Mark Sandrich Presents. . . The Darkest Of Comedy Teams

Before the great and prolific Mark Sandrich (October 26, 1900 - March 4, 1945) became the premier director of classic 1930's movie musicals, including several boffo Astaire & Rogers flicks (The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat, Follow The Fleet, Shall We Dance, Carefree), he was responsible for making fast and very funny 2-reel comedies for RKO. Several short subjects Sandrich directed starred the aggressively zany, randy and exceedingly pre-Code comedy team of Bobby Clark & Paul McCullough.

Clark & McCullough emphatically give the bird to the world as they pose as various professions, always under false pretenses, in these RKO comedies. Jitters The Butler co-stars the always dignified Robert Grieg (a memorable co-star in the Marx Brothers' 1930 film of ANIMAL CRACKERS) as the funniest - and the most enthusiastically masochistic - of professional manservants.



The Iceman's Ball features a rather amazing cast of 2-reel comedy royalty, including Billy Franey, Laurel & Hardy nemesis Jimmie Finlayson, 3 Stooges arch-nemesis Vernon Dent and perennial cop Fred Kelsey. All the players make sure that the essential premise - the always brazen Clark & McCullough masquerade as cops to pick up girls and crash all the local parties - is also a riot.



In The Druggist's Dilemma, Clark & McCullough co-star with both Jimmie Finlayson and the marvelous comedienne and character actress Cecil Cunningham.



Prior to his smashing success as RKO musicals king, Mark Sandrich successfully delivered both key elements of Clark & McCullough's humor, the ultra-zany and that sense of the dark and disturbing, to the silver screen.



C & McC possess a dark sensibility well beyond even that of the early 1930's Marx Brothers, who also gave the world the bird. . . at least until they ended up at MGM.



There is always an palpable uneasiness intertwined with C&McC's distinctive comic anarchy, and not just due to the troubled Paul McCullough's suicide in March 1936.



After directing Bobby & Paul's go-for-broke wacky antics and musical short subjects featuring bandleader Phil Harris (pre-Jack Benny) but before helming Fred & Ginger musicals, Mr. Sandrich made very funny films with a goofier (and substantially less dark) comedy team, Bert Wheeler & Robert Woolsey.



These include two of our all-time favorite classic comedies, Cockeyed Cavaliers and Hips Hips Hooray.









Love the talented Mark Sandrich's W&W features for the same reasons I love the aforementioned Clark & McCullough comedies and the Marx Brothers at Paramount: that unique 1930-1934 blend of the unabashedly and unrepentantly wacky, the silly, the goofy, the outrageous and the risqué, all served simultaneously.



In closing, must extend big time thanks to the YouTube poster "Joseph Blough," who is responsible for the excellent Library Of Congress transfers of Jitters The Butler, The Iceman's Ball and The Druggist's Dilemma.

And This Blog Loves Harry Ruby

When it comes to 20th century pop culture, there were many witty, clever and wonderful wordsmiths in the days of Olde Broadway, but none more brilliant and nimble than the prolific songwriter, screenwriter and Groucho Marx pal Harry Ruby (January 27, 1895 – February 23, 1974). Here he is, on Ralph Edwards' This Is Your Life show.



Harry is top row center in the following snapshot of show business luminaries.



The 20th century music lovers at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog hold Harry Ruby in extremely high regard as a songwriter for stage, screen and television. Today's post pays tribute to the songs of Harry Ruby, who, frequently in collaboration with his partner, lyricist Bert Kalmar, was responsible for so many memorable Tin Pan Alley tunes.



Kalmar & Ruby wrote songs for the Broadway shows High Kickers, The Five O' Clock Girl, The Ramblers, Good Boy, Animal Crackers, Top Speed and Marc Connelly & George S. Kaufman's Helen Of Troy, New York.



The list of Harry Ruby songs is so lengthy, it's tough to know where to begin. Even diehard film buffs may not know Harry's name or face, but will definitely know his songs. Marilyn Monroe's vowel-caressing performance of I Wanna Be Loved By You is just one among many blazing scenes in the Billy Wilder masterpiece Some Like It Hot.



