Blues Busters

A rather good entry in the series and Horace DeBusey Jones gets a singing voice and the Boys get into the nightclub business. The ladies are beautiful as the Boys play out the film.

The Bowery Boys invade the world of music and nightclubs when after a tonsillectomy which the hapless Bernard Gorcey paid for leaves Huntz Hall with a radio crooner's voice. Naturally Leo Gorcey and the rest of the boys want to capitalize on this if for no other reasons than to pay poor Bernard Gorcey back. They don't want to lose the ambiance of Louis Dumbrowski's Bowery Sweet Shop as a hangout.

But the elder Gorcey gets in far deeper as song plugger Gabriel Dell and Leo get the Sweet Shop owner to turn his place into a nightclub as a showcase for Hall. That doesn't please Craig Stevens who owns a nightclub across the street with his featured singer Adele Jergens, they don't like the competition. That sets up the crazy antics of this Bowery Boys feature.

A few years earlier Eddie Bracken did a comedy at Paramount where he played his usual schnook character who is discovered to have a velvety singing voice. A guy named Crosby was also under contract to Paramount and they dubbed Bing's singing voice to Bracken's songs.

Monogram couldn't afford Bing Crosby so they grabbed a singer named John Lorenz to dub Huntz Hall. I'm sure Mr. Lorenz was like thousands of others who couldn't get a break because he sounded like Bing Crosby. Still he's effective in Blues Busters.

To waste a Crosby voice on Huntz Hall, the shame of it.

Sach is in the hospital. The gang fears that he's on death's door. It turns out to be a simple tonsillectomy and Sach's voice is changed into something beautiful. Louie is besides himself over the hospital bill. Slip comes up with an idea to make the money back.

This movie needs a Susan Boyle moment. I mean that it needs to do the standard competition prize story. It starts with a great premise. It just goes down a less compelling road. It doesn't have a ticking clock or the tension from a competition. This is still fun with Sach getting a big head and a small brain. This is generally fine.

I'm not sure who to give the praise to, but this entry in the series is quite above the quality of of the other Bowery Boys efforts. It has a more polished look and feel to it and seems more in the style of the Universal-International comedy series of the time (i.e., A&C, Francis the Talking Mule, Ma & Pa Kettle, etc.)in terms of craftsmanship and production value (and like those other series mentioned, nothing hilarious in general, but pleasantly amusing). Overall, a Bowery Boys movie even non-fans might enjoy. Being a longtime fan of Bing Crosby's work, I would have SWORN it was Crosby dubbing the voice (especially in the sequence where we first see Satch performing at Louie's "new" nightclub) and I read somewhere here this was made in 6 days, which makes this film even more remarkable.

I think this and "The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters" are the two standouts in the series' run. As Orson Welles once said, "There are good movies, of ALL kinds." I guess this fits into that category!

The archetypal Bowery Boys movie, which shows Huntz Hall and Leo Gorcey at their best.

Sach, in one of those Bowery Boy incidents, accidentally ends up singing strikingly like Bing Crosby. All the boys capitalize on his success and everything is honky dory until Sach decides he has forgotten where he came from and starts acting like a diva.

This series, although labelled "B," which it was, has a lot of humor, strong characterizations and is simply a lot of un. You will notice that it is a family affair, with Butch (or is it Chuck) played by David Gorcey and, of course, Louie Dumbrowski is Leo "Slip Mahoney" Gorcey's Dad, Bernard.

THe earlier series, the "Dead End Kids," was also very good, although those films have not aged as well given production techniques. That series, though starred Billy Halop and Bobby Jordan, in addition to Gorcey, Hall, and Gabe Dell. Jordan did appear in some Bowery Boy movies.