Crazy House
                                                                       
Director: Edward F. Cline
Year: 1943
Rating: 6.0
I am not sure if many people remember the comedy team of Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson. They were both middle aged men, frumpy, told some bad jokes and made one genius film. This isn't it but Hellzapoppin' is so good I would follow them into battle. They can't make it to that level here but they sure give it the old vaudeville try.  Their comedy is chaos. It is like taking a wild rickshaw ride at a 100-miles an hour through a mental institution in which all the doctors have been locked into their rooms and the keys thrown away. The rickshaw stops from time to time for musical entertainment.



Olsen and Johnson had been together as a comedy team since 1918 playing vaudeville houses. They throw everything at the audience - gags galore, visual puns, songs, slapstick falls - in an effort to get them to laugh. Neither is a straight man - they just play off each other - insult one another, give each other a good kick in the pants. At the speed of light. It is impossible to see all the gags as they fly by. They made it big when Hellzapoppin' was a theatrical hit on Broadway playing for over 1,000 performances and then made into a film. They followed it up with three more films and then disappeared. Maybe absurd comedy can only go so far. This is the first after Hellzapoppin'.



Which is sort of where this film begins. In a grand opening sequence they are returning to Universal in a big parade to make a new film after the success of Helzapoppin' and the studio sends out the army to stop them, closes the gates, sends people into bomb shelters. The joke being that they demolished the studio the last time around and Universal want nothing to do with them. Getting through the opening credits is an exercise in what the hell - some of the many names you see pass by are Patric Knowles. Thomas Gomez, Billy Gilbert, Edgar Kennedy, Shemp Howard, Franklin Pangborn, the De Marco Dancers, The Glenn Miller Singers, The Delta Rhythm Boys, Count Basie and his Orchestra, Allan Jones, Johnny Mack Brown, Andy Devine, Alan Curtis and Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. It is an 80 minute film. I wondered how you could get all these and more into a film.  Easy if they are 10-second cameos - like Rathbone and Bruce playing Holmes and Watson for a quickie. Others pop in for slightly longer cameos such as Andy Devine riding a bike and warning people that Olsen and Johnson were coming.



So they go off to make an independent film with a producer that is broke. But they make a movie. Mainly with unknowns at this point - Martha O'Driscoll and Cass Daley, anyone? The film slows down and basically becomes a musical. The numbers were ok - Count Basie giving a good turn. A fun courtroom sequence - Judge - "Anything you say may be held against you", "Marlene Dietrich", "Maria Montez".  Sounds good to me though my choice would have been Rita Hayworth. Might have done better with more crazy shenanigans and fewer musical numbers.