Bud and Lou

Having just watched Stan & Ollie-which lovingly depicted Laurel & Hardy's final performing days on tour in Europe-I finally watched this TV biopic of Abbott & Costello which told of their life from the day they first teamed up to Lou's deathbed scene. Harvey Korman played Abbott and Buddy Hackett, who resembled him, played Costello. Based on a book by Bob Thomas who got much of his research from the team's manager Eddie Sherman, it has Korman and Hackett doing not too bad versions of the A & C routines like their most famous one of "Who's on First?". When it came to the tragic sequence of Costello's infant son's death, it was handled tastefully likewise the way the two comedians handled the news, not to mention the way Lou's wife Anne (Michelle Lee) handled it. But the film seems also intent to show how much of a jerk Costello was after becoming such a big star to the detriment of everyone around him. Presumably, the team's manager Sherman had an ax to grind concerning Costello though as played by Arte Johnson, he's one of the most sympathetic characters in the film. Unfortunately, because of the limited time, while Abbott is mentioned as having a wife, she's never seen nor are their two children mentioned, likewise Lou and Anne's three daughters. So if you want to know about Bud and Lou's life, I suggest you look for the book "Lou's on First", written by Costello's youngest offspring, Chris Costello.

I saw 'Bud and Lou' the night of its initial prime-time television release. It is certainly a loving look at these two legendary comics and takes the expected look at their showbiz origins and their close family lives. I was struck by the apparent desire to feature 'name' late-'70s stars in the title roles (most likely to assure better ratings, I'd guess), and the film's major flaw is that we are constantly distracted by the almost-competing performances of the two other very talented clowns, Harvey Korman and Buddy Hackett, who are sadly miscast in the title roles.

The stretch of imagination is too much to make, and try though I might, I kept seeing Korman and Hackett, whose resemblances to A&C, both physical and in mannerism, were nonexistent. (Better they had starred K&H in an original story, and left the A&C biopic to be done right, as was the masterful 'The Three Stooges' of 2000.) But to their professional credit, K&H soldier on in the roles.

The conclusion is unnecessarily downbeat, and doesn't correllate with our memories of those two great men, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, the legendary partners in comedy who entertained millions and dedicated so much of their personal resources and private efforts to charitable causes and the public good, not the least of which were the War Bond drives.

Though it's not a successful portrait of the team, I believe all concerned did do what they could with the material, and at times the film does have its moments. See it and satisfy your curiosity.

The movie was obviously lovingly done, and the story line superb. When Hackett and Korman are acting "out of character", that is, living Bud and Lou's private lives, the story holds together well. But when they are trying to recreate Abbot and Costello's great routines, things fall apart, particularly a very poorly timed version of "Who's On First". The recent t.v. pic of the Three Stooges stands head and shoulders above this show.

Recently my friend and I had been talking about this pretty awful 1978 telemovie about Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. We hadn't seen it in many years but have always recalled how embarrassingly bad it had been and were dying to see it again, mainly for unintentional laughs at the poor quality of it. Well, a few days ago we managed to find an old VHS tape at a still-functional old time video store, and we rented it and went to my place to watch it. It was worse than we remembered, but it did give us some howls due to its incompetence.

First off, the casting is just horrendous. Stand-up comedian Buddy Hackett plays the short, roly-poly Costello, and Harvey Korman plays the slender straight man, Bud Abbott. I have always enjoyed Korman in many things (especially on The Carol Burnett Show), and when Hackett was in his element he could be quite humorous (especially in IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD). But little Buddy makes a lousy Costello, and it's obvious he was not much of an actor as he desperately attempts to do classic routines of Lou's, and especially a pathetically off-timed "Who's On First?", with Hackett's garbled marbles-in-his-mouth voice. It's vomitable watching Buddy staring off to the side and reciting this gag as though he is reading from scripted cue cards; just putrid. And Korman is no better.

This movie was based on a book by Bob Thomas, supposedly heavily influenced by the memories of A&C's longtime manager, Eddie Sherman (in the film, Eddie is played by Arte Johnson). One of the biggest objections about this movie is that Sherman was at one time fired and later re-hired, and therefore it is said that he had an axe to grind. As a result of personal animosity, it is so claimed, the portrayal of Hackett's Lou Costello here as a nasty, arrogant, sadistic control freak is supposedly way out of line. Indeed, in this film Costello is made out to be quite a monster. But I have to tell you that while it may be somewhat exaggerated, I am of the opinion that the real-life Lou could sometimes be that bad. I base my opinion on the memories of people who worked with him, and especially the directors. Many filmmakers said that Costello could be a little terror, and that he and Abbott would be deliberately difficult on the movie sets. That they gambled all the time, threw their weight around a lot, made unreasonable demands, and that Costello was known to actually steal props from the films they were currently in the middle of working on.

