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.
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