Peach-O-Reno

Just as sure as you can tell your left sock from the right after you wear them for a week, I'm sure you will like this movie, which is filled with laughs and song and dance numbers. The court room scene is a blast and the high light of the film is the song Niagara Falls To Reno performed by Bert Wheeler and Dorothy Lee.

Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey are divorce lawyers in Reno. Joseph Cawthorne and Cora Witherspoon come to town, each seeking a divorce from the other. Their daughters, Dorothy Lee and Zelma O'Neal, show up too.

This is the basic idea of the movie. It seems to be among Wheeler & Woolsey's most chaotic movies. This is not necessarily a bad thing, since they break into song, dance, and drag every few minutes.

Interest in Wheeler & Woolsey has declined in recent decades. Woolsey's death age 50 in 1938 goes a long way to explaining it; compared to the longevity of the Marx Brothers, this pair, created for the stage version of Rio Rita, had a ten-year run, and it was over. Wheeler.

The family of Joseph Cawthorn (Joe) and Cora Witherspoon (Aggie) are sitting down to a meal to celebrate their 25 years of marriage. Included at the family meal are the couple's daughters Dorothy Lee (Pru) and Zelma O'Neal (Pansy). Well, shortly after a toast to the happy couple, things descend into all-out warfare with the parents vowing to divorce and heading to Reno as quickly as possible to make it a reality. Cue W + W who specialize in divorcing couples. They have a rival company that works across the road - Jackson, Jackson, Jackson & Jackson - and there is an ongoing one-upmanship for business. W + W have the upper hand as they arrange for busloads of customers to be collected from the train station as soon as the unhappily married individuals arrive in Reno. Both Joseph and Cora arrive at the office of W + W but their daughters chase after them as they don't want the divorce to go through. Will things end happily? Well, what do you think?

It's a comedy with a couple of entertaining dance segments that includes a catchy song performed by Wheeler and Lee, but it is the dancing that really entertains. Watch Lee - she is brilliant! The dance performed by W + W is also very entertaining. I've watched a few W & W comedies and this is my favourite so far. Wheeler makes a very good woman in drag - I usually hate films where men dress up as women but Wheeler pulls it off on this offering and is funny with it.

Their lawyer business turns into a successful nightclub in the evenings with the push of various buttons and female office administrators becoming nightclub hostesses. It is very impressive. And funny. Unfortunately, some of their jokes are too obvious and the end courtroom sequence is too drawn out so falls a bit flat after the good work that had been done up to that point.

I guess humor, like beauty, is in the eye (ear) of the beholder. Wheeler and Woolsey are two of my favorite funnymen but Peach-O-Reno contains some of the oldest and stalest jokes ever put on film. I'll bet they were funnier in 1932, but here it is 2011 and some of the material fell flatter than a pancake despite their best efforts and that of the supporting cast.

Joseph Cawthorn and Cora Witherspoon are the old married couple trying to get a divorce, after a hilarious scene at their 25th wedding anniversary party which turns into an argument and a trip to Reno. They are excellent and very funny when on screen - maybe they should have given these two old pros more screen time. Bert Wheeler and Dorothy Lee have a good song and dance number and Wheeler himself is quite good impersonating a floozy to aid Cawthorn's cause for divorce.

There is some good fun here and there and I have a hard time knocking Wheeler and Woolsey in any case, but maybe "Peach-O-Reno" should have been seen in 1932 and then stored in a vault somewhere. It came as a two-fer with "Girl Crazy" - maybe I'll have better luck with that one.

Wheeler and Woolsey were popular comics from the late Twenties to Woolsey's early death in the late Thirties. They dealt heavily in wordplay and bad puns, and were generally charlatans; Woolsey's remarks have a strong Groucho tinge to them. They're certainly corrupt in this 1931 confection, directed, inevitably, by William A. Seiter, where they're divorce lawyers by day and casino operators at night. (There's a fun sequence of their office converting into a gambling parlor, echoed in 1964's "Robin and the Seven Hoods.") When long-married Joseph Cawthorn and Cora Witherspoon arrive in Reno seeking a divorce, they take both cases, and for reasons not worth going into, Wheeler is forced to go into drag. The surprise is, he's actually a rather attractive woman! He gets the look, the voice, and walk right and even does an acrobatic pas de deux with Woolsey. The couple's daughters, Zelma O'Neal and the always adorable Dorothy Lee, arrive in Reno to try to prevent the divorce, and a few more plot shenanigans happen before Wheeler and Lee, who were usually partnered and always worked well together, stop the proceedings for a terrific song-and-dance number about how the path from Niagara to Reno is growing shorter. It's a discombobulated movie, the beginning not having much to do with the end, and yes, there are groaners among the jokes. But at just over an hour, it doesn't wear out its welcome, and you'll positively marvel at Wheeler's drag act.