Entry tags:
All except the ouch
The first time I saw Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey, it was love at first gag and I couldn't imagine how they had survived the pre-Code era. Their particular brand of racy, musical surrealism in which the women were as cockamamie and complicit as the men seemed doomed to land speed oblivion with the establishment of the Production Code Administration, which as of July 1, 1934 would hold final script and cut approval over nearly every movie produced in the United States for the next thirty years. Their humor wasn't blue so much as it was blithely rainbow-colored. The fact remained that they continued to make feature comedies for RKO until 1937 when Woolsey's fast-failing health rather than censorship put an end to their partnership and I was half curious, half apprehensive to know what they were like. I have now had an opportunity to find out.
Directed by George Stevens and released in November of its year, Kentucky Kernels (1934) was the first of Wheeler and Woolsey's comedies to be produced under the new regime; their June release Cockeyed Cavaliers (1934) had sailed under the nose of the Code by a couple of days, but the screenwriters of Kernels had to keep the Catholic parameters of decency in mind from word one and it shows. The plot is almost stereotypically family-friendly, with the anarchic pair of zanies turned adoptive parents to an orphaned moppet who promptly falls heir to an old Kentucky homestead, the claiming of which drops them all into the middle of a Hatfield–McCoy-style feud complete with moonshining, gunslinging, and cross-clan romance. The kudzu of Southern gentility rapidly overgrows the normally bumper crop of double entendres—no scantily clad showgirls in Banesville, population 1984 and falling—and while Mary Carlisle makes a spirited female lead, the script never gives her anything to match the flamboyance of Dorothy Lee swinging from light fixtures or cross-dressing her way through the Restoration. I also regret to inform the reader that sending the action south of the Mason-Dixon Line allows for the introduction of a slow-footed, easily spooked gofer played by Willie Best under the Stepin Fetchitesque moniker of "Sleep 'n' Eat," which I recognize is an artifact of the era in general but still aggravating: I don't consider racism a fair trade for smut. The movie as a whole is legitimately funny, its centerpiece number "One Little Kiss" is a Kalmar and Ruby earworm, and I would in all honesty watch Wheeler and Woolsey read a telephone book (inevitably they would end up serenading it and Woolsey would probably ash out his cigar in the pages; the scene ends in flames—"Whoa-oh!"), but it has been visibly tailored away from the freewheeling abandon of their pre-Code vehicles and I get that that was the point, but I don't have to like it. And yet I am not convinced that Code-era Wheeler and Woolsey were as totally domesticated as the censors of the time must have believed in order to approve the movie, especially after Breen had pulled one of their previous pictures from theaters and halted the further distribution of two more. Or let me put it another way: domesticity by Wheeler and Woolsey still looks pretty disorderly to me.
It's frankly reassuring. The story begins with a swell (Paul Page) on a high city bridge disbursing his cigarettes, his watch, and his billfold to passing strangers after fatefully flicking a ring into the foggy water far below, but it really gets underway in a tin-roofed shack in the shadow of that same bridge, its raddled walls crowded with old pictures and posters. One shows a pair of familiar faces, a four-eyed magician and his pert assistant smiling under the headline "The Great Elmer and Company—Sensational Feats of Magic." The Great Elmer when he's at home is Woolsey's Elmer Doyle, currently enjoying a cigar and the latest edition of Variety with his feet up after dinner; Company is Wheeler's Willie Dugan, currently not enjoying the latest round of after-dinner dishes. In shirtsleeves, an apron, and a gauntlet of suds, he snaps at his impatient partner, "It's all right for you to say, 'Hurry up.' All you do is sit around the house all day and read the paper—while I work my fingers to the bone!" and they're off on the archetypal argument of the layabout husband and the overworked wife. Eat your heart out, Menander. They don't miss a beat, from the attempted bribe of an evening at the movies to the invocation of the neighbors and what they must think, the display of dishwater-ruined hands, and the auxiliary argument about one of their mothers-in-law, culminating in Wheeler's long-resigned lamentation: "Oh, I should've known better than to let you make an actor out of me!" It is played absolutely, excuse my language, straight. No limp wrists, no lavender inflections, and no side winks to the camera to assure no homo. It's just the same casual gender play that runs merrily through their pre-Codes and that means that even though normally I can't stand this scenario even when it is Menander, I am charmed that the censors missed this permutation and accept these characters at once as a down-on-their-luck theatrical couple. "Is it my fault there's no more vaudeville?" Woolsey grouses defensively. They've been trying to rely on the river to get by, but all it's done is furnish them with the most interesting assortment of trash north of Turtle Mound. All they need is a crying baby and we could be in any Depression melodrama.