In his four decades writing songs, Harry Ruby, with collaborators Bert Kalmar, Edgar Leslie, Rube Bloom, and Fred E. Ahlert, penned everything from Broadway scores to movies to TV show themes, such as The Real McCoys.



We'll kick this homage to the great songs of Harry Ruby off with Frank Sinatra's stellar rendition of Nevertheless, I'm In Love With You.



To follow Sinatra, here's a version of A Kiss To Build A Dream On, performed beautifully by Louis Armstrong. As usual, Pops expresses the song's heart, its essential meaning.



Talented songstress June "Something Cool" Christy from the Stan Kenton Orchestra waxed a fantastic version of Give Me The Simple Life by Harry Ruby and Rube Bloom.



Gotta love pianist Dorothy Donegan's take on this tune as well.



Most famous, celebrated and beloved among all the Kalmar & Ruby songs would be their great work with The Marx Brothers. The songs from Animal Crackers (both stage and screen), Horse Feathers and the arch-satirical Duck Soup, delivered with great enthusiasm by the Marx Brothers, exemplify what the team is all about - and still make this writer laugh out loud.









Even the secondary tunes featuring the non-comedic players are pretty wonderful, such as this ditty from Animal Crackers, penned for the 1928-1929 stage production at the 44th Street Theatre, Why I Am So Romantic?.



Sung by Hal Thompson and the charming Lillian Roth, who appeared in many Paramount Pictures features and musical shorts in the late 1920's and early 1930's. Oddly enough, Groucho doesn't then sing it to Margaret Dumont!



Groucho was particularly fond of singing Harry's Father's Day song. There are a couple of versions. I like the one Groucho performed on The Dick Cavett Show, but even more, the second one, from Music Scene, hosted by screen and TV comedy "triple threat," comic-writer-director David Steinberg.






Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby penned many songs for other popular comedians of stage and screen, including George Jessel and Eddie Cantor.



The team's songs are mainstays in the RKO films of Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey, the topics of two Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog posts, Two Guys I Like: Wheeler And Woolsey and and New On DVD - And As Randy As Ever: Wheeler & Woolsey, both laden with songs by Kalmar & Ruby.



I Love You So Much, ends up serving as a motif through much of the movie The Cuckoos, and is the background music for the plot's slapstick denouement towards the end.



Just Keep On Doin' What You're Doin' from Hips Hips Hooray, performed hilariously by Bert Wheeler, Robert Woolsey, Dorothy Lee and Thelma Todd, may be my individual favorite musical number from all the Wheeler & Woolsey features.



Just Keep On Doin' What You're Doin' is one of Kalmar & Ruby's best and such a great song, none other than The Manhattan Transfer covered it on The Tonight Show, hosted by Johnny Carson.



No less than the great Zero Mostel recorded an album of Harry Ruby's Songs My Mom Never Sang



MGM produced a biopic about Kalmar and Ruby, starring the team of "Fred n' Red" - Astaire and Skelton - as the songwriters.



We tip our top hats worn by Fred Astaire to Mr. Ruby, who was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970 and close today's tribute with several renditions of with possibly Monsieur Blogmeister's favorite all of Harry Ruby tunes, and one embraced by Broadway, the movies and especially by virtuoso jazz singers and improvisers, Three Little Words.



















For more info on the great songwriter, check out:

All Music.com - Artist Biography by Joslyn Layne

Archive.org entry for An Evening With Groucho

Broadway World website: list of Harry Ruby stage shows

DBOPM - The Database Of Popular Music

Harry Ruby, from the Songwriters' Hall Of Fame website

Harry Ruby Song List - Songwriters Hall Of Fame

Internet Broadway Database

Interview with Harry Ruby, June 12, 1971 by Max Wilk: audio, can be heard onsite in The New York Public Library Digital Collections. Parts of this interview ended up in Max Wilks' book They're Playing Our Song: Conversations With America's Classic Songwriters

Wikipedia - Harry Ruby

Wikipedia - Kalmar & Ruby

All Talking! All Singing! All Dancing! All WTF! Part 6 by Paul F. Etcheverry

"Bring along your girl. Go home with someone else's. What about your girl? She's gonna do all right." Frances Williams, Hollywood Party, 1934

"The way I like it is the way it is. You got yours - HAH! - don't worry 'bout his." James Brown, Sex Machine, 1969




Back to the wonderful world of movie musicals, not quite chronologically, we continue the story across the world in Gay Parree. In said mecca for visual artistes and jazz musicians, Josephine Baker got her two cents in about just how to headline a movie musical with panache AND star in spectacular Busby Berkeley style production numbers.





