment as Javert showed in his pursuit of Jean Valjean. Eventually she finds the journal Alice kept, which gives us much of the backstory of her relationships with both her husband and Drew (this film is non-linear in ways that just seem arbitrary and confusing, and one sometimes has to look closely at Sonya Salomaa’s hair style to determine just when a flashback scene is taking place), and Katie says that her family’s dog would have gone after a stranger attacking their home or anyone in it, leading to Pastor Drew because he, alone of all the townspeople who didn’t actually live at the Haywards’, was friendly with the dog.

Pretty early on I became convinced that this film (written by Anne Meredith, adapting a best-selling novel by Chris Bohjalian) was going to end with Katie turning out to be her father’s murderer because, after killing her mom, he had tried to rape her — Bohjalian and Meredith didn’t quite go that far but they did have Katie be her dad’s killer (she came home early — she had gone to a concert with friends and was supposed to sleep over there but she wanted to fetch her laptop — discovered her mom dead and her dad sitting in a chair, drinking, barely conscious but still very much alive, and shot him) and Pastor Drew actually helped her get away with it, saying he’d set up the scene to look like suicide and, if that didn’t fool the police, they would leak evidence implicating him so she would not be suspected. Secrets of Eden was an O.K. movie that had the potential to be much better than it was, and the key thing wrong with it was McKiernan’s sluggish direction, way too slow and dull for what was supposed to be a thriller — though in general the movie was well acted and, aside from a somewhat far-fetched resolution, was great bad fun. It didn’t help that Drew has a brief affair with Heather after Alice dies (or that he calls her “Alice” in bed!) — John Stamos is, as he was in his youth, a decent-looking but hardly drop-dead gorgeous hunk of man-meat and it’s hard to believe two women in the dramatis personae both found him irresistible; frankly, I found the actor playing the abusive husband far more visually appealing!

One Night in the Tropics (Universal, 1940)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I cracked open my latest DVD arrival from Columbia House — the 15-DVD boxed set of all 28 movies Abbott and Costello made for Universal (which is all but eight of their feature films — they made Rio Rita, Lost in a Harem and Abbott and Costello in Hollywood for MGM, Jack and the Beanstalk and Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd for Warners, Africa Screams for Nassour, The Noose Hangs High for Eagle-Lion and their last joint film, Dance With Me, Henry, for United Artists) — and watched the first one, a 1940 semi-musical called One Night in the Tropics in which Abbott and Costello were billed third and fourth. The story began life in 1914 as a novel called Love Insurance by Earl Derr Biggers — who’s remembered today, if at all, only as the creator of Charlie Chan, but who actually had a quite long and profitable career writing all sorts of pop fiction, including the original source novel George M. Cohan adapted into the hit play Seven Keys to Baldpate. 

Playboy Steve Harper (Robert Cummings) has been in and out of several relationships with women but insists that the one he’s currently dating, Cynthia Merrick (Nancy Kelly), is The One he’s going to marry and live happily ever after with. Only he happens to run into — literally — Cynthia’s fearsome Aunt Kitty (a marvelous performance by Mary Boland), who hates him at first sight and is willing to do whatever she has to do to break up the relationship. Anxious about the wedding, Steve complains to his friend Jim Moore (Allan Jones, top-billed), the son of insurance company owner Mr. Moore (Richard Carle doing an impression of Charles Coburn at his most dyspeptic), and Jim offers to sell him a “love insurance” policy for $100,000. According to the policy, if Steve doesn’t marry Cynthia (or anyone else, as we learn about two-thirds of the way through the movie but the characters seem to forget until the final frames) by a set deadline, Moore’s company is out $1 million. Steve’s former girlfriend, singer Mickey Fitzgerald (Peggy Moran), still has the hots for him and is trying to latch on to him and get him away from Cynthia. Jim decides to keep an eye on the proceedings to safeguard the investments of both his father and gangster/club owner (in a 1940 movie that’s redundant!) Roscoe (William Frawley), who’s essentially bought half the policy in a reinsurance deal and is threatening the Moores and everyone else involved with bodily harm if the marriage doesn’t happen and the policy has to be paid out. With this setup, any reasonably hardened moviegoer either in 1940 or now could guess what’s going to happen next: Jim is going to fall in love with Cynthia himself, and it’s going to be touch-and-go whether his heart or his (and his family’s) pocketbook wins out — along with his and his family’s continued state of well-being at the hands of revenge-minded Roscoe.