First they get the swell, who has fetched up dripping in the mess of fishing nets outside their door. Brought inside and dried out, he's so poetically despondent over his broken engagement to a woman he describes as "Juno, Venus, and Aphrodite all rolled into one . . . her eyes are sunbeams, her hair is just like burnished gold, her kiss is the gossamer touch of a zephyr breeze!" that his rescuers decide he needs something to distract him from rhapsodizing them to death; after a few false starts, they collect an appropriate distraction from the Children's Welfare League, but by the time they get home with the sturdy little tyke played by George "Spanky" McFarland, the intended father has kissed and made up with his syncretic goddess and skedaddled, leaving our heroes literally holding the baby. Wheeler is starry-eyed; his mantra for the last few scenes has been a sigh of "Gee, I would love to have a baby." Woolsey's eyes are looking a little wilder, especially through his suddenly vulnerable horn-rims. As if placed with them by the hand of Nemesis rather than a plummily disingenuous Margaret Dumont, Spanky is exactly the kind of rug rat a pair of tricksters should find themselves stuck with: a tiny, lisping force of pure destruction. He smiles seraphically. He breaks glass for fun. Windshields, spectacles, picture frames, windows, the kid has a hammer or a half-brick for all contingencies; he's indifferent to the upswing in his fortunes that whisks him and his new "uncles" from their now rather smashed-up shack to a bluegrass country mansion, but it's love at first sight with the big-framed greenhouse of the Milford estate. He says innocently truthful things that leave his uncles' fast talk flat-footed. He bats longingly at a garland of lights at a garden party like a cat with a string just out of reach. McFarland at five years of age was already a veteran of Hal Roach's Our Gang and your mileage on child actors may vary, but I feel strongly that if his Spanky had just been all dimples and light, both the movie and its viewers would have drowned in treacle. Instead, being the sort of miniature disaster engine who leaves the same trail of chaos through his uncles' lives as they leave through other people's, he fits right into Kentucky Kernels' burlesque of the nuclear family that still turns out weirdly sweet. After all the shenanigans of assumed identities, star-crossed romance, stage magic, disguises, drunken horse chases, and a brilliantly violent mockup of a Gatling gun with a kerosene torch, a can of raspberries, and a string of shattering lightbulbs, the happy ending is Spanky and his uncles plus one new aunt all heading back north in their old touring car—by way of the greenhouse, which collapses most satisfyingly in their wake. Maybe that gets it out of the kid's system, who knows. The climactic shootout broke so many things.
The musical number is also pleasingly polymorphous. We get the verse and chorus modeled by Carlisle and Wheeler; it's catchy and they're cute, especially since they share the lyrics. "One little kiss / Is all I live for / Oh, what I'd give for / One teeny little, weeny little kiss / One little kiss / Would satisfy me / Please don't deny me / One teeny little, weeny little kiss / Oh, what are your lips made for? / Oh, give me what I've hoped and prayed for / One little kiss / Not six or seven / One glimpse of heaven / One teeny little, weeny little kiss." Then it's taken up by Noah Beery and Lucille La Verne, representing the elder generation of the feuding families; an uncredited Black close-harmony group swings it for a refrain, dressed like sharecropper's kids in a yard of sunflowers; Spanky sings it to a dog which obligingly licks his face at the end. And then we cut to Woolsey, earnestly crooning, "One little kiss / Just to begin with / 'Cause I give in with / One teeny little, weeny little kiss / One little kiss / I've set my cap for / I'd be a sap for / One teeny little, weeny little kiss / I know that I am able / To make you think that I'm Clark Gable / One little kiss / That's all I beg for / I'd break a leg for / One teeny little, weeny little kiss." He's singing to a donkey. He chucks it under the chin, hangs on its neck, caresses its big fringed ears; he cuts one line short to shoot a look at the camera: "I'm the one with the glasses on." I can't explain it and I don't care. Best abbreviated Midsummer I've seen.