Unlike her American counterparts, from Alice White to Babs Stanwyck to Mae West to Dorothy McKaill to Ruth Chatterton to the Marx Brothers, Wheeler & Woolsey and Betty Boop, the St. Louis born entertainer, now the toast of the town in Paris, did not have to deal with the severe constraints of vigorous Production Code enforcement in the U.S.A. And to that, at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog, we, like the intrepid protagonists in the Tex Avery MGM cartoon Flea Circus, say Viva La France!



We are lucky Ms. Baker made these two films, preserving her beautiful singing voice and charisma as a young performer for future generations.



Nothing says surrealism quite like a musical number straight from the subconscious of Busby Berkeley.



While André Breton and Salvador Dali, no doubt, seldom agreed on anything, both would have been okay with accepting the signature Busby Berkeley camera track through the spread legs of jaunty showgirls as a dadaist/surrealist manifesto, on the strict proviso that the chorines hailed from Paris.



After dreaming up amazing numbers for Sam Goldwyn's series of Eddie Cantor comedies, Berkeley hit "paydirt" at Warner Brothers with from the iconic 42nd Street and Gold Diggers Of 1933.



Footlight Parade starred, with musical mainstays Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler, as well as the still beloved Joan Blondell, none less than the alpha male of the Warner Brothers lot, Jimmy Cagney - a tough guy who could dance.



By the time the Hays Office, yes, that merry band spoken of today as Joseph A. Breen & The Bluenoses, were on their way to police the movies with extreme prejudice, Mr. Berkeley had to answer the question "what do you do for an encore?" as well as "how do you top the randy Warner Brothers comedy hit Convention City (not a musical per se, but jam-packed with the usual suspects)?"



Here's the Busby response: a wild "50,000 showgirls and counting" production number and "screw the Code - and you too, Mr. Breen" manifesto, just one production number from Dames, which hit the movie palaces on September 1, 1934. Beats the living daylights out of 76 Trombones.





Also from Dames, the I Only Have Eyes For You number manages to be imaginative, bizarre, a tad creepy, beautiful and oddly sweet and poignant in the same fell swoop.



Besides, it's difficult for any card-carrying classic movie buff NOT to love Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell (here in his pre-Philip Marlowe and Johnny O'Clock crooner phase).

There were many more films featuring Mr. Berkeley's unique handiwork, including Fashions Of 1934,the dark, disturbing, brilliant and weirdly militaristic Lullaby Of Broadway number from Gold Diggers Of 1935, and such both over-the-top and over-the-edge (but fascinating) misfires as the Al Jolson vehicle Wonder Bar (from the Leonard Maltin review, "very strange, often tasteless musical drama set in Paris").



Seeing some of the stranger moments from Wonder Bar (we shall spare you the Goin' To Heaven On A Mule segment, arguably the most grotesque musical interlude in motion picture history, featuring racial stereotypes utterly dumbfounding even by 1934 standards), one realizes it isn't an accident that the YouTube channel devoted to the choreographer/director/mad scientist is titled Unhinged! A Busby Berkeley Collection.



While Paramount Pictures made numerous contributions to the musicals of 1929-1934, the most "paramount" ones were the continental and sophisticated Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette McDonald features, several directed by none other than Ernst Lubitsch.



Monsieur Blogmeister must grudgingly admit to having a profound soft spot in his heart for the team's third Paramount vehicle, Love Me Tonight, directed brilliantly by Rouben Mamoulian.



