Sundays With The Boys: Ride 'em Cowboy

 

The boys return for their first film of 1942 with Ride 'em Cowboy. In sitting back and thinking over the films that Abbott & Costello have done to this point, the last four (of the five total) were all shot and released in 1941 (Buck Privates started production in mid December 1940 but was still shooting into mid January 1941 before its release at the end of that month). That's a crazy hectic schedule when you also realize that this film was also shot in 1941 (and their next film Rio Rita started production in 1941)...especially with three of them being service comedies and the other two (this film and Hold That Ghost) being shifted around to accommodate getting the service comedies out sooner. Five of their first six films were all in production during 1941. Crazy.

Anyway, Ride 'em Cowboy finds the boys working as vendors at a Rodeo, getting into a kerfuffle with their boss and accidentally "running away" (when they're locked in a cattle car) to a Ranch (but not before Costello accidentally winds up engaged to an Indian squaw) and team up with some of their Rodeo friends who are there to help train a writer of Western novels become the real cowboy his press agent claims he is.

The formula that was set up in One Night in the Tropics still remains (albeit the boys are the "A" story and the romance is the "B" story which may propel the plot, but gets less screen time). The boys have some great bits (Herd a cows, Poker, The Diving Routine) and there's lots of great physical comedy as Costello gets dragged by horses, kicked by cows, etc. The romance story (faux Western novelist falls in love with Cowgirl training him) isn't intrusive at all, but it also isn't good either (are they ever?).

There are plenty of musical numbers, mostly by The Merry Macs, but we also get the film debut of the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald (singing "A Tisket A Tasket"). Fitzgerald is so good in her one number (she does have more screen time that just that as a friend to lead Anne Gywnn) that one hopes she gets more than that one number (which she does when she accompanies The Merry Macs on one number which mixes swing and square dancing...which is kind of ahead of the time).

By this film the boys have settled into a formula that was obvious but hadn't actually taken over and become tired. There are some gems coming up in the next few weeks (I'm a big fan of Who Done It), but I can see the potential for repetition to set in quickly.

Ride 'em Cowboy has been released on VHS, Laserdisc (as part of the Bud Abbott & Lou Costello Comedy Collection Box Set) and on DVD twice (first as part of The Best of Abbott & Costello Volume One and then as part of Abbott & Costello: The Complete Universal Pictures Collection).

Be seeing you.

Isn't It Grand?

Sometimes when I'm watching a movie other movies will pop into my head. It's not a bad thing and I don't dwell on them very long. It's more like "oh...this movie is like this other movie." And so it was watching Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel which had moments that caused Steven Soderbergh's Kafka and the Coen Brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy to pop into my head (in addition to other Wes Anderson films of course).

A story told within a story being told, The Grand Budapest Hotel is about the friendship that develops between the hotel's Concierge (Ralph Fiennes) and the new Lobby Boy (Tony Rivolori in the scenes from the 1930s and F. Murray Abraham in the scenes from the 1960s). They get mixed up in the murder of a Dowager whom the Concierge had been sleeping with and lots of weird chaos ensues involving many colorful characters. To say anymore would ruin the fun of the film's story as it unfolds. It is funny and touching in places.

This may be my favorite Wes Anderson film to date. The story is engaging and highly entertaining. The cast is perfect from Fiennes as the Concierge who prides himself on giving the guests the exceptional service he believes they deserve to Rivolori as the Lobby Boy trying to keep up to Jeff Goldblum's weird nervous lawyer and Willem Dafoe's thug trying to tie up loose ends. Since I didn't see this in theaters, it took a bit to realize that Anderson and cinematographer Robert Yoeman shot the film using three different aspect ratios on purpose (instead of my initial confusion of wondering why we would have a pan and scan HD master in the 21st century). It helps give the three eras of the story three very distinct looks.

If you enjoy quirky original films (admittedly I'm not sure we needed the story being within a story of a story concept as maybe two layers would have been plenty), you should enjoy The Grand Budapest Hotel.

It's Just Too Good To Be True: Jersey Boys

 

I haven't seen the stage version of Jersey Boys so I'm at a bit of a loss to make a comparison to that. What research I've done on it tells me that it is a juke box musical that uses the popular tunes made famous by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons to tell the story of their rise and fall and rise in a Rashomon like manner. It's been running almost ten years now and doesn't seem to have an end in sight. I can see the concept being very popular with baby boomers kind of how Mamma Mia is (just with a newly written story that incorporates ABBA's music).

The film version is directed by Clint Eastwood and I'm not sure if he needed the money or lost a bet or owed the Mafia money. The film version misfires in so many aspects it becomes more of a study on how not to adapt a popular stage musical to film (it reminded me of the paper I wrote in grad school doing comparisons between Tom Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities and Brian DePalma's film adapation using the novel, a couple of drafts of the script and the finished film...If I were still in school this film would present a great follow up to that paper).

Jersey Boys is little more than a typical "by the numbers" musical biopic that has little to offer in any way shape or form. Even most of the musical numbers that still remain (it seems the score has been gutted as the film barely seems like a musical at all) don't get completed. The acting ranges from adequate to weird (Christopher Walken seems to be playing a Xerox of a character he's played before while doing an impression of Christopher Walken).

