High Flyers

I have long been a fan of this pair.More for the characters than the actual humour.After all the jokes are rarely funny now.I have only just seen this final film of theirs,and i have to say that this is a sad finale to a double act which i have much enjoyed.I think that RKO must have had their doubts because they have cast Lupe Velez,presumably to bolster the laughs.Unfortunately it does not work.She is on one level the boys on another.This film even manages to make the great Margaret Dumont seem unfunny.Also i have to say that poor Robert Woolsey seems to be quite strained,if you look at his face.Sadly,it isn't funny and is a poor epitaph.

A couple of zany HIGH FLYERS find themselves involved in the hunt for missing stolen diamonds.

The wonderfully funny team of Wheeler & Woolsey (Bert Wheeler is the little guy with curly hair; Robert Woolsey is the skinny fellow with glasses & cigar) provide lots of solid laughs in this fast moving comedy crime caper. Of course, crash-landing on a millionaire's estate inhabited by peppery Lupe Velez, lovely Marjorie Lord & the monumental Margaret Dumont might raise anyone's spirits.

Jack Carson is hanging around as a crooked reporter, while an exasperated Paul Harvey tries to figure out why his household is suddenly so topsy-turvy. Maybe it has something to do with the trio of gentlemanly criminals - Charles Judels, Lucien Prival & Herbert Evans - who have arrived, hot on the Boys' trail.

Lupe & Woolsey perform a wildly exuberant gaucho number, while a solo Velez gets to do devastating impressions of her Hollywood rivals Dolores Del Rio & Simone Simon. Not to be outdone, Wheeler is terrific mimicking Charlie Chaplin & Bill Robinson. Dumont, meanwhile, provides chuckles as a matron infatuated with crystal gazing.

Ultimately, though, HIGH FLYERS is rather bittersweet, as it was the last Wheeler & Woolsey film. First brought together by Flo Ziegfeld for Broadway's Rio Rita, the Boys had starred in 22 features from 1929 until 1937, carving out a unique niche in the history of movie comedy.

Tragically, however, even while filming for HIGH FLYERS was underway, Robert Woolsey was already stricken with kidney failure. After a year of horrible suffering, he died on October 31, 1938. He was only 50 years old.

Bert Wheeler continued on in films for awhile, making a handful of unremarkable movies. But the spark that came from his association with Robert Woolsey was gone. When, at the age of 72, Wheeler died on January 18, 1968 from emphysema, it was more than 30 years since the release of the final Wheeler & Woolsey film. The Boys - energetic, hilarious & ever so eager to please - had slipped into almost complete cinematic obscurity.

Robert Woosley and Bert Wheeler are a comedy duo whose career was hurt by the strict enforcement of the Production Code in 1934: their often risquè humor was necessarily reduced to mostly "safe" slapstick. In "High Flyers", their last film together, the comedy is weak and repetitive, and the story is aimless. But there are a few funny bits, and some bright spots, particularly a couple of specialty numbers which have absolutely nothing to do with the "plot": Lupe Velez's terrific impersonation of Dolores Del Rio (what adds an extra punch to this is that Del Rio was probably the only other Mexican female star working in Hollywood at that time), and Wheeler's equally terrific impersonation of Charlie Chaplin. There is also a pretty spectacular plane crash. ** out of 4.

This is the last Wheeler and Woolsey film, as Robert Woolsey died of kidney disease soon after this film was completed. And in light of this, this is a very sad way to end the team's career. While I will agree that Wheeler and Woolsey were not a particularly funny team compared to the Marx Brothers or Laurel and Hardy, they were capable of making better films than this. Perhaps Woolsey's illness helped to make this film to dreadfully unfunny, but regardless of why, this is a film so bad that only the Ritz Brothers might have been able to make so unfunny a film in this era (they were like a "poor man's Wheeler and Woolsey").

The bottom line is that the film never really made me smile or laugh. So many of the snappy lines from Woolsey never seemed to have punchlines or points--it was just "blathering". A very tiresome and unfunny film with so little energy it just isn't worth seeing unless you are a die-hard fan.

'High Flyers' marked the end of the partnership between Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey, which had begun eight years earlier with 'Rio Rita'.

Although their films had been hit and miss for a while, this one really is pretty awful. It's only just over an hour long, but your attention still wanders. Robert Woolsey is clearly not well (and indeed this was his last appearance before his early death), and although he has a musical number with peppy Lupe Velez, it doesn't have much go in it.

Slightly better is Wheeler's Chaplin impersonation which comes from his music hall days. 'High Flyers' is sort of worth watching for this, but you won't remember much about the rest of the film, and it is far worse in quality than most of their other work.

A sad way to end their association, really. Wheeler made a few more films, including 'Las Vegas Nights' and 'The Cowboy Quarterback', but never again regained the success he had with Woolsey in the early days of RKO.