The Nitwits

Moviecut—The Nitwits

source: The Nitwits

Rising director George Stevens had already directed the long-time team of Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey when he was assigned a second film for them, this sometimes boring farce that looses interest when they are not on screen or when young leading lady Betty Grable isn't showing off those sexy gams which made her the toast of soldiers a decade later. The success of "The Thin Man" made murder with a bit of comedy thrown in ripe for rip-off, and in the case of "The Nitwits", that is obvious what is happening here. Grable is the secretary to lecherous boss Hale Hamilton whose wife (Evelyn Brent) has been receiving threats from a stalker only known as "the Black Widow". Before you know it, somebody gets a big hole in the head, and everybody in the plot is suspect, including the too dumb to hurt a fly comedy duo. Wheeler and Grable get an adorable musical number where they spin around down a flight of circular staircase. While the lyrics to "Music in My Heart" (by Dorothy Fields) aren't a threat to "With a Song in My Heart" or "There's Music in You", it is a cute moment in an otherwise occasionally tedious film. The movie comes alive during comedy moments where the boys take center stage, particularly a hysterically funny moment where a handcuffed Woolsey shows a cop how to get his hands free. The simple use of a tennis ball as comic prop may have you in hysterics. There's a bit of racial comedy thrown in with the presence of Willie Best as the slow-moving young black man who becomes a victim of Woolsey's burglar trap. I'd rather see the cops made out as buffoons than a young black man continuously be forced to play the dumb sap who is only happy if there's a hidden mattress somewhere, a bottle of liquor around. or a crap game going on. It is obvious that in the three years between "Hold Em' Jail" (Grable's previous pairing with Wheeler) and "The Nitwits" that she's grown up a lot, not only in age, but in her singing and dancing abilities as well. This retains amusement when Wheeler, Woolsey and Grable are on screen, but downloads itself into boredom when they are not and becomes something pretty predictable.

George Stevens had previously directed RKO's top comedy duo a year earlier in KENTUCKY KERNELS. This time the boys are thrown into a corporate setting, playing cigar stand owners in a building where a music company does business. One of them (Bert Wheeler) is in love with a pretty secretary (Betty Grable), while the other (Robert Woolsey) is focused on perfecting his latest screwy invention. The invention, a truth telling apparatus, is glimpsed briefly at the beginning of the movie. But it plays an important role later when a killer's identity is made known. Leave it to Wheeler & Woolsey to help police solve a whodunit in the zaniest way possible. Most of what occurs on screen is a bit surreal, but that's what makes these comedy features from the 1930s so much fun. At one point, Woolsey is afraid that his pal may be the killer, so he tries to throw the cops off the track by nearly confessing to the crime himself. During these scenes there's a good gag involving some handcuffs and a fly-away hat. Later, we have a goofy reenactment of the murder where Woolsey plays the victim. While not every bit works, these pictures are never short on imagination or gimmicks. Perhaps the highlight of the film is a wonderful sight gag where the boys walk on stilts down a darkened street and around a corner. They want to be tall enough to speak to Grable, who's just been arrested and is looking out a jail cell window several stories up. As they talk to her, a crook who is down below on another floor starts sawing their wooden stilt's legs. It's an amusing scene, especially when the stilts give way and they are scrambling off in trousers that are now much too long for them! Adding to the overall merriment of the proceedings are a few catchy tunes. After all, Grable's character is employed by a music publishing firm. So of course, she'd have to sing a number or two. She's great, and her performance hints of bigger things to come for her in the musical comedy genre. One other thing worth mentioning is the actor who plays the murderer. He is quite convincing, meaning he plays some of his scenes so smoothly that it doesn't seem obvious he's the bad guy until the end. He wears an interesting costume in the final climactic sequence, something that seems straight out of Halloween. THE NITWITS was a big hit for the studio. So it is not surprising that RKO execs saw fit to remake the story eleven years later. That time GENIUS AT WORK featured Alan Carney and Wally Brown. And lovely Anne Jeffreys took the part played by Grable.