The opening of this film presents the sounds of everyday life, circa 1932, as a musical number featuring no singing and dancing. . . a gorgeous piece of filmmaking, as well a living snapshot of a bygone era.



Then there's the Isn't It Romantic number, which also employs these cinematic techniques.



No doubt when diva McDonald moved on to MGM to co-star with Nelson Eddy, as enjoyable as those movies (Rose Marie especially) are, they meant the end of the misbehavin' pre-Code era.



MGM's Dancing Lady starred someone who wanted to be as epic a star as Josephine Baker. Well, she did not hit the international stages as Baker did but was a movie star for the better part of five decades - headliner of numerous MGM and Warner Bros. vehicles - and, above all, survivor - Joan Crawford.



The following clips were from Dancing Lady, MGM's effort to have a movie musical hit as boffo as 42nd Street. While Diva Crawford isn't Eleanor Powell, Vera-Ellen or Ginger Rogers, she gives it her all and, by golly, her partner is Fred Astaire, always fun to watch and there to give the moviegoing audience maximum entertainment value.



RKO Radio Pictures continued its series of musicals starring the hard-working comedy team of Bert Wheeler & Robert Woolsey, often supported by the spunky and charming Dorothy Lee. While The Marx Brothers may have been the funniest and most anarchic of the comedy teams in 1928-1934, otherwise, Bert Wheeler & Woolsey practically had the wacky musical comedy genre all to themselves.



The following number is one of the saner musical moments from their 1933 "no gag too wild, no bit too tasteless, no opportunity for nose-thumbing left behind" opus Diplomaniacs.



On loan to Columbia in 1932, the team made their most pre-code of all pre-codes, So This Is Africa, a film considered so scandalous that the original cut of the risque romp was edited severely to make it acceptable for theatrical release.



A significantly pruned-down version of the film would eventually be released on April 22, 1933.



A complete print of the original cut of So This Is Africa, unfortunately, does not exist.



In the comedy team's very funny 1934 film, Hips Hips Hooray, co-starring Thelma Todd and Dorothy Lee, a famous choreographer assisted, uncredited, with the wonderfully goofy dance numbers: Hermes Pan, between gigs - he would stage and design the dance numbers for ALL NINE of RKO's Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals.



Another W&W romp, Cockeyed Cavaliers, was released theatrically on June 29, 1934, TWO DAYS before enforcement of the Production Code took effect. Hence, the lines about "dallying" and the usual Bert n' Bob risque repartee. Thelma Todd is so funny in Hips Hips Hooray and Cockeyed Cavaliers, taking advantage of a chance to demonstrate her comedienne mojo in a feature film - it's a shame her tragic and most untimely death in 1935 put an end to this felicitous onscreen relationship. Thelma is at her very best in films with W&W and Hal Roach Studios director-writer-comedian Charley Chase.





Back to Hermes Pan and a choreography throw down to Mr. Berkeley, RKO Radio Pictures followed the successful musical comedies starring Wheeler & Woolsey with an epic Busby style all talking, all singing, all dancing, all WTF extravaganza, Flying Down To Rio, no doubt given the go-ahead by producer Pandro S. Berman as the studio's direct competition to the smash hit 42nd Street.



The ersatz stars were Dolores Del Rio and Gene Raymond, but Flying Down To Rio was stolen, with the skill of a Willie Sutton robbery, from the headliners by - well, the rest is history - the elegant, facile, yet fancy high stepping by a new terpsichorean team, Broadway's Fred Astaire and the perky musical comedy gal who sang We're In The Money in pig Latin in Gold Diggers Of 1933, chorus girl turned dancer and versatile movie actress Ginger Rogers.



Mr. Blogmeister's favorite part of the film, besides the very creative filmmaking techniques of director Mark Sandrich throughout - without question, would be the showgirls standing on the wing of the flying airplane, then gyrating, doing dance moves before losing their skimpy outfits. This worthy bit of cinema history starts at 2:00.



And THAT bit of WTF wonderment leads, sad but true, to the end of this post and series: a respectful tip of Mr. Astaire's top hat to the star of George White's Scandals, ultra-wry chanteuse Frances Williams.



