Movies

One Night in the Tropics (1940) Idiotic "Love Insurance" farce, with forgettable Jerome Kern songs and Abbott and Costello crudely shoe-horned in. Expensive sets look so fresh and unrealistic you can almost smell the paint; there may not be lighting fixtures but there is always plenty of elaborate illumination with decorative shadows but nothing casting them, and everything else is equally convincing. If you can put yourself into that sort of total fantasy mindset it may be watchable but for me it was a real chore to sit through, especially as I have always found the protagonists, Robert Cummings and Allan Jones, rather hard to take. Mary Bolland as the love interest's numerologist aunt is the best character - even William Frawley is kind of lousy. This is Abbott and Costello's first feature film appearance, a simple cash-in on their radio popularity. I am watching their films looking for lesser-known routines and this has some good ones, which I will call Two Tens for a Five, A Dollar a Day For a Year, and I Don't Like Mustard. And it isn't even one night either because they are in the tropics for days and days. 4/10