Copyright 7 June 1935 by RKO-Radio Pictures, Inc. No recorded New York opening. Australian release: 21 August 1935. 9 reels. 81 minutes. SYNOPSIS: Music publisher receives death threats from a blackmailer called "The Black Widow". COMMENT: You'll laugh until it hurts! How often have I heard that advertising spiel for a movie that inspired a few mild chuckles at most. But here's a picture that really deserved that sort of promotion. I watched it on television, and was I sore! I ached all over and almost fell off my chair at least three or four times. We all know that watching a comedy on TV can be a very disappointing experience. Most comics desperately need an audience to bounce their gags off. In movies the comebacks are scrupulously spaced out (by stop-watching audience reactions at preview screenings) to allow for the laughs. On TV, that timing often seems dead wrong — which is why some genius invented canned laughter. So it's a rare movie indeed that will have me in stitches. But after watching "The Nitwits" in action last night, my ribs are still sore a day later. A host of hilarious gags (including three side-splitting run-ins with Arthur Treacher) are climaxed by a chase melee through an office building that fully deserves its reputation as one of the wildest, most inspiredly chaotic and hair-raisingly funny ever put on film. Mind you, the idea of entangling comedians in a murder mystery is almost a sure-fire gimmick. The approach here, however, can only be described as highly original and inventive. It allows for some really funny bits of business which have never been equaled, let alone topped. The timing is absolutely perfect. Although he made his name with romantic dramas like "A Place in the Sun" and "Giant", director George Stevens was also a master of comedy. Wheeler and Woolsey deliver their usual terrific impersonations of imbecility with ingratiating aplomb. Our comics receive wonderful support from Betty Grable (struggling with an unflattering hair style, alas, but singing and dancing a treat), Evelyn Brent (who serves up her straight characterization of repressed acidity in fine style), Willie Best (a stereotypical role, I know, but he handles it with amiable gusto), Arthur Treacher (three marvelous strikes and suddenly he's pitching), Fred Keating's double (what an acrobat! but notice that our Wheeler and Woolsey match him stride for stride), and last but not least, perennial cop, Edgar Dearing, in one of his biggest and certainly most harassed roles. Production values and credits rate at least 100%. And did this masterwork of laughs figure in even so much as a nomination? Not on your life!

(Some Spoilers) Almost totally unknown to todays movie going audiences the comedy team of Bert Wheeler & Robert Woolsey was one of the most successful, as RKO Pictures biggest money makers, as well as prolific, making some two dozen films in a span of just under ten years, of the 1930's. It was in the mid 1930's when Robert Woosley started suffering from health problems that the comedy team started to go under and finally came to an end with Woosley's death at age 50 in 1938 of kidney failure. Ironically Robert Woosley died on Halloween of that year the very day that Orsen Wells made headlines with his unforgettable as well as shocking "War of the Worlds" broadcast on national radio. "The Nitwits" is a both comedy murder drama with both Wheeler and Woolsey, as Johnnie & Newton,playing two cigar store employees who among other things have developed this truth machine that can force anyone who's put under it to tell the truth no matter how bad it would effect him or her. Even if the truth can send the person to prison for murder. In the office building where Jonnie and Newton have their cigar stand record producer Winfield Lake, Hale Hamilton,gets a,threatening note from this person who calls himself the Black Widow. The Black Widow tells Lake to pay up, the amount of cash is never made clear, or die. Getting top New York Private Eye William Darrell, Fred Keating, on the case doesn't at all help the concerned Winfield Lake with him ending up shot to death in his office by an unseen assailant. It's with the killer now targeting Mrs. Lake, Evelyn Brent, to come up with the blackmail money that PI Darrell suddenly and inexplicably decides, for the first time in his career, to give into the blackmailers demands! While all this is going on Mr. Lake's pretty secretary Mary Roberts,Betty Grable,is implicated in his murder being that she was the last person to see him alive and also had a gun in her possession! A gun that her boyfriend Johnnie gave Mary as a present! It doesn't take long for both Johnnie and his friend Newton to get themselves in involved in Mr. Lake's murder in trying to clear the innocent Mary Roberts. The killer himself is caught red-handed by Johnnie and Newton when he plops himself down on the chair that the truth detector, invented by Newton, is installed on. Screaming out uncountably that he's in fact the killer, the Black Weidow, the two "Nitwits" don't believe him thinking that the machine had malfunctioned! This gives the by now recognized, by the audience, Black Widow a new lease on life, as well as a scary Halloween skeleton custom, to end up murdering a number of other people including suspected killer, by the police, the auditor of M. Lake's enterprises Mr. Lurch, Arthur Aylesworth! Hilarious final sequence with both Johnnie and Newton having it out with the Black Widow and his henchmen, as well as the bumbling police, as they end up throwing everything from beer bottles to one to five gallon jugs as well as the bathroom bathtub on top of their heads. There also Black comic Willie Best as Sleepy the building elevator operator who together with his neighborhood, Harlem, dice shooting friends uncover the secret way that the Black widow is to get his ransom money, through the ventilator shaft. That leads the killer, in his skeleton costume, to come out of hiding and scare the living hell out of Sleepy and his friends as well everyone else in the cast and audience until one of Newton's over-sized moonshine jugs puts him out of business.