But back to this movie. It's boring. It leaves out many details such as the fact that Lou had daughters, not just the one baby boy who tragically drowned just before his first birthday. Also, the fact that Abbott had a family. Korman and Hackett have zero chemistry together and don't do their roles justice. The way the events zip along you would think that the duo's career only lasted a few years; there is no sense of the passage of decades. And there is no time spent with them on their many movies.

In the end, my friend and I had a tremendous and hearty laugh at how ineptly the death of Lou Costello is played here. I won't ruin it for you, but we frequently mimic this "death scene" for endless kicks. Not because the passing of a great comic is truly funny; I'm talking about the overly-dramatic and probably exaggerated execution of the moment. Just unintentionally hilarious. It is the incompetence of this badly made film that keeps me from rating this a complete ZERO. It entertains ever so slightly because it is so bad. *1/2 out of ****

I read the book on which this film is based--"Bud and Lou", by Bob Thomas--when it first came out, and it didn't impress me much. It turned out that Thomas had relied for a lot of his information on Eddie Sherman, Abbott & Costello's longtime manager who had been fired by the duo and obviously had a major ax to grind. That was to be expected, and it's even understandable, but this movie is, if anything, even more one-sided than the book. Its main goal seemed to be to paint the two comics, especially Costello, in as bad a light as possible. Now Lou Costello was no saint; he was known to have a short fuse, he and Abbott fought bitterly on occasion and even went for months at a time without speaking to each other off the set, he gave many of his directors a lot of trouble and he had a habit of "appropriating" furniture and props that he particularly liked from the sets of his pictures. However, if you believe this movie, he was venal, nasty, stubborn, vengeful, temperamental and offensive 24/7. The script bears little resemblance to the real lives of the two comedians (Costello's daughter in particular was so incensed by this movie that she wrote her own book to refute it and the book it was based on); however, even if it was 100% accurate and Costello actually was the ogre the movie paints him to be, the horrendous miscasting of Buddy Hackett and Harvey Korman destroys whatever possibilities the movie might have had. Hackett bears somewhat of a resemblance to Costello, although he's taller and heavier, and Korman is about the right size and build as Abbott, but that's it. Costello was born and raised in northern New Jersey, as was Abbott, and both had the sharp, rapid-fire speech patterns and New York-ish accent typical of that area, though Costello's was more pronounced than Abbott's. Hackett sounds like a Borscht-belt Catskills comic, which is what he is, and Korman sounds like a classically trained stage actor, which is what he is, and neither of them even tries to come close to the way Bud and Lou spoke--Abbott's mile-a-minute carnival barker spiel, Costello's excitable sputtering as he gets more and more confused--which was central to the astonishing verbal byplay between the two and which, although they made it look easy, was actually quite complex, especially in the "Who's On First" routine. In addition, and even more damaging, is the fact that Korman and Hackett have absolutely no chemistry whatsoever, which is painfully obvious by their atrocious rendering of "Who's On First"; it's so embarrassingly, maddeningly inept--Hackett, for reasons known only to himself, speaks even more slowly here than he does in the rest of the movie, when the whole POINT of the routine was Costello getting more and more overwhelmed as the pace got faster and faster--that it should have been completely cut out.

The film plays fast and loose with the facts--many bios do, but this one does more than most--and the performances by the other actors are nothing special. Arte Johnson plays Eddie Sherman, but makes no particular impression. Michelle Lee, tall, slender, gorgeous and WASPish, plays Costello's wife Anne, who in reality was short, stocky, swarthy, and in fact looked more like Lou Costello than she did Michelle Lee, and Hackett doesn't connect with her, either. The film makes some curious omissions; it doesn't mention, for example, that both Abbott's and Costello's wives were burlesque dancers, which is where they all met. While a case may possibly be made for leaving that out, less understandable is the fact that, although the film covers the team's career in radio and movies, for some unfathomable reason it completely ignores the fact that they had a hugely successful television series for several years (which is still being shown in reruns today).

To sum it all up, if the one-sidedness, inaccuracies and omissions weren't enough to sink this movie, the almost criminal miscasting of the two leads is. This is a stinker of virtually biblical proportions. Avoid it.