No, we're not talking the actress and activist by the same name, but the Broadway headliner from the 1920's through the 1940's, in possession of electric stage presence and a wit so dry as to compel Cole Porter to quaff three more shots of extra dry gin. Among other stage and vaudeville triumphs, Frances was the featured vocalist - delivering her trademark risqué songs between the wacky onstage antics of the Marx Brothers - in the Broadway run of The Cocoanuts.



None other than Frances Williams introduced the standard As Time Goes By - YES, THAT STANDARD, the one performed so beautifully by Dooley Wilson at Rick's Cafe American in Casablanca.



Frances' specialty: songs ("Let's Don't And Say We Did") that featured more double-entendres than Groucho Marx AND Bob Woolsey combined. Yep, this was one grande dame, like Lyda Roberti's "Hatta Mari" in MILLION DOLLAR LEGS, who only could have strutted her stuff in pre-Code movies.



Ms. Williams didn't appear in many films, but her few appearances, like those of Broadway star Zelma O' Neal, prove striking and memorable. These include a 1927 Vitaphone Varieties series, a film that at this writing does not exist, Broadway's Queen Of Jazz, as well as a few Paramount short subjects (including Deep "C' Melodies, On The High C's, both also featuring The Yacht Club Boys, and Let's Stay Single), shot in 1929 and 1930. A quote from her bio on All Music.com adds "none of which capture her reportedly startling stage presence".



She also made a series of recordings in 1931-1937 and would be, along with Lyda Roberti and Gertrude Lawrence, among those to perform and record music by George and Ira Gershwin.



Here's Frances, introduced and followed with extra relish by Roaring 20's legend and raconteur Texas Guinan, in the 20th Century Fox film Broadway Through A Keyhole, directed by Lowell Sherman (that guy who helmed the first Mae West starring feature, among other exploits).



This last clip is from MGM's Hollywood Party, released on June 1, 1934. It's the title number from what is a return to, and, along with the very odd, head-scratching yet entertaining Stand Up And Cheer (a.k.a. Fox Follies, mostly known as Shirley Temple's debut in feature films), the revue musical format and delivered, as always with elegance and personality, by Frances Williams.



After this, Ms. Williams made one more appearance in the rare Mentone Brevity short subject Shoes With Rhythm, returned to her métier, Broadway (Three After Three, Du Barry Was A Lady, Bright Lights Of 1944) and made a few television appearances in the early 1950's.



Alas, pretty much everything seen here, except for the Astaire-Rogers dance numbers, would be stopped with Monty Python's Flying Circus 16 TON WEIGHT on July 1, 1934, when the Production Code would be enforced, with teeth. Seeing what subsequently happened begs the question, were people in the U.S.A. outside the major metropolitan areas so dumb that they did not find the concept of Nick and Nora Charles (as Rob and Laura Petrie would on TV 30 years later) sleeping in separate beds wrong, TERRIBLY wrong? They COULDN'T HAVE BEEN. . . The mind boggles.

With that, we finish up this series, as that inimitable 1928-1934 style WTF factor, outside of such wonderful individual scenes as the inventive title number from Top Hat (bravo Mr. Sandrich and Mr. Astaire) and Busby Berkeley's return to signature way-out form, The Girl With The Tutti Frutti Hat starring Carmen Miranda, pretty much vanished from movies by 1935. The many talents of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland notwithstanding, somehow the thought of a wholesome musical directed by Busby Berkeley is something we at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog can never quite wrap our brains around.

There will be a followup piece about jazz films, in which, thanks to the musical genius of Duke Ellington and the filmmaking acumen of Fred Waller (A.K.A. the fellow who later developed Cinerama), undimmed imagination stayed intact and red-hot music made it into films. . . even well after Betty Boop's dress was lengthened to assuage the bluenoses.

All Talking! All Singing! All Dancing! All WTF! Part 3 by Paul F. Etcheverry

The early talkie musicals featured entertainers who, having headlined feature films over an extended period of time, received some measure of enduring fame, others whose stardom was short-lived, as well as performers who, because they appeared in few movies, remain lesser-known.



