10: Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955, Charles Lamont)

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.

8: Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Kops (1955, Charles Lamont)

Owned release: The 2009 Universal box. This is on Disc 14.

Acquired: Amazon. Feb. 2014.

Seen before?: Once before from this disc - July 24, 2017.

The only one of the ...Meet films that couldn't be slotted sideways into the horror genre, and the weakest of the bunch. The team was well and truly running on fumes here, so a change of pace - going back to straight comedy after a run of genre hybrids - had to be appealing, and with the added benefit of being a homage to the old days of comedy. The late films, due to the necessity of avoiding the team's classic routines (as they were providing material for the duo's TV show), were heavy on the slapstick anyway, so why wouldn't they want to lean into that and pay their forebearers their due respect by crafting a slapstick comedy set during the early days of slapstick comedy - a sort of pratfall-laden wish-fulfillment vehicle/tip of the cap?

It's a nice idea, for sure. The execution, on the other hand... not so much. The funniest part of the movie is the very first sequence, with Lou making a sobbing nuisance of himself while watching a silent epic entitled Eliza and the Bloodhounds (which, in another instance of recycled history, is made of footage from 1927's Uncle Tom's Cabin) and Bud getting thrown into two flower pots within five minutes. Past that, it's a slow slide into genial mediocrity, with a few scattered chuckles (A&C running out of a tunnel with a train in hot pursuit; Lou giving the camera a knowing glance as he palms some loaded dice) and a lot of big, ostensibly-exciting hunks of vehicular mayhem that sit on screen and die. Given the focus on loud, dangerous stunts and car chases/plane chases, it could be argued that this is essentially the A&C equivalent of a big-budget FX comedy... but where the ideal of something like that is, say, Ghostbusters, this is closer to something like Evolution or Leonard Part 6, where the scale and extravagance fail to paper over the tired gags and minimum-effort performances.

What pushes it into the realms of the obnoxious is the film's insistence that this is indeed all a big screaming laff riot - the big biplane sequence has two crew members at two different points laughing hysterically at how funny this all is. One even tells the blowhard European director - who is actually a NYC con man, but that's something else - "This is very funny, Mr. Touminoff!" to which the director replies, "This is not supposed to be funny!" and here I am thinking they're both wrong. As an argument for the value of comedy in the face of misery and the desire to make "serious" art, this is hardly Sullivan's Travels, and the shaking by the lapels, demanding that we LAAAAAAAAAUGH, is unwelcome and frankly surprising for a duo whose chemistry generally makes this all feel so fluid. By the time the Keystone Kops show up to do their thing, the warmth of the homage has curdled into two steps off a rip-off, a film using the reputation of its predecessors to palm off some shabby goods - the Mack Sennett cameo is an embarrassment - and that's even before the final chase sequence straight-up steals a joke from Sherlock, Jr. In retrospect, it's funny that this has A&C tackling a con artist who's gone into making movies, because someone's getting conned here and it isn't the people on screen.

Note of interest: The villain's female sidekick is named Leona Van Cleef. As Lee Van Cleef was just beginning his career at this point, part of me wonders whether that's a weird shoutout or just a coincidence.