Midway through the movie, Jim decides to spirit Steve and Cynthia to the Caribbean resort island of San Marcos and have them stay at the island’s hotel, whose proprietor Escobar (Leo Carrillo) insists that once you go to San Marcos with the person you’re trying to get to marry you, it’s practically a done deal. Only Mickey gets Steve drunk and he misses the boat, so Jim has to arrange for Steve to fly down — and Mickey turns up on San Marcos herself, while among the permanent residents is amorous bullfighter Rudolfo (Don Alvarado), who gets the hots for Cynthia himself. The movie ends the way you think it’s going to, with Jim marrying Cynthia, Steve marrying Mickey (thereby invalidating the love insurance policy that kicked off this story and gave it its original title), Aunt Kitty paired with Escobar and everyone dancing to the music of San Marcos’s theme song, “Farandole” — composed, like all the other songs in the film, by Jerome Kern. Surprisingly, Universal did not ballyhoo Kern’s association with this film (he isn’t mentioned in the credits — at least not on this version: I recall seeing this film before in a version in which Kern was mentioned on the opening credits) even though he was a major composer with huge hits under his belt. Maybe it’s not so surprising after all, given that the five songs Kern contributed to this film — “You and Your Kiss,” “Remind Me,” “Simple Philosophy” and “Farandole,” with lyrics by Dorothy Fields (his collaborator on the superb score for the Astaire-Rogers Swing Time) and “Your Dream” with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II (which I suspect wasn’t written for this film but was a leftover from the “insertion numbers” Kern and Hammerstein wrote at Universal in 1936 for the second film of Show Boat, which also starred Allan Jones) — are competent and pleasant enough but singularly unmemorable.

As for Abbott and Costello, in case you were wondering where they fit into all this, they play two henchmen of Roscoe’s, and the screenwriters (Kathryn Scola, Francis Martin, Gertrude Purcell and Charles Grayson) didn’t bother to write any material for them. Not that they needed to: by the time they made this movie Abbott and Costello were long-time veterans of burlesque, vaudeville, Broadway and (especially) radio, and they had a huge backlog of material, most of it (like the famous “Who’s on First?” routine, excerpted here and given a longer presentation five years later in the film The Naughty Nineties) by their go-to guy for hilarious talking gags, John Grant. The original plan was for the second half of the film to take place on the French Riviera and the movie to be called Riviera, and when that plan was scotched the movie went through various title changes including Moonlight in the Tropics and Caribbean Holiday before One Night in the Tropics was finally settled on. It doesn’t help that (as Charles pointed out) neither Allan Jones nor Bob Cummings are playing especially appealing characters, or that Nancy Kelly and Peggy Moran look so similar that, especially when cinematographer Joseph Valentine decides to get atmospheric, it’s hard to tell them apart. It also doesn’t help that a story whose central premise seems to lend itself to lunatic humor gets a surprisingly “straight” treatment — one wonders what Preston Sturges could have made of the whole idea of a marriage-shy playboy threatening to bankrupt his friend who’s sold him a “love insurance” policy — or that Abbott and Costello’s routines are really the only reliable laughs this film has.

It’s a bizarre movie because virtually everyone in it had worked (or would work) with someone better; when Allan Jones croons to Nancy Kelly on board the ship to San Marcos one can’t help but remember A Night at the Opera, where he got to sing a much better song (Nacio Herb Brown’s and Arthur Freed’s “Alone”) in a movie with even more legendary comedians (the Marx Brothers) than Abbott and Costello — and the “Farandole” also evokes A Night at the Opera through its resemblance to “Cosi-Cosa,” the big Brown-Freed production number from that film. Allan Jones had worked with the Marx Brothers, Mary Boland (brilliantly) with W. C. Fields, and later on Robert Cummings would work with Alfred Hitchcock and William Frawley (again, brilliantly) with Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. “Every critic, to a man, singled [Abbott and Costello] out as the sole bright spot in this otherwise dreary film,” wrote Leonard Maltin in his book Movie Comedy Teams, and while the movie isn’t quite that bad, it does rather drone on and get predictable and dull well before it’s over. Still, give Universal credit for knowing what they had in Abbott and Costello, signing them to a long-term contract, and giving them as their next film the service comedy Buck Privates, a mega-hit which shot them to stardom.