I suspect I will still prefer the further pre-Codes of Wheeler and Woolsey when I can get them; Half Shot at Sunrise (1930) is one of the great Army comedy titles, Cracked Nuts (1931) and Diplomaniacs (1933) sound like Ruritanian spoofs of the kind I've just been discussing with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
moon_custafer, and So This Is Africa (1933) was famously so wild that it lost a third of its runtime to censorship even before the PCA came along. I was nonetheless worried that they had been forced to forfeit all their weirdness to the Catholic Legion of Decency and I am heartened to see that it wasn't a dead stop. Even a few innuendos insist on nudging their way to light. A skeptical Woolsey follows the swell's rhapsody with "Yeah? Well, I'll take Mae West," and when he muses a moment later, "Now let's see, what would take a man's mind off a woman?" his guileless partner is there to supply, "Another woman." An absentminded moment with a magician's hat leaves a gang of angry Wakefields trying to shoot our heroes with a brace of white rabbits. Wheeler does a very fine spit-take at the punch line of a story about a plumber. Margaret Dumont does not play the Margaret Dumont role. I will probably never wrap my head around the thing where Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby also wrote for the Marx Brothers and Eddie Cantor, but I'm glad they did what they could for Wheeler and Woolsey, even if I would have been gladder still for the history in which there was no need to clean up their act. This vandalism brought to you by my wholesome backers at Patreon.
Directed by George Stevens and released in November of its year, Kentucky Kernels (1934) was the first of Wheeler and Woolsey's comedies to be produced under the new regime; their June release Cockeyed Cavaliers (1934) had sailed under the nose of the Code by a couple of days, but the screenwriters of Kernels had to keep the Catholic parameters of decency in mind from word one and it shows. The plot is almost stereotypically family-friendly, with the anarchic pair of zanies turned adoptive parents to an orphaned moppet who promptly falls heir to an old Kentucky homestead, the claiming of which drops them all into the middle of a Hatfield–McCoy-style feud complete with moonshining, gunslinging, and cross-clan romance. The kudzu of Southern gentility rapidly overgrows the normally bumper crop of double entendres—no scantily clad showgirls in Banesville, population 1984 and falling—and while Mary Carlisle makes a spirited female lead, the script never gives her anything to match the flamboyance of Dorothy Lee swinging from light fixtures or cross-dressing her way through the Restoration. I also regret to inform the reader that sending the action south of the Mason-Dixon Line allows for the introduction of a slow-footed, easily spooked gofer played by Willie Best under the Stepin Fetchitesque moniker of "Sleep 'n' Eat," which I recognize is an artifact of the era in general but still aggravating: I don't consider racism a fair trade for smut. The movie as a whole is legitimately funny, its centerpiece number "One Little Kiss" is a Kalmar and Ruby earworm, and I would in all honesty watch Wheeler and Woolsey read a telephone book (inevitably they would end up serenading it and Woolsey would probably ash out his cigar in the pages; the scene ends in flames—"Whoa-oh!"), but it has been visibly tailored away from the freewheeling abandon of their pre-Code vehicles and I get that that was the point, but I don't have to like it. And yet I am not convinced that Code-era Wheeler and Woolsey were as totally domesticated as the censors of the time must have believed in order to approve the movie, especially after Breen had pulled one of their previous pictures from theaters and halted the further distribution of two more. Or let me put it another way: domesticity by Wheeler and Woolsey still looks pretty disorderly to me.
