Tag: The Private Eyes

Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955)

ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET THE MUMMY (1955) Two stars
Bud Abbott (1897-1974) and Lou Costello (1906-59) enjoyed a phenomenal run for Universal Studios from 1941’s Buck Privates through 1955’s Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy.

They made lots of pictures that made lots and lots of money and they met lots and lots of interesting people (and monsters) in their pictures.

Their career meeting people for Universal took off with the 1948 hit Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, a title which sells Larry Talbot / The Wolf Man (Lon Chaney Jr.), Dracula (Bela Lugosi), and even for one gag the Invisible Man (Vincent Price) short. After that, let’s see, Abbott and Costello meet the Killer, Boris Karloff (not the killer), the Invisible Man (not Vincent Price), Captain Kidd, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Keystone Kops, and the Mummy. We should pause right here and mention Abbott and Costello visited Jack and his beanstalk, Africa, Mexico, and Mars.

I wanted to like Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy.


I wanted to laugh at Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy.

I had a mixed reaction instead.

I liked it without laughing at it once.

Since it’s a comedy and I didn’t laugh even once, I guess I don’t really like it.

I call it a forced smile picture more than anything else, where I see the joke, understand the joke, and finally smile with a sense of resignation.

Maybe I have seen too many Abbott and Costello films in close proximity during quarantine, not to mention imitation Abbott and Costello Don Knotts and Tim Conway in The Private Eyes, but I failed to laugh at humor frequently predicated on Costello fumbling bumbling stumbling into or through someone or something, being terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought or a coherent sentence, and then most often failing to make the skeptical Abbott believe him. I swear, Abbott and Costello must play their favorite routine about 100 times during Meet the Mummy.

Abbott and Costello only call each other by name throughout Meet the Mummy. During the final credits, they’re listed playing Pete Patterson and Freddie Franklin, respectively. That’s about the high point of the humor in Meet the Mummy.

Of all the Universal classic monsters, I must admit that I like the Mummy series the least, namely the four pictures Universal rattled off like machine gun fire in the 1940s — The Mummy’s Hand, The Mummy’s Tomb, The Mummy’s Ghost, and The Mummy’s Curse. I like Hand alright, find Tomb elevated by Lon Chaney Jr.’s debut as Kharis, and Ghost and Curse have already blended into monotonous goo in my brain after seeing them back-to-back recently. Don’t even get me started on the Indiana Jones wannabe Brendan Fraser CGI monstrosities and I blissfully missed Tom Cruise’s so-called abomination completely.

Chaney Jr. proved to be the most menacing Mummy on screen, and he’s not in Meet the Mummy. It could be any other guy wrapped in gauze and affecting a lumbering pace. Yeah, it’s a guy named Eddie Parker. Oh, sure, probably a nice guy, but still no Chaney Jr. They call the Mummy ‘Claris’ — not Kharis — anyway in Meet the Mummy.

Meet Frankenstein and Meet the Invisible Man worked because the actors portraying the monsters played it straight rather than knowing they were in a comedy. It’s similar to the acting in Airplane, Top Secret, and The Naked Gun, in that it never received the credit it deserved.

As for Abbott and Costello, there’s always Hold That Ghost, Meet Frankenstein, Meet the Invisible Man, and “Who’s on First.”

The Private Eyes (1980)

THE PRIVATE EYES (1980) *1/2
Eighty years of nostalgia account for the appeal of the comedy mystery THE PRIVATE EYES.

THE PRIVATE EYES spoofs Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, who first appeared in the 1887 Arthur Conan Doyle novel “A Study in Scarlet” and made a comeback in the ’70s through such films as THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, THE ADVENTURE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES’ SMARTER BROTHER, THE SEVEN-PER-CENT SOLUTION, and MURDER BY DECREE, and it takes on a comedic style made famous by Abbott and Costello in such ’40s films as HOLD THAT GHOST and ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN.

Meanwhile, here we are more than 40 years out from the release of THE PRIVATE EYES, possibly feeling nostalgic for the comedic duo Don Knotts (1924-2006) and Tim Conway (1933-2019), who appeared together in a trifecta of Disney live-action pictures before THE PRIZE FIGHTER and THE PRIVATE EYES, both major successes for Roger Corman’s New World Productions. They last appeared together in a cameo for the bomb turkey CANNONBALL RUN II.

Knotts definitely carries more nostalgic heft than Conway, since I remember him from ‘The Andy Griffith Show,’ ‘Three’s Company,’ PLEASANTVILLE (playing a TV repairman, of course), and even a play in Kansas City when I was in college. Knotts’ Bernard ‘Barney’ Fife worked up my Grandma like no other fictional character and she reveled in his regularly scheduled comeuppance. I fondly remember giving her a hard time about it, saying that Knotts’ Fife made the show and that it went downhill after his departure. Strangely enough, I remember most fondly a TV spot pairing Fife’s antics with Right Said Fred’s ‘I’m Too Sexy.’ Wish that I could find that spot and crack up once again.

So, needless to say, I entered THE PRIVATE EYES with a generosity of good spirit and desire to laugh. I left 90 minutes later defeated by a really, really, really dumb, dumb, dumb mystery comedy and I have no real motivation to seek out the other Knotts and Conway cinematic pairings.

Knotts and Conway portray Inspector Winship and Dr. Tart, two bumbling fumbling stumbling American detectives who have somehow found themselves working for ‘The Yard.’ They bumble fumble stumble from their very first scene together all the way to the end and if you find that bumble fumble stumble worth a funny rumble the first time, you just might find it funny a hundred times. However, I did not find it funny the first or the last time or any darn time in-between.

THE PRIVATE EYES more accurately recalls a Scooby Doo episode. Hey, wouldn’t you know that Knotts appeared in cartoon form in the episodes ‘Guess Who’s Knott Coming to Dinner’ and ‘The Spooky Fog of Juneberry’ and Conway took on the Spirit of Fireball McPhan in ‘The Spirit Spooked Sports Show.’ I vaguely remember watching all three from childhood, but I still have no doubt they are each better than THE PRIVATE EYES.

Ironically, THE PRIVATE EYES has way too much plot for a dumb comedy.

HOLD THAT GHOST works much better than THE PRIVATE EYES because it has flights of fancy that deviate from its mystery plot like Costello’s dance scene with Joan Davis. Since they were all under the imperial offices of Universal Pictures, HOLD THAT GHOST makes room for musical numbers by Ted Lewis and His Orchestra and the Andrews Sisters. THE PRIVATE EYES, meanwhile, offers scenes like a gas station destroyed by Winship and Tart in a way that recalls IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD, a very, very, very, very unfunny comedy. Let’s face it, Hollywood made less dumb comedies in 1941 than both 1963 and 1980.

Knotts and Conway remain likable throughout THE PRIVATE EYES, despite very rarely ever being funny. That said, Australian singer and actress Trisha Noble virtually steals the show out from underneath Knotts and Conway every time she appears as the alluring heiress Phyllis Morley. She’s very, ahem, ‘Oh LàLà,’ like a model for that magazine favored by 1955 Biff Tannen. I can honestly say that she alone boosts the overall rating for THE PRIVATE EYES by at least half a star.