Dear readers, do you start rolling around on the floor, laughing to the point of utter hysterics on the mere mention of the name "Osgood Fielding"?



Bought Blu-rays and DVDS of his movies or, even better, had the pleasure of seeing him get big laughs onstage in a touring company of Show Boat? Then you know what an outstanding performer and comedian Joe E. Brown was.



In the following toe-tapping number from Top Speed, Joe's dancing partner, Laura Lee, was also terrific, holding her own with the goofy, triple-jointed, rubber-legged comic - and showing plenty of spunk in the process. Take it, Joe and Laura!



Your correspondent is an absolute sucker for the epic late silent films (directed with cinematic genius by F.W. Murnau and Frank Borzage, respectively) Sunrise and Seventh Heaven. Both starred another actress in the category of "the camera loves her", Janet Gaynor.



Here's Janet, with extra Alice White style pep, demonstrating charm, the effects of excessive coffee drinking and early talkie musical mojo in a Fox feature that made its New York premiere squarely between the September 1929 implosion of the London Stock Exchange and the Wall Street crash in October, Sunnyside Up.



Actress and vocalist Sharon Lynn is remembered fondly as the uber-villainess co-star of the Laurel & Hardy feature Way Out West, but also achieved silver screen immortality in the wonderful "Turn On The Heat" production number - also in Sunnyside Up.



Ms. Lynn, also among the stars of the lost Fox Movietone Follies Of 1929, delivers the vocal prelude to skillful and snazzy dancing by nimble Ziegfeld Follies hoofer Ann Pennington in the following production number from Happy Days.



Sam Goldwyn signed vaudeville icon Eddie Cantor to a contract. His appearances in silents (Kid Boots) were quite successful, so, to make a splash in talkies, Goldwyn produced Whoopee as just the first of a slew of musical comedy vehicles starring the legendary "Banjo Eyes".



Whoopee not only starred the great Eddie Cantor, but also a bevy of adorable showgirls (including Betty Grable) and, most importantly, the way-out visions of the one, the only Busby Berkeley.





Paramount Pictures got into the musicals game early, with Rouben Mamoulian's Applause, starring legendary "torch singer" Helen Morgan, as well as The Love Parade, the first of several wildly successful vehicles co-starring Maurice Chevalier, everyone's favorite randy Parisian, with diva Jeanette McDonald.



Ernst Lubitsch's sophisticated musical didn't just spotlight the stars but also featured magnificent numbers featuring the supporting players, in this case England's finest acrobatic comedian, Lupino Lane, and actress-songstress-comedienne Lillian Roth.



Some of the lesser-known stars and supporting players from the movie musicals of 1929-1930 were incredible performers. One was Broadway legend Zelma O'Neal, hugely popular on stage and in her excellent recordings.



Zelma was a larger-than-life personality, and, unfortunately, the movie that provided the perfect showcase for her formidable talents never materialized. Why MGM never signed her to be singing-dancing "comic relief" in their big budget musical extravaganzas starring Eleanor Powell and other headliners, we'll never know.



Still, Ms. O' Neal was responsible for absolutely blazing moments in her relatively few silver screen appearances.



Although the popular team of silent film headliner Buddy Rogers (from Wild Bill Wellman's WINGS) and winsome musical star Nancy Carroll were the headliners of Paramount Pictures' Follow Thru, the question remains, who stole the picture?



Answer? Zelma O'Neal and her equally funny co-star, the fabulous Jack Haley!



Singing the number she originated onstage, Zelma demonstrates her buoyant good humor, comedy chops and winning personality. No doubt, those who got to see Zelma tear it up onstage enjoyed a rare treat!



Readers of this blog may recognize Zelma from Peach O' Reno, a splendid and fast-paced 1931 film starring the comedy team of Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey. In the following clip, Bert and sprightly Dorothy Lee, as Joe E. Brown did so well, show us a thing or two about keeping the fun quotient in entertainment.



Here, Mr. Woolsey does a bit of terpsichorean tripping the lights fantastic - invariably with good humor.



