Owned release: Universal box, 2008, you know the drill. (This is on Disc 14.)
Acquired: Amazon. 2014. February. It's a cold winter.
Seen before?: Once from this disc - August 1st, 2017.
So often we end up where we started. Where the team's penultimate Universal film, ...Meet the Keystone Kops, attempted to relight their spark by nestling them amongst some of their formative influences, Mummy brings them back to their roots in a couple of ways. The more obvious is that the types of comedy on display have been rebalanced; where the films immediately preceding it had included predominately physical humor and slapstick, this one scales that back and works in more of the verbal sparring and conceptual bits for which the duo were famed. I don't mean that as a generality - Mummy features restagings of several of the team's well-known bits, including another go at "Changing Room" (featured in ...Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff and before that in Hold That Ghost) and a very funny bit involving a cursed medallion hidden inside a hamburger that I'm told bears a similarity to a poison-swap bit done in both The Naughty Nineties and Pardon My Sarong. There's even a new bit, "Take Your Pick," written specifically for this film and meant to take advantage of the duo's verbal dexterity that nonetheless is based on the same general premise as "Who's on First?"
This may sound like complaining, but it's anything but - letting the boys back on familiar ground loosens them up and lets them fall back into a solid groove. The subsequent film, while not top-echelon, has what's probably the best work of this last stretch; the verbal patter has a welcome snap ("I never had a mummy!" "What'd your father do, win you in a crap game?"), there's some amusing left-field sight gags - Lou using a straw hat as a horn mute, Lou fighting with an arm that's emerged from the mouth of a stuffed lion head - and the plot, though over-complex, has each of its three chief threads culminate in someone donning a mummy costume, so that there's three mummies running around at the climax. Plus, there's a young Michael Ansara running around in a crisp white suit and being generally threatening, which is fun. And there's musical numbers! This last aspect is key, as it belies a fascinating dimension to this film's relationship with the team's established body of work.
There are, to be specific, four dance sequences and one song interspersed through this film. Two of the dance sequences are framed as Egyptian ritualism, while the other two (and the song) are explicitly performances for an audience in a cafe. During the first dance number, a lively and mock-violent piece involving two men, two women, a lot of flips and tumbles, and a little tap-dancing, it struck me that this would be a number not out of place on the burlesque circuit. You know, the same milieu in which Abbott and Costello came up and first made their name(s). The other musical interludes are woven through the film in such a way that they break up the action and provide a contrast, a different type of entertainment... much in the way musical numbers and striptease performances are interlaced with comedic routines in burlesque films. (And just when I thought that the one thing they didn't include was scantily-clad ladies, a beautiful blonde shows up at the end to provide some cheesecake and do a gag involving a snake dance.) What I see here is A&C going all the way back, past the films and into their early days as entertainers to see if they can't recapture that young hunger. That, despite their efforts, they ultimately can't and end up constructing a homage to themselves is also quietly encoded in the final product.
The last scene sees the two opening their own cafe with which to host routines in the vein of the one from the beginning of the film. And by "in the vein of," I mean "exactly the same as" - the routine we see at the end of the film as we tour their shiny new performance space is the one from the beginning of the film. And in that vein, this film sees Abbott & Costello using their own names as the names for their characters for the first time since their film debut One Night in the Tropics. Going back to the beginning often means bringing everything full circle, and while this wasn't intended to be the last vehicle for the team (indeed, they made one more film, Dance With Me, Henry, after this for an independent producer) nor even their last film under Universal, there's a certain sense of finality that make this a proper outro - a closing of the circle, if you will. This may not have been intended as their final bow, but it works just fine as one anyway. There's worse notes to go out on.
No comments:
Post a Comment