- Indeed, Charles thought the music held up better than any other element in the film — though the Abbott and Costello verbal routines are still very funny (their main writer, John Grant, got a “special material” credit, and deserved it) and it was nice to see their first one, in which Costello claims never to have played craps before but his command of such gambling lingo as “fade it.
- Directed by Charles Lamont. With Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Robert Paige, Mari Blanchard. Two workmen accidentally launch a space rocket intended for Mars, and find mistakenly landing in New Orleans just the beginning of their misadventures.
- ABBOTT & COSTELLO made 36 movies;28 with UNIVERSAL;the other 8 with MGM and WARNER.When any fan of the duo make a list of their favorite film,BUCK PRIVATES is always among the top 5.The reputation of this comedy remains intact to this day.Everything clicks in this film:the subject:the country needed volonteers for the war that was coming fast;the music:THE ANDREWS SISTERS have wonderful songs.
Quotations on luck. Other favorite moments include the opening of how the boys are introduced-as Mischa Auer's character overhears what he thinks might be a stickup only to find his 2 new relief waiters playing craps. And the end of the film where Mischa is now working for Bud & Lou but still intimidating Costello. Show in caesars palace las vegas.
The film was Ride ’Em,Cowboy, sixth in sequence in theAbbott and Costello boxed set at Universal and a movie of which I have extra-specialchildhood memories because my grandfather gave my mom and stepfather a coupleof reels spliced together from home-movie versions of several Universalfeatures put out by Castle Films and Official Films. Some of these wereself-contained cartoons and some were artfully re-edited sequences from classiclive-action features, including one called No Indians, Please! re-edited from three sequences in Ride ’Em,Cowboy: the one that introducesthe Indian characters (Lou Costello, playing around at a trading post, picks upa bow and arrow, shoots it into a heart adorning a tepee, is told that thismeans he has to marry the woman who lives there, a hot-looking Indian babenamed Sunbeam [Linda Brent] emerges and Lou likes the idea — until she explainsthat the tepee’s owner is her sister Moonbeam [Jody Gilbert], who looks likeOliver Hardy in drag and quite possibly was actually played by a man on screen), a chase scenein which Abbott and Costello try to escape the tribe and a final scene (thatactually occurs earlier in thefull feature than the chase) in which Costello ends up in “Dr. Ha-Ha’sSanitarium” and the head of the place turns out to be an Indian. (In thefull-length feature he’s really Bud Abbott in “Indian” drag.)I’d got quitefamiliar with this digest version well before I saw the film “complete,” andwhen I did it turned out to have some other delights: it was Ella Fitzgerald’sfilm debut (she sings “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” on the back of the bus taking theprincipals to the Lazy S dude ranch on which most of the film takes place, andshe also adds a few choice interjections to a song called “Rockin’ and Reelin’”that purports to be a swing version of a square dance) and also the film thatfirst introduced the song “I’ll Remember April” (though an LP collection calledMusic from the Late Show releasedin the 1950’s attributed “I’ll Remember April” to the movie Phantom Lady, which actually came out two years later). Ride ’Em, Cowboy was also the fifth and last Abbott and Costellomovie directed by Arthur Lubin, who’d started in films as an actor and hadbegun directing in 1934 — he would continue well into the 1960’s, mostly on TV,and as a director he had a flair for Gothic stylistics but rarely got scriptsthat would take advantage of it. (One time he did was the 1940 Universal horror/sci-fi movie BlackFriday; he also threw somesurprisingly noir-ish scenes in the 1947jazz musical New Orleans, a treasurable film because Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and WoodyHerman are in it, though they’re not all that well used.) Plot-wise, Ride’Em, Cowboy is the old chestnut aboutthe hot-selling Western writer “Bronco Bob” Mitchell (Dick Foran) whoseexploits are being passed off by his publicist as autobiographical when he’snot only not a real cowboy but he barely knows which end of a horse is which —which doesn’t stop him from making an entrance in an opening scene at a rodeoriding — or at least moving on top of — a horse and belting out a nicelystentorian “Western” ballad by Don Raye and Gene De Paul called “Give Me MySaddle.”