Wheeler & Woolsey also began their movie career in musicals shot in glorious two-strip Technicolor. The first two RKO films starring the team, Rio Rita (1929) and Dixiana (1930), employ the semi-operatic format which was popular on stage, but never quite right for movies.



The team, however, would go on to star in a series of very good comedies through the 1930's, daunted only when strict enforcement of the Production Code commenced in July 1934 and "sanitized" their trademark double entendre-filled humor.



Even in these rather stage bound films, Bert, Bob and Dorothy are nothing if not troupers! Dorothy and Bert sing the following song with a genuine sweetness that's a welcome alternative to the empty snark of 2014 entertainment.


Another team that was not served well by the "filmed stage play" method was the Marx Brothers. Their first feature films were the stagey adaptations of their Broadway smashes The Coconuts (which featured the music of Irving Berlin and a book by George S. Kaufman, with additional material by Morrie Ryskind) and Animal Crackers. Then as now, Groucho got the last laugh.



Here's Groucho, merging Algonquin Round Table with Gilbert & Sullivan in a ditty he deftly pulverized Broadway audiences with and would sing with caustic glee the rest of his performing life.



Part 4 of this series will cover the WTF wonders that were musical short subjects, from MGM, Paramount, Vitaphone, Columbia and more.



We sign off with a respectful Jack Buchanan top hat tip to The Talkie King, who has done film historians a valuable service by posting dozens of numbers from movie musicals on his YouTube channel.

New On DVD - And As Randy As Ever: Wheeler & Woolsey

Before I could spring for the upcoming, much-awaited UPA and Paramount cartoon DVD sets, Warner Archive beat 'em to the punch by releasing four vintage comedies starring RKO Radio Pictures' ever-wisecracking 1930's team of Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey.

Tops among the quartet is Diplomaniacs, which pre-dates the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup and shares with that opus the distinction of "most nose-thumbing, convention and gender-bending, take-no-prisoners American feature comedy" until Mel Brooks' The Producers and Blazing Saddles decades later.

Those who are easily offended or view ancient movies strictly on Level One, PLEASE, don't even bother taking the plastic cover off the DVD on this one. The film's modus operandi is to get away with as much as humanly possible - A.K.A. barbeque sacred cows to a crisp, offend everyone and have tons of fun in the process.

Diplomaniacs was written by Joseph L. Manckiewicz - yep, the same guy who deliciously skewered the world of showbiz in All About Eve - during his "insane pre-Code comedy" phase that began with the following memorable 1932 Paramount Pictures opus, Million Dollar Legs.



Next in line and the only release of this quartet that isn't from a newly restored master is one of three W&W features released in 1934, Kentucky Kernels.

Co-starring in Kentucky Kernels is Our Gang star George "Spanky" McFarland, a pint-sized comedian if there ever was one. While Spanky is quite the scene stealer, he has his work cut out for him sharing the screen with Bert and Bob!

The Rainmakers (1935) and On Again Off Again (1937) present a different proposition: a sanitized, post-Code W&W, as vigorous Production Code enforcement began on July 1, 1934. I personally find both films very funny and entertaining, but enforcement of the hated Production Code arguably harmed Wheeler & Woolsey even more than it straitjacketed Mae West; good-natured lechery was as much a cornerstone of W&W as sexy one-liners defined Miss West

The Rainmakers is also the last Wheeler & Woolsey comedy to cast Dorothy Lee in her invaluable supporting role as pert ingenue. Dorothy brought an incalculable degree of spunk, charm, fun, good humor and likeability to the W&W films and is remembered today as an unofficial third member of the team.

Dorothy left the series after Silly Billies in 1936, and by the time the team began shooting in 1937, Robert Woolsey was increasingly suffering from kidney disease.



Robert makes a go of it under difficult circumstances in On-Again-Off-Again, but looked clearly ailing in the subsequent High Flyers.



Although Wheeler and Woolsey stopped making movies in 1937, the team still has devoted fans.

For example, here in 2012, there is a Bert Wheeler & Robert Woolsey tribute group on Facebook!

L to R: Bert Wheeler, Robert Woolsey, Milton Berle, Joe Penner, Victor Moore, Benny Rubin