MOVIES

I am probably the only person you know who even knows who Wheeler and Woolsey are.  I never let an opportunity to watch a Wheeler and Woolsey movie escape me.  They just crack me up.  Peach-O-Reno (1931) is as good as any of them.  Their usual girl foil, squeaky cute jazz-baby Dorothy Lee, is joined by Zelma O'Neal who can be seen at the end of the I Want to be Bad clip from Follow Thru, posted below.  Peach-O-Reno is a divorce farce, a popular subject for many years, until the code clamped down, and Bert Wheeler has an extended sequence, including a musical number, in drag.  Looks pretty good too.  That's all, I just like to post these drag shots when I get a chance.

THAT'S HEAVEN TO ME

This excerpt from the "I Want to be Bad" number in the 1930 technicolor musical Follow Thru is an accurate depiction of what I hope heaven will be like.  It's not a great movie but it introduced the perennial "Button Up Your Overcoat" to the wider public, and it features the following disturbing scene of Eugene Pallette in drag:

Movies

Genius at Work (1946) stars obscure comedy duo Wally Brown and Alan Carney, and it is a real puzzle how these guys got over half a dozen starring vehicles.  They have no schtick, no outstanding features of any kind except that one of them is not jewish.  Here they are - now you will remember them forever.

This is alleged to be a re-make of the Wheeler and Woolsey movie The Nitwits - I will watch it to find out, and I won't mind because Wheeler and Woolsey can actually be funny sometimes.  Most people don't even know who W&W are nowadays and here are Wally Brown (R) and Alan Carney (L) eating off of their table. Not even enough of a team to be called Brown and Carney.  They are supposed to be a couple of radio announcers who do a crime program and fall afoul of a Master Fiend called The Cobra who baffles the police with his nefariousness.  Studio villain Lionel Atwill is hauled in for that role and Lugosi is reduced to henchman status.  The only really notable thing in the movie is pictured below - Lugosi in spectacles and phony beard, Atwill in granny drag, in a wheelchair, using a poison needle blowgun to commit his shocking murders.  The less said about that the better.  This is a flat factory-made bill-filler cranked out to fill time, not seats, and of no conceivable interest to anyone, not even me.

Movies - Frances Langford again

 I had bookmarked Girl Rush (1944) a while ago because it stars the obscure comedy duo of  Wally Brown and Alan Carney, but when I realized it also features Frances Langford I decided I'd better download it and get it watched.  Well, it's pretty terrible, combining a mediocre Gay Nineties music hall story with a flat RKO western and the Brown-Carney duo seems to me to be justly forgotten.

 Langford's hair is again an enormous superstructure some five or six inches high, perched atop her head like a Venusian Brain Bat but with sausage curls added in the back for that Gay Nineties look. To be fair, most of the girls in the movie have the same sort of hairstyle but hers is far and away the most huge and imposing. The movie is mercifully short, and other than feeding my temporary Langfordmania its only really notable moment is during the scene we see below - Robert Mitchum in drag.

As I was sitting in the sauna at the health club today, pondering the mystery of Frances Langford's immense hairdo, I recalled this scene from Dixie Jamboree, where she takes the wheel of the riverboat in a cartoonishly enormous captain's hat.  It was then that I figured it all out.

  In the 1920s and 1930s, it was cute to be little.  There was nothing more charming than a chest-high jazz-baby gazing up at her big strong man and a sweet little gold-digger like Joan Blondell could wrap any man around her little finger just by acting helpless.  In the '40s small women were not hep.  It wasn't cute any more to be little except in a juvenile role or as comedy relief, probably because the war effort demanded more of women and they were, temporarily at least, taking on a more autonomous and self-determining role in society.  Frances Langford was five feet one inch tall. Like the even more diminutive Carmen Miranda she was tricked out in high heels and big hats, and her colossal coiffure, to make her more acceptably large.  It really is a terribly unflattering style for her, and I find her much more human looking (and her vocal style more interesting) in this clip from the 1930s.