Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were one of the most successful comedy acts in show business history, but their movies have never been highly ranked by critics. In his landmark 1949 Life magazine essay, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” James Agee dismissed them as “semiskilled laborers, at best.” Writing in the Reader, Dave Kehr observed, “They never got the hang of the kiddie slapstick Universal assigned to them, and their physical comedy is low, heavy, and graceless.” Comedy and cartoon historian Joe Adamson seemed to sum up the prevailing wisdom when he declared the golden age of movie comedy over at the close of the 1930s: “Twenty-five years of brilliant gags, incisive characterization, and dynamic, subversive comedy had come to an end. There was nothing left but disintegration, heartbreak, and Abbott and Costello.”
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To be sure, the team was severely overexposed, cranking out 36 features from 1940 to 1956 even while starring in weekly radio and TV series. But the impression of Abbott and Costello as artless baggy-pants comedians doesn’t do them justice, as you might conclude from this weekend’s rare screening of their best picture, Buck Privates (1941), at LaSalle Bank Cinema. Visually they can’t compete with comic imagists like Keaton and Chaplin, but verbally they’re astonishing, with timing so sharp and rhythms so infectious that the routines seem to leap off the screen. They came up through burlesque, but their core material was the great comic literature of vaudeville, routines they harvested and honed with their longtime writer, John Grant. “Who’s on First” is the best known of them, but they’re all of a piece, assaulting logic, grammar, or mathematics in a way that makes you wonder if anyone can really understand anything.
Buck Privates was a cheap B movie from Universal Pictures, but it turned out to be the sleeper hit of 1941; today it plays like a time capsule of America on the eve of World War II, opening with newsreel footage of President Roosevelt signing the Selective Training and Service Act in September 1940. Abbott and Costello are street-corner tie salesmen who unwittingly enlist in the army, and the great Hollywood heavy Nat Pendleton (Horse Feathers, The Thin Man) proves an excellent foil as their roaring drill sergeant. The straight story is a democratic morality play about a well-connected playboy (Lee Bowman) who gets drafted and learns to be a team player. It’s corny, but Abbott and Costello are perfectly complemented by the close-harmonizing Andrews Sisters, who entertain soldiers with the swinging “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” the lilting “I’ll Be With You in Apple Blossom Time,” and the patriotic march “You’re a Lucky Fellow, Mr. Smith.” Real combat was still a year away, and the music and comedy pulse with optimism and exuberance.
Directed by Arthur Lubin | Written by Arthur T. Horman and John Grant
With Bud Abbott and Lou CosteLlo, the Andrews Sisters, Lee Bowman, Nat Pendleton, and Shemp Howard.
I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry • (worthless)
Directed by Dennis Dugan
Written by Barry Fanaro, Alexander Payne, and Jim Taylor
With Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Jessica Biel, Dan AYkroyd, Ving Rhames, and Steve Buscemi