You're Telling Me! (Paramount, 1934)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film I picked was You’re Telling Me!, a 1934 Paramount vehicle for W. C. Fields. Basically Fields’ movies fit into one of two categories, the “husband” movies and the “carnie” movies, and this was definitely a “husband” movie. Fields plays Samuel Bisbee, professional optometrist (though we never actually see him working as such) and amateur inventor who’s been working for 10 years to perfect his latest, and most commercially promising, invention, a totally puncture-proof car tire. He’s also got the usual battle-axe wife he had to contend with in these films, Bessie Bisbee (Louise Carter), and their nice ingénue daughter Pauline (Joan Marsh, whose winsome manner and authority when the role calls for it should have marked her for biggers and betters) has fallen in love with the son of their small town’s richest people, the Murchisons.

Her boyfriend Bob (Buster Crabbe, billed as Larry “Buster” Crabbe before he got typecast in roles like Tarzan and Flash Gordon) is a down-to-earth guy but his parents (Fred Sullivan and Kathleen Howard) are insufferable status-conscious snobs; at one point Mrs. Murchison is willing to relent and allow the marriage when she learns that Bessie Bisbee’s maiden name was Warren and she was one of the Virginia Warrens — only to break it off again when Sam comes home unexpectedly, rolling an automobile wheel containing his experimental tire and acting like the down-to-earth working-class guy he is. You’re Telling Me! (the exclamation point is on the opening title card) began as a Redbook short story in the early 1920’s called “Mr. Bisbee’s Princess” by Julian Leonard Street (though the magazine’s name back then was Red Book — two words); it’s unclear when the magazine first published it but it appeared in book form as part a collection of Street’s stories, Mr. Bisbee’s Princess and Other Stories, in 1925. Unusually for a Fields movie, he isn’t credited as a writer, either under his own name or a pseudonym — though “Charles Bogle,” a name he commonly used later on for his writing credits (and before that he’d used as a gag in his stage act, drawing out the “o” in “Bogle” to unusual Fieldsian lengths), appears on the cast list as the name of a minor character.

It’s not clear just who thought this old story would be a suitable Fields vehicle, but he certainly put his stamp on it even though some of the movie’s funniest scenes either were or seemed to have been spliced in almost at random — in one sequence he’s told that he can square things with his wife by bringing her a pet bird, and he decides that he needs a bigger bird than his friend’s, so there are some screamingly funny scenes in which he’s attempting to lead an ostrich down the streets; and the writers contrive to have the film end on a golf course so Fields can do his famous “Golf Specialist” routine, first introduced by him in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1915 and filmed on its own as an RKO short in 1930 (though that film presented it as it would have been on stage, in front of a painted backdrop representing the opening tee of a golf course, whereas here it’s filmed on an actual golf course — or at least a reasonable simulacrum thereof on the Paramount backlot). It’s also one of those movies whose plot resembles a bell-shaped curve, with Fields’ fortunes plummeting until at the midpoint he’s contemplating suicide — his wife is mad at him, his daughter has broken up with her boyfriend and blames dad, and his demonstration of the puncture-proof tire (which he tests by shooting a gun at it, itself leading to some very bizarre black-humor gags, with Fields telling the demonstration’s witnesses, “Stand back, the bullets bounce”) is a washout when, unbeknownst to him, the police tow away his own car (which he’s equipped with the special tires, but which he parked illegally) and park one of their police cars in its place.

He slinks home on a train and is about to commit suicide by drinking iodine (only he can’t keep his collapsible spoon from collapsing and folding in on itself just when he’s about to raise the fatal dose to his lips) when his deus ex machina appears in the form of Princess Maria Lescaboura (the suitably exotic-looking Adrienne Ames), who also has a bottle of iodine out — she’s only going to use it topically but he’s convinced she, too, is contemplating suicide and talks her out of it. She hears out his story and takes pity on him, insisting that her state visit to the U.S. include a stop at his town, Crystal Springs, and where he’s finding himself the talk of the town for all the wrong reasons — a couple of gossips saw him entering the Princess’s compartment on the train and assumed the worst. The film ends with the Princess (who’s being forced to marry her country’s crown prince even though she loves someone else) rehabilitating Bisbee’s reputation, reconciling him with his wife, getting Bob Murchison and Pauline Bisbee together and starting a bidding war with the National Tire Company over Bisbee’s super-tire (they found Bisbee’s car where the cops had towed it, tested the tires themselves and found they worked) and getting him a $1 million fee plus royalties. As the Princess drives out of town, Bisbee — convinced through all of this that she’s just an ordinary woman posing as a princess — drawls out to her, “We certainly put that princess stuff over, didn’t we?” “You’re telling me!” she says — the only explanation we ever get for the title.