This feels like a concept that wasn't fleshed out as the idea of the four band members each telling a part of their story but only seeing it from their side at the time is there (they do narrate, but there's no logic or consistency as to who narrates when). The story seems to skip all over the place and there is little sense of how much time passes between the start of the film in 1951 and the "epilogue" in 1990 beyond watching Valli's daughter grow up. There are huge gaps in the story (how many daughters does Valli have? when exactly and how did his marriage dissolve?) and the actors basically seem to age by growing facial hair and wearing wigs, but still looking the same age they did at the start. It's distracting.At the end of the film, one of the characters (I forget which) mentions the scene depicted in the poster above. We don't actually see that until the very end of the film, but he mentions it like we should have already seen it. And that's part of the problem. If it is a by the numbers biopic at the end of the day, the film makers forgot to include the odd numbers and left out the colors green and purple. There is little beyond the nostalgic appeal of the music of Frankie Valli and the Four Season to recommend this film and even that isn't played up as much as it should be.

There was a preview for an upcoming film about James Brown (called Get On Up) that played before this. That seemed like it would be more interesting. Let's hope that Clint Eastwood has a better film up his sleeve for his next film because this would be a bad place to end a distinguished directing career.

Sundays With The Boys: Hold That Ghost

It's mid 1941 and the boys are back in their 4th film (even though it was shot third). The film starts off with the boys as replacement waiters in a nightclub where we get the film off to an unfortunately awkward start watching Ted Lewis singing "Me and My Shadow" while being shadowed by an African American dancer. It is our 21st Century vantage point that makes this odd, but Lewis was one of the first prominent entertainers to employ African American performers (he started in the late 1920s) and things recover quickly with a quick routine between the boys and a number by the Andrew Sisters (for the third and last time in an Abbott & Costello film) before the plot proper gets under way.  The boys get mixed up with a gangster named Moose Matson who gives them his last will & testament bequeathing an old tavern to those with him at his time of death (the boys). Lots of hijinks ensue as the boys (and an odd collection of other "bus" passengers stranded with them) spend the night in the mobster's spooky Tavern.

The film has a number of self referential moments. The boys know they're in a "haunted house" and point out some of the tropes of the genre just before they actually happen (and it helps that one of the other passengers is a "famous" radio actress, played by Joan Davis, who is only known for her screaming). Some of the highlights of the film are a dance routine between Lou and Davis set to the "Blue Danube", Lou and the bedroom that changes into a casino and the Moving Candle routine.

This is, for me, the funniest of their early movies. The boys' routines seem to be blended into the plot better (instead of still feeling like they were dropped in) and the plot actually seems to move from point A to point B (instead of meandering around a basic concept).

Hold That Ghost has appeared on VHS, Laser Disc (as a double feature with The Time of Their Lives) and DVD twice (first as part of "The Best of Abbott and Costello Volume 1" and then as part of "Abbott and Costello: The Complete Universal Pictures Collection"...both versions contain a jovial and informative commentary by film historian Jeff Miller who also watched the boys on WPIX out of NYC).

Next week: Keep 'em Flying.

Be seeing you.

Sundays With The Boys: One Night In The Tropics

My intro to Abbott & Costello came courtesy of WPIX in New York. Every Sunday for as far back as I can remember, they ran their Sunday Morning Movie and it was always Abbott & Costello (at least I don't remember anything else ever being run aside from Abbott & Costello).

I know I saw every one of their movies this way. It was a great way to start a Sunday (if one slept late) back in the day when you didn't have too many choice for finding programming on TV.

Last weekend being Memorial Day and the boys no longer having Hebrew School until the fall, I thought it was a great opportunity to pull out Buck Privates and show it to the kids. It quickly devolved into my watching most of the film by myself (though the D-man did spend a chunk of the film next to me playing games on my iPad). It brought back great memories...so much so that I decided as long as there was nowhere to be on Sunday mornings, I'd be going through the A&C catalog in chronological order...but having watched their 2nd film first, I needed to back up one film.

The boys (Abbott & Costello, not Mac & the D-man) first appeared on screen in One Night in the Tropics. I know I had seen the film a few times before (I've probably seen it 3 or 4 times which is certainly not as many times as several of their other films) and that it had been a while since I had last seen it (most likely when it first came out on DVD as part of a set entitled "The Best of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Volume One" back in 2004 -- since replaced with "Abbott and Costello: The Complete Universal Pictures Collection" which was the only way to get It Ain't Hay due to licensing rights issues blocking a prior release). For reasons unknown, whenever I think of this film I tend to actually think of Pardon My Sarong (probably due the "tropical" feel of that film as well).

So, how is One Night in the Tropics? As a typical romantic musical comedy of the late 30s/early 40s (the film was released in 1940) it's B material at best. Cute, but nothing special. The plot as such involves two friend, one an insurance salesman who sells his friend a "love insurance policy" because he knows the sap won't marry his fiance (and predictably he winds up with an ex while the insurance salesman winds up with the fiance). Alan Jones, Robert Cummings, Nancy Kelly and Peggy Moran play the couples while Mary Boland plays the stuffy Aunt Kitty (to Nancy Kelly) and William Frawley (Fred Mertz of I Love Lucy a decade later than this) as a nightclub owner who underwrites the policy and sends two of his "guys" to make sure the policy doesn't pay out. The "guys" are the "boys".

Obviously, the highlight of the film are Abbott & Costello. The plot stops dead in its tracks almost every time they appear, but it is worth it. We get some of their most famous bits spread across the film: "Mustard," "Jonah and the Whale," "A Dollar A Day" and even a truncated version of their most famous bit "Who's on First ." Each and every one of the is as funny now as they were then and it's nice to see A&C do the stuff they had been doing for over a decade already...routines that had been polished like diamonds.

It's a cute film at best that shows off the comedy due in a great light and was the start to a long run of more successful films for them.

I'll take a look at Buck Privates later in the week before we roll into In the Navy next weekend.

Until then...be seeing you.