The humor in the films of Wheeler and Woolsey seemed to go steadily downhill from their early promise in "Rio Rita" to at least this one, made 6 years later. These two very funny guys try mightily to overcome some tepid material in "The Nitwits" and get a boost from the murder mystery back story, which at least challenges you to spot the murderer. The familiar faces on hand are Betty Grable as Bert's girl friend, Erik Rhodes, best remembered with a foreign accent in some Astaire/Rogers musicals, and Willie Best who plays (what else?) the janitor. Also Arthur Treacher, who has some funny scenes as a hapless tennis instructor enroute to an appointment in the building where most of the story takes place. There are two good songs in the picture which elevate the proceedings and my rating, "Music In My Heart" and "You Opened My Eyes", which is the better of the two. Wheeler and Grable dance together in that one in a pretty athletic and acrobatic number. It makes you wonder how much better this could have been with better screenwriters.

Nitwits, The (1935) *** (out of 4) Wheeler and Woolsey comedy has the boys playing cigar salesmen who get caught up in a murder mystery surrounding a killer known as "The Black Widow". This is a pretty good little gem that manages to be quite hilarious but it also has a good mystery surrounding it. There's also no doubt that this film influenced Abbott and Costello's Who Done It? not to mention there are other gags here later used by Abbott and Costello. The film has non-stop gags including a hilarious sequence that involves a chase towards the end of the film. Just about every type of gag gets thrown out there and the majority of them stick. There's also a very funny scene where Woolsey scares the future dead victim by singing a song about a black widow. Betty Grable play's Wheeler's girlfriend and the prime murder suspect and she's very good in her bit role. Black actor Willie Best has some of the funniest scenes, although most of them come in the form of racial jokes.

I didn't know the comedy team Wheeler & Woolsey before seeing this film but, believe me, you must find out about them because they were very effective and good, especially Robert Woolsey who reminds me a bit of George Burns. See them! The wonderful Betty Grable is, as always, very beautiful but one cannot believe, seeing her in that movie, how subdued, poised and almost shy she was at that time. When one knows how much energy she displayed in the Forties and how sassy she was, it is a bit of a curio to see her in the Thirties. She doesn't have much of a showy role but she's good and we have the pleasure of hearing her sing in a duet with Bert Wheeler and do some steps with him. Fred Keating is very handsome, laid-off and good. He should have been a leading man...why not Betty's? What a stunning couple they would've made in Technicolor! As for the movie, it is very good. Everyone work well together and, besides the comedy business, there's a little action and suspense. Yeah, though simple, this film reach it's goal in that it is really entertaining. Don't hesitate to see it if you have a chance.

The Nitwits are of course Wheeler&Woolsey and in this film they own a cigar stand in the building where music publisher Hale Hamilton has an office. Hamilton's got a secretary played by Betty Grable that Bert is stuck on. Hamilton's married to Evelyn Brent, but never lets that stand in the way of a little nookie. Anyway, a notorious criminal called the Black Widow is known for sending out letters of extortion demanding money or the victim would be killed. Hamilton decides not to give in and does wind up dead as a result. Unlike Abbott&Costello's Who Done It which has a lot of the same plot premise, The Nitwits is better edited and the perpetrator doesn't come out of nowhere as in Bud&Lou's film. Unfortunately due to one of the gags which involves Woolsey inventing a chair in which a charge of electricity passes through you so you blurt the truth out, we learn a little prematurely in my opinion who the culprit is. Anyway because Betty is a prime suspect, Wheeler&Woolsey get themselves involved in the investigation. They prove as much help to the cops as Abbott&Costello did, but like them they do stumble on to the perpetrator. One reason this film is not revived too often is the climax also involves a bunch of black people being allowed by one of their peers who works as a janitor to use the basement for a quiet crap game. Their fright reactions in the climatic chase of the culprit plays into a lot of racial stereotyping. Anyway I did like Woolsey's Rube Goldberg contraption as a gag. Maybe they could use a real one of those at Guantanamo.