Abbott and Costello play peanut and hot-dog (respectively) vendors whoget themselves fired and chased off the lot; they hide out in one of the chutesout of which a bull is supposed to come out for a roping contest, and the bull ridesby Bronco Bob, who panicks at the sight of it and thereby it’s able to goreAnne Shaw (Anne Gwynne) just before she was supposed to enter a trick-ridingcontest which would have won her $10,000 that her dad Sam Shaw (Samuel S.Hinds) needs to save his Lazy S dude ranch. Bronco Bob offers her a $10,000check made out to cash, she throws it back in his face, he tosses it to theground — “Did he just throw away a $10,000 check made out to cash?” anincredulous Charles asked at this point — and Lou Costello picks up the checkand tears it up, explaining to Bud Abbott, “It wasn’t even made out to me.”“Who was it made out to?” says Abbott. “Some guy named Cash,” Costello replies.The two hide out in a van with more cows and end up on a train bound for the LazyS, where Bronco Bob intends to train to learn to do the things for real he’sbeen making up in his books — and of course he wants Anne to train him, andproximity turns her hate into love. There’s also a real cowhand named “Alabam”Brewster (played by real-life Western star Johnny Mack Brown, who in the late1920’s had been under contract to MGM and had co-starred with such illustriousnames as Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo — only in 1931 MGMproduction chief Irving Thalberg reviewed the rough cut of a new Crawford/Brownmovie called Laughing Sinners, decided Brown wasn’t holding his weight in his scenes, and orderedeverything of his reshot with another actor, Clark Gable — so Gable went on tobe a superstar and Mack Brown got dropped by MGM and picked up by Universal fora “B” Western series) who’s sort of a rival for Anne’s affections, thoughwriters Edmund L. Hartmann (“original” story), Harold Shumate (“adaptation”),True Boardman and John Grant (script) mercifully don’t push that trope too hard.
Between all the Seven Chances-ish stuff of Lou Costello being pursued by ajumbo-sized Indian drag queen and her/his whole tribe determined to make anhonest man of him, there are some spectacular chase scenes and a subplot of aband of gangsters trying to fix the final rodeo so the Lazy S loses, andMitchell agrees to take the bet against the Lazy S — only he means to win andthe $10,000 is his way of paying off the debt to Anne which he feels he owesbut she was too good to take from him directly. Ride ’Em, Cowboy is one of Abbott and Costello’s best films, with agood mix of slapstick and dialogue humor (and the slapstick is aidedimmeasurably by Universal’s excellent process work — similar sequences in thelater Laurel and Hardy comedies for Hal Roach sometimes fall relatively flatbecause the process work is so bad it’s all too clear Stan and Ollie aren’t inany real danger in that supposedly“runaway” car) and great singing by Ella Fitzgerald, who essentially is to thisfilm what the Andrews Sisters were to Buck Privates, In the Navy and Hold That Ghost and Martha Raye was to Keep ’Em Flying. Billed in the original trailer as a “sepiasongstress” (the horribly cutesy-poo way they had of letting the audience knowshe was Black), Ella does her star-making hit “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” (which hadhit for her with Chick Webb’s band in 1938, four years before this movie wasmade) and also interjects into “Rockin’ and Reelin’,” with a white vocal group(three men, one women) called the Merry Macs who turned up on some of JudyGarland’s Decca records at the time and get some pleasant songs here, including“Beside the Rio Tonto Shore,” used as backdrop for a romantic ride at twilightthrough the Iverson Ranch, the fabled Western location where many of the landscapesequences were shot. Ironically, Ella’sappearance and (ill) use in this movie is uncomfortably premonitory of the waythe same director, Arthur Lubin, used Billie Holiday in New Orleans five years later. He cast both Ella and Billie asthe white heroine’s maids — and both women seem horribly uncomfortable tryingto get the servile maid's dialogue out of their mouths but visibly loosen upwhen they get to sing.
One wishes that Ella could have introduced “I’ll RememberApril” — it’s the sort of lightly jazz-flavored standard she sang so well lateron (in the 1950’s, when the slightly congested quality of her voice in theearly years had cleared up and her voice had become even more beautiful than itwas here) — but instead Dick Foran (who actually had quite a nice voice if youcan handle his stentorian tones and unwillingness to phrase) introduces it bysinging it to Anne Gwynne during one of those long hayrides. Between the longand inventive slapstick scenes, the nice dialogue bits (though the poker gamein which Costello gets involved is a case of having gone to the well once toooften and doesn’t have the snap of the craps sequence in Buck Privates), the generally good Raye-De Paul songs and anuninventive but at least serviceable plot (is it only a coincidence that theplot line involving “Bronco Bob” being the creation of a publicity agentpromoting his books resembles the real-life career of “Buffalo Bill” Cody?), Ride’Em, Cowboy