With their return to Universal after MGM's Rio Rita "remake," the boys were put into a film in an attempt to recreate the success of Paramount's Hope & Crosby Road movies. So we get Pardon My Sarong which follows the same formula as the previous Abbott & Costello Universal films. There's some musical numbers (all great, especially the ones featuring The Ink Spots and Tip, Tap, Toe, but they slow down the film) and a love story that's kind of bland (and doesn't really go anywhere). There's two villains (Willam Demerest in the first half, Lionel Atwill in the the second) and the usual antics from the boys.
Pardon My Sarong finds the boys as bus drivers who are being pursued by a police detective (Demerest) when they don't return the bus to the company after escorting a wealthy bachelor (Robert Paige) from Chicago to Los Angeles. After escaping the detective (by accidentally driving the bus into the ocean), the boys wind up working on the bachelor's boat and helping him sail to Hawaii (where they also bring along the sister of a competitor who tried sabotaging the boat). Once they are shipwrecked on an uncharted island their antics involve an evil scientist (Atwill), his henchmen, a group of natives who think Costello is a God and have the ability to break out into an swing number with English lyrics at the drop of the hat (making one think the evil scientist is related to Busby Berkeley).
While this may have been the second highest grossing film of 1942, critics were starting to get a bit tired of the boys (after all they had 6 films released in the previous year, 3 of which were stories that found them in the Armed Forces). But they remained popular with the movie going public. Looking back, this isn't one of their best films, but it certainly has enough laughs to keep it from being one of their worst. Middle of the road Abbott & Costello is a fine way to spend your Sunday mornings.
Pardon My Sarong has been released on VHS and twice on DVD; first in The Best of Abbott & Costello Volume One and then as part of Abbott and Costello: The Complete Universal Pictures Collection.
Next week comes one of my favorites: Who Done It?
Be seeing you...
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