You’re Telling Me! is one of Fields’ best movies, maybe not quite as relentless as his other “husband” movies (The Fatal Glass of Beer, It’s a Gift, The Man on the Flying Trapeze and The Bank Dick) but showing off his skill as a physical comedian as well as a verbal one — the opening is a long pantomime sequence in which a drunk Fields comes home shortly before midnight, takes off his shoes so as not to wake up his wife when he enters, juggles shoes and hat and can’t get his key in the door until he uses another one of his invention, a funnel-shaped device to aid inebriated latecomers in getting their keys in their locks — and also showing how surprisingly agile Fields was before he really got bloated from years of overdrinking. Frankly, it’s jarring to watch Buster Crabbe tower over him in their scenes together! It’s yet another indication of how much better movie comedies were in the classic era — as I’ve noted before, maybe one could make the case that movie dramas have benefited from the greater sexual freedom of the post-Code era, but somehow most of today’s “comedies” offer too few good laughs and too many tasteless “jokes” to be genuinely warm, human or funny. (The few exceptions are movies like Kabluey! that have deliberately sought to evoke older styles of comedy.)

The Las Vegas Story (RKO, 1952)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was The Las Vegas Story, a 1952 RKO/Howard Hughes production starring Jane Russell and Victor Mature in a movie with noir pretensions that was really much more noir thematically than visually. It starts out on a train barreling through the Southwest (while I’m in the middle of reading Richard White’s Railroaded it was fascinating to watch a movie that opens on a train!) and discovers the unhappily married couple Lloyd and Linda Rollins (Vincent Price and Jane Russell) as the train approaches what’s billed in the station as “Las Vegas, the Streamlined City.” (It’s hard to remember, but in the 1940’s and 1950’s the word “streamlined” had the same sort of futuristic cachet as “high-tech” did in the 1980’s and 1990’s.) As the streamlined train approaches the streamlined city Lloyd and Linda are in the middle of an argument; she wants to stay on the train until its final destination in Los Angeles, while he wants to get off in Las Vegas. She has bad memories of the place, which are kept ambiguous at first but which we eventually learn are due to her having once romanced a servicemember there during World War II while she was a singer at the Last Chance saloon and casino (a remnant of the unpretentious gambling joints that were mostly put out of business by the Flamingo and the other glittering casino/hotels that were put up on the Strip in the wake of its success — one could watch the 1941 Las Vegas Nights, this movie and the 1960 Ocean’s Eleven in chronological order and have a pretty good idea of the growth and change in Vegas over those years) with Hoagy Carmichael (playing himself under the guise of a character named “Happy” — ironic, since he goes through the whole movie with a hang-dog look on his face and world-weary pessimistic dialogue to match) as her accompanist.

Lloyd pretends to be a well-heeled stockbroker, so loaded that he can walk into a casino, ask for $100,000 credit and get it without the casino management batting an eye, but it turns out he’s actually broke — we learn that from a telegram sent him by a mysterious “Will” back in Boston well before the other characters do — and the $10,000 he actually got in casino credit came from pledging a fabulously elaborate necklace he had bought for his wife in more flush times. (The opening credits included an acknowledgment to “Cartier, Inc.” for supplying the necklace, and at first I ridiculed that credit, not realizing how crucial a plot function That Necklace would serve.) Linda didn’t want to go back to Vegas because when she worked there before she’d been the girlfriend of Dave Andrews (Victor Mature), who then was a servicemember and is now a lieutenant for the Clark County Sheriff’s office with a “beat” on the Las Vegas Strip. Dave senses Linda’s unhappiness and wants to resume their relationship — there’s the little detail that she’s still married to someone else but, since Nevada was then still famous for easy divorces as well as legal gambling, he doesn’t think that’s going to be much of a problem.

