Talk About Cinema

After making their first film for MGM, Abbott and Costello returned to Universal and made Pardon My Sarong , their first Universal film made without director Arthur Lubin, who had directed all of their Universal films since Buck Privates . Unfortunately, the results are not too good. Abbott and Costello are Algy Shaw and Wellington Pflug, two former bus drivers who find themselves joining the crew of boat racer Tommy Layton (Robert Paige). When Joan Marshall (Virginia Bruce) fires his crew in order to help her brother win, Layton takes her along. The four eventually find themselves stranded on an island where they encounter island natives and a suspicious scientist (Lionel Atwill). Let’s start with the positives. There is a great sequence at the beginning featuring Abbott and Costello being chased by a cop played by William Demarest. They go backstage to where a magician is setting up his act and use his props in order to escape the cop. It’s a really funny sequence and is definite...

One of my favorite actors is Lon Chaney, Sr. He’s often remembered for his ability to create terrifying images with makeup, which appropriately gave him the nickname, “The Man of a Thousand Faces.” For me, though, it was his ability to act through that makeup that made him so great. Chaney was one of the first actors to really give the villain depth; there are some films where he makes you feel bad enough to the point that you sort of want him to succeed. That is the genius of Lon Chaney, and he didn’t have to use many words to do so. Chaney did make one talkie, The Unholy Three , which is a remake of one of my favorite Chaney silent films, and he probably would have continued to make more if it weren’t for his death a few months later. The question: is Chaney’s acting style just as effective with words as it was silent? Echo (Chaney), Tweedle Dee (Harry Earles), and Hercules (Ivan Linow) are three circus performers who, after the circus is shut down, decide to go on a crime spree as...

In between filming their Universal movies, Abbott and Costello also found time to make three films for MGM in the early 1940s. Although Costello had previously worked at MGM as a bit player and occasional stunt man during the silent era, this was the team’s first experience as stars at the studio that often claimed to have “more stars than there are in heaven.” MGM did not have the best track record when it came to comedians under contract to them; Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy’s MGM films are generally considered some of the worst films that they ever made. However, MGM did have a much better track record when it came to musicals, a genre that Abbott and Costello were almost too familiar with by this point, so, for all we know, these films could possibly be better than the majority of the Universal musicals. Today, let’s look at the first of their MGM films, Rio Rita . Although it’s generally considered a remake of the 1929 film that launched Wheeler and Woolsey’s film careers,...

Today’s post is dedicated to Walt Disney’s first cartoon star: Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Although Disney had created some cartoons for his Laugh-O-Grams studio as well as the Alice Comedies , Oswald was Disney’s first big cartoon star, headlining his own cartoon series as well as generating lots of merchandise for Universal Pictures. Oh, and also, the cartoons were silent, giving us an opportunity to see how Disney and his staff were able to work without sound, the very thing that made Disney a household name in the first place (the first two Mickey Mouse cartoons, made as silent cartoons, failed to find a distributor until sound was added later). For anyone who wants more information on Oswald and his cartoons that were made under Disney’s supervision, I highly recommend David A. Bossert’s Oswald the Lucky Rabbit: The Search for the Lost Disney Cartoons , a very well-researched book which tells the history of Oswald at Disney, as well as presenting plenty of information about the carto...

Well, Abbott and Costello abandoned the service comedies for a while and began to focus on different ideas for premises, in this case deciding to try their luck as cowboys out west. Hold That Ghost showed that they could work in different genres, so now that they’re doing something different like they did in Ghost and have more open space to work with, naturally this must mean that this was an improvement over the service comedies, right?... ...Not even close! Dick Foran plays a writer who for publicity pretends to be a famous cowboy. After being saved by an actual cowgirl (Anne Gwynne), he decides to come to her ranch to actually learn how to be a cowboy and finds himself being entered into a rodeo in which lots of money is at stake for him to win. So where do Abbott and Costello play into this? They happened to work at the same rodeo at the beginning that the main characters appeared at and although they do cause them to meet in the first place, Abbott and Costello really don...