It's frankly reassuring. The story begins with a swell (Paul Page) on a high city bridge disbursing his cigarettes, his watch, and his billfold to passing strangers after fatefully flicking a ring into the foggy water far below, but it really gets underway in a tin-roofed shack in the shadow of that same bridge, its raddled walls crowded with old pictures and posters. One shows a pair of familiar faces, a four-eyed magician and his pert assistant smiling under the headline "The Great Elmer and Company—Sensational Feats of Magic." The Great Elmer when he's at home is Woolsey's Elmer Doyle, currently enjoying a cigar and the latest edition of Variety with his feet up after dinner; Company is Wheeler's Willie Dugan, currently not enjoying the latest round of after-dinner dishes. In shirtsleeves, an apron, and a gauntlet of suds, he snaps at his impatient partner, "It's all right for you to say, 'Hurry up.' All you do is sit around the house all day and read the paper—while I work my fingers to the bone!" and they're off on the archetypal argument of the layabout husband and the overworked wife. Eat your heart out, Menander. They don't miss a beat, from the attempted bribe of an evening at the movies to the invocation of the neighbors and what they must think, the display of dishwater-ruined hands, and the auxiliary argument about one of their mothers-in-law, culminating in Wheeler's long-resigned lamentation: "Oh, I should've known better than to let you make an actor out of me!" It is played absolutely, excuse my language, straight. No limp wrists, no lavender inflections, and no side winks to the camera to assure no homo. It's just the same casual gender play that runs merrily through their pre-Codes and that means that even though normally I can't stand this scenario even when it is Menander, I am charmed that the censors missed this permutation and accept these characters at once as a down-on-their-luck theatrical couple. "Is it my fault there's no more vaudeville?" Woolsey grouses defensively. They've been trying to rely on the river to get by, but all it's done is furnish them with the most interesting assortment of trash north of Turtle Mound. All they need is a crying baby and we could be in any Depression melodrama.
First they get the swell, who has fetched up dripping in the mess of fishing nets outside their door. Brought inside and dried out, he's so poetically despondent over his broken engagement to a woman he describes as "Juno, Venus, and Aphrodite all rolled into one . . . her eyes are sunbeams, her hair is just like burnished gold, her kiss is the gossamer touch of a zephyr breeze!" that his rescuers decide he needs something to distract him from rhapsodizing them to death; after a few false starts, they collect an appropriate distraction from the Children's Welfare League, but by the time they get home with the sturdy little tyke played by George "Spanky" McFarland, the intended father has kissed and made up with his syncretic goddess and skedaddled, leaving our heroes literally holding the baby. Wheeler is starry-eyed; his mantra for the last few scenes has been a sigh of "Gee, I would love to have a baby." Woolsey's eyes are looking a little wilder, especially through his suddenly vulnerable horn-rims. As if placed with them by the hand of Nemesis rather than a plummily disingenuous Margaret Dumont, Spanky is exactly the kind of rug rat a pair of tricksters should find themselves stuck with: a tiny, lisping force of pure destruction. He smiles seraphically. He breaks glass for fun. Windshields, spectacles, picture frames, windows, the kid has a hammer or a half-brick for all contingencies; he's indifferent to the upswing in his fortunes that whisks him and his new "uncles" from their now rather smashed-up shack to a bluegrass country mansion, but it's love at first sight with the big-framed greenhouse of the Milford estate. He says innocently truthful things that leave his uncles' fast talk flat-footed. He bats longingly at a garland of lights at a garden party like a cat with a string just out of reach. McFarland at five years of age was already a veteran of Hal Roach's Our Gang and your mileage on child actors may vary, but I feel strongly that if his Spanky had just been all dimples and light, both the movie and its viewers would have drowned in treacle. Instead, being the sort of miniature disaster engine who leaves the same trail of chaos through his uncles' lives as they leave through other people's, he fits right into Kentucky Kernels' burlesque of the nuclear family that still turns out weirdly sweet. After all the shenanigans of assumed identities, star-crossed romance, stage magic, disguises, drunken horse chases, and a brilliantly violent mockup of a Gatling gun with a kerosene torch, a can of raspberries, and a string of shattering lightbulbs, the happy ending is Spanky and his uncles plus one new aunt all heading back north in their old touring car—by way of the greenhouse, which collapses most satisfyingly in their wake. Maybe that gets it out of the kid's system, who knows. The climactic shootout broke so many things.
