by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched a movie that proved to be
surprisingly good: Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion, the next in sequence in the Universal boxed set and
a considerably better film than Abbott and Costello Go to Mars, the one we’d just seen at one of the public (or
semi-public) screenings in Golden Hill. It was the first Abbott and Costello
movie directed by Charles Lamont, who would do most of their movies until they
left Universal in 1955, and unlike some of the other, more highly regarded
horror-comedies A&C made during the period (particularly Abbott
and Costello Meet Frankenstein), it didn’t
have the maddening alternation between creatively shadowed Gothic photography
in the horror or action scenes and dull, flatly lit work when Abbott and
Costello are doing their comedy sequences. This time Universal-International
assigned the cinematography to George Robinson, master of atmosphere, who’d
shot the 1931 Spanish-language version of the original Dracula (and, for my money, did a much better job than the
more highly regarded Karl Freund did with the English version) and the Dracula sequels, Dracula’s Daughter (1936) and the awesome Son of Dracula (1943). Robinson shot the whole thing in glorious
half-lit atmospherics, making it look far more like Casablanca than like an Abbott and Costello spoof, and the film
gained a great deal from his work.
It’s true that the script (by John Grant,
Martin Ragaway and Kenneth Stern from an “original” story by D. D. Beauchamp)
seems almost to have been written to a checklist of Middle Eastern clichés —
slave auction? Check. Guys accidentally end up in a harem? Check. Swarthy
locals throwing daggers at Our Heroes to kill them or scare them off? Check.
Gags about oases and mirages? Check (though those are among the funniest scenes
in the film, especially when Costello runs into a mirage of a newsboy in the
middle of the desert, asks what he’s doing there and is told, “Can I help it if
they gave me a lousy corner?”) — plus the boys’ enlistment scene into the French
Foreign Legion, which is a virtual cop of their accidental enlistment into the
U.S. Army nine years earlier in their star-making film Buck Privates. The film starts in New York City, where Abbott and
Costello are small-time wrestling promoters who’ve brought in a wrestler from
Algeria named Abdullah (Tor Johnson — who’s actually quite good; though the W.
C. Fields/Clyde Bruckman comedy masterpiece The Man on the Flying
Trapeze is probably the best film Johnson
was ever in, this is probably his best role; he even gets to be an action hero
on the side of good in the closing scenes! Continuity goof: In the opening scene, set in New York City, Tor Johnson's character is called Abdullah. Later, when he appears in the Middle East, he is called Abou Ben and the person he is wrestling against, played by Wee Willie Davis, is called Abdullah). The only problem is that Abdullah
claims to be the greatest wrestler in the world, and Bud Jones (Bud Abbott —
Lou Costello’s character is called “Lou Hotchkiss” and so this film offers us
the rare treat of hearing Abbott and Costello at least able to address each
other by their real first names)
has scripted his latest match so Abdullah will lose. Abdullah walks out on his
contract and returns to his native Algeria (Johnson was really Swedish, but
once again he was cast on the one-foreign-accent-is-as-good-as-another
principle), and Bud and Lou follow him there because the gangsters who put up
the money to bring Abdullah to the U.S. in the first place threaten to kill
them if they can’t get him back.
So they end up accidentally enlisting in the
Foreign Legion and doing some gag scenes recycled from Buck Privates and the other service comedies they did in the early
days of both their film careers and the U.S.’s involvement in World War II, as
well as some scenes more reminiscent of the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby Road movies than anything we usually associate with
Abbott and Costello (notably a fish with false teeth in its mouth — courtesy of
an Arab soldier who accidentally dropped his into the oasis water — that spits
at Our Heroes when they try to catch him for dinner). There’s also a plot line
recycled from American Westerns and incorporated into the Algerian setting:
Bud’s and Lou’s immediate commander in the Foreign Legion, Sgt. Axmann (Walter
Slezak), is really a bad guy, in cahoots with corrupt desert Sheik Hamud
el-Khalid (Douglass Dumbrille, who also played a corrupt sheik in Abbott and
Costello’s other Mideast spoof, Lost
in a Harem, at MGM in 1944) and a crooked
landowner to stage raids along the proposed railroad route so the railroad will
have to buy the landowner’s properties instead, pay a lot more money and have
to run their trains on a much longer track. And there’s a character from French
intelligence, Nicole Dupré (Patricia Medina, Mrs. Joseph Cotten and for some
reason a go-to woman for Middle Eastern movies just then; she’s the good girl
to Lucille Ball’s bad girl in Lew Landers’ and David Mathews’ wildly improbable
but still fun Arab adventure The Magic Carpet from 1951), who’s trying to figure out who the
“mole” is inside the Foreign Legion that keeps leaking its plans to Sheik
Hamud. There’s nothing really that innovative or brilliant about this movie,
but it kept me laughing considerably harder than most of the A&C vehicles
around this time, and George Robinson’s cinematography is quite a bit better
than the A&C norm and proves (as did the original 1984 Ghostbusters, with its comedy scenes brilliantly set off against
a dark, almost dystopian version of New York City) that dark, atmospheric
photography can sometimes, instead of taking away from a comedy, make it even
funnier by contrast!