The Rollinses are staying at the Hotel Fabulous (it and the Last Chance are fictional establishments but all the rest of the Las Vegas hostelries we glimpse, including the Flamingo, the Desert Inn and the Golden Nugget, are for real) and they and Dave all find themselves under the watchful eye of a mystery man (with a nice hairy chest which, since he’s doing a lot of his surveilling at the Hotel Fabulous’s pool, we get to see a lot of) who turns out to be a private investigator, Tom Hubler (Brad Dexter), who’s been hired by the insurance company that has the policy on Linda’s necklace. Eventually it turns out that Lloyd Rollins is not only broke but an embezzler to boot — he insisted on stopping in Vegas in the hopes that he could hit a winning streak that would enable him to replace the money he embezzled — and the Las Vegas Sheriff gets a warrant for his arrest, which not surprisingly Dave Andrews is all too glad to serve personally — but not before Hubler turns out to be a crook interested in stealing the necklace and smuggling it out of the country. He rents a Mercury and takes Linda along as a hostage, and Dave charters a helicopter and gives chase — well, it’s a Howard Hughes production set in contemporary times, so aircraft had to figure in it somewhere! — and the sight of Dave and his pilot deftly flying their helicopter just inches off the ground as it pursues Hubler through open airplane hangars is exciting and a lot of fun. Eventually Hubler is killed — the necklace falls out of his suit as he expires in the desert — Lloyd is arrested and extradited back to Massachusetts, and Linda announces her intention to spend the next six weeks establishing legal residence in Nevada so she can sue for divorce and she and Dave can get together.

The Las Vegas Story, directed by Robert Stevenson (who had a weird career trajectory — in the 1930’s he worked in his native England and was considered one of only two British directors good enough for an international career; Alfred Hitchcock was the other; later he followed Hitchcock to the U.S. and directed the Joan Fontaine/Orson Welles Jane Eyre, got on Howard Hughes’ good side by taking on his pet project I Married a Communist — though by the time Stevenson finished it, it had been retitled The Woman on Pier 13 — and ended up at Walt Disney Studios, of all places, directing Mary Poppins and most of Disney’s other big live-action/animation fusion movies in the 1960’s) from a script by Earl Fenton, Harry Essex and an uncredited Paul Jarrico (whom Hughes removed from the credits after he was blacklisted; Jarrico went to court to challenge the blacklist and, alas, lost) based on a story by Jay Dratler, is the sort of movie more interesting in its parts than as a whole. There’s a quite remarkable scene in which Jane Russell’s character visits the Last Chance and sees it for the first time since she worked there — and the sequence dissolves back and forth from footage of her now, hearing the song “I Get Along Without You Very Well” in an echoey voice, and her several years previously without any echo on her voice — and one gets the impression that if Marcel Proust had directed a movie, this is what it would have looked like.

The helicopter/car chase is also noteworthy, as is a subplot in which Dave busts an underage couple who were trying to get married at one of the quickie chapels Vegas then abounded in (still does, as far as I know); Dave feels guilty because the boy had just been drafted and was worried that if they didn’t get hitched immediately he’d never see his girlfriend again, especially since their parents were determined to break them up, but at the end his dad relents and gives the needed parental consent for the wedding and even offers to host it in a more inspiring location than a Las Vegas Strip joint. Hoagy Carmichael’s performance of “The Monkey Song” — like “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” one song he wrote completely himself, words and music (usually he, like Elton John, just wrote the music) — is also one of the highlights, filled with ironic comments about bop and a passing reference to Bix that reminds us that Carmichael actually knew Bix (which must have made the historical inaccuracies of the film Young Man with a Horn, made two years earlier and also featuring Carmichael, all that much more galling to him!). The Las Vegas Story is a good movie that might have been great, though it’s probably as good as it could have been under Hughes’ all-controlling auspices, and director Stevenson deserves credit for turning both Mature’s and Russell’s limitations as actors to his and the movie’s advantage: his tendency to bluster even on the most trivial lines becomes a legitimate depiction of hot-headedness (as it had under an even weaker director, H. Bruce Humberstone, in I Wake Up Screaming 11 years earlier!) and her monotonous delivery comes off as believable world-weariness and traumatization.