The musical number is also pleasingly polymorphous. We get the verse and chorus modeled by Carlisle and Wheeler; it's catchy and they're cute, especially since they share the lyrics. "One little kiss / Is all I live for / Oh, what I'd give for / One teeny little, weeny little kiss / One little kiss / Would satisfy me / Please don't deny me / One teeny little, weeny little kiss / Oh, what are your lips made for? / Oh, give me what I've hoped and prayed for / One little kiss / Not six or seven / One glimpse of heaven / One teeny little, weeny little kiss." Then it's taken up by Noah Beery and Lucille La Verne, representing the elder generation of the feuding families; an uncredited Black close-harmony group swings it for a refrain, dressed like sharecropper's kids in a yard of sunflowers; Spanky sings it to a dog which obligingly licks his face at the end. And then we cut to Woolsey, earnestly crooning, "One little kiss / Just to begin with / 'Cause I give in with / One teeny little, weeny little kiss / One little kiss / I've set my cap for / I'd be a sap for / One teeny little, weeny little kiss / I know that I am able / To make you think that I'm Clark Gable / One little kiss / That's all I beg for / I'd break a leg for / One teeny little, weeny little kiss." He's singing to a donkey. He chucks it under the chin, hangs on its neck, caresses its big fringed ears; he cuts one line short to shoot a look at the camera: "I'm the one with the glasses on." I can't explain it and I don't care. Best abbreviated Midsummer I've seen.
I suspect I will still prefer the further pre-Codes of Wheeler and Woolsey when I can get them; Half Shot at Sunrise (1930) is one of the great Army comedy titles, Cracked Nuts (1931) and Diplomaniacs (1933) sound like Ruritanian spoofs of the kind I've just been discussing with
moon_custafer, and So This Is Africa (1933) was famously so wild that it lost a third of its runtime to censorship even before the PCA came along. I was nonetheless worried that they had been forced to forfeit all their weirdness to the Catholic Legion of Decency and I am heartened to see that it wasn't a dead stop. Even a few innuendos insist on nudging their way to light. A skeptical Woolsey follows the swell's rhapsody with "Yeah? Well, I'll take Mae West," and when he muses a moment later, "Now let's see, what would take a man's mind off a woman?" his guileless partner is there to supply, "Another woman." An absentminded moment with a magician's hat leaves a gang of angry Wakefields trying to shoot our heroes with a brace of white rabbits. Wheeler does a very fine spit-take at the punch line of a story about a plumber. Margaret Dumont does not play the Margaret Dumont role. I will probably never wrap my head around the thing where Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby also wrote for the Marx Brothers and Eddie Cantor, but I'm glad they did what they could for Wheeler and Woolsey, even if I would have been gladder still for the history in which there was no need to clean up their act. This vandalism brought to you by my wholesome backers at Patreon.
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She worked with Wheeler and Woolsey again in their last film, High Flyers (1937). I'm looking forward to that much more now than I was.
W&W weren't insulters although irreverent when necessary, which I think helped them in the Code transition. They don't feel as defanged as the Marx Bros seemed when they went to MGM.
I missed the mile-a-minute double entendres and the middle-aged weirdo romance, but you're right, they feel much less as though they've been suddenly redirected from forces of anarchy to forces for social good—I think the chaos baby really helped. Not to mention stray bits like Wheeler identifying himself automatically as Spanky's mother or their peace offering of flowers suddenly wilting at the roar of the Colonel's threats. They still inhabit an essentially absurd and mutable universe. Like, the drunken horse chase was ridiculous, but I'm not sure it was any more ridiculous than the helium tires and frog radiator of Hips, Hips, Hooray! (1934). My God, RKO sure cranked its movies out.
I realized while writing this post that it is almost impossible for me to refer to either Wheeler or Woolsey by their character names. Sure, the kid keeps calling them "Uncle Elmer" and "Uncle Willie," but they don't look like a Willie and Elmer any more than they looked like a Curly and Spider in Hold 'Em Jail (1932) and I'm still not sure they had names in Cockeyed Cavaliers. I didn't bat an eye at it. They're just so very much themselves.