The Naughty Nineties

Abbott and Costello are at their comedic best in their underrated gem, "The Naughty Nineties." It's interesting to note that this could be considered their first film where their characters aren't a team. Abbott plays a ham actor on a show boat, with Costello as a drummer and handyman. It's rumored that A&C began to have a falling out at the time this film was made in early 1945, which may (or may not) have led to playing separate characters. ("Little Giant" and "The Time of Their Lives" are two more examples.)

The film is best known for the classic "Who's on First" routine. While the boys have the routine down pat and perform it almost flawlessly (except when Costello almost forgets the name of Abbott's character), it falls a little flat without audience reaction. Evidently, the director instructed the audience in the show boat not to laugh, which robs A&C of natural audience reactions. The funniest bit in the film is the part where Costello attempts to sing "My Bonnie"; thinking he is being coached by Abbott, he raises and lowers his voice with comedic hilarity -- one of the funniest segments in the entire A&C series of films.

Ably supported by a decent cast, "The Naughty Nineties" comes in at a snappy 76 minutes of fun and laughter. One of their best from their mid-40s period. 8 out of 10.

It's not surprising that Abbott and Costello eventually got to do a movie on a showboat. Remember it was only 8 years earlier that Universal Studios did their classic version of Showboat and I'm sure that Carl Laemmle, Jr. wanted to take advantage of the set that was still there.

The Naughty Nineties in fact take whole characters from the Showboat plot. Henry Travers's character of Captain Sam is a total ripoff of Captain Andy and Alan Curtis and Lois Collier make a passable nonsinging Gaylord Ravenal and Magnolia Hawkes. Collier sings, but there are no classic duets like in Showboat. And Curtis's character is a riverboat gambler like Ravenal.

That being said the plot such as it is involves Rita Johnson and her two associates, Curtis and Joe Sawyer, gaining possession of Henry Travers's showboat with which they then set up some crooked gambling to make a quick profitable kill.

Abbott and Costello are part of the Showboat crew. Abbott is an actor in the Victorian tradition and Costello is as usual a lovable all around klutz that Travers must be keeping around for laughs.

If it's laughs Travers wants, he's made a sound investment because the boys do provide the public with plenty of that. The Naughty Nineties is famous as the film they did their classic Who's on First baseball routine. It had been done previously in their debut film, One Night in the Tropics, but in an abbreviated form.

Actually there is one routine involving poor Lou as he thinks he's eating a cat, I mean the feline type cat.

Joe Sawyer joins a list of otherwise serious actors like Douglass Dumbrille, Lionel Atwill, and Lon Chaney, Jr., who got in on the comedy with the boys. Sawyer does his own version of the famous Niagara Falls routine involving him sleepwalking and he looks like he's having a ball doing it. Sawyer makes a perfect foil for Bud and Lou's monkeyshines.

And I think the audience will enjoy it as much as Joe Sawyer.

In order to really appreciate Abbott and Costello, one needs to understand where their careers fell on the timeline. Bud and Lou's careers actually can be broken down into, at least, four different eras, which is a lot when you think about it, since their partnership only lasted about 20 years total. You can break them up into the vaudeville era (1936-1940), the glory years (1940-1945), the tough years (1945-1948), the resurgence (1948-1953) and the end (1953-1956).

This film falls at a moment when they were starting to loose their audience. Unfortunately, Bud and Lou's biggest success came during World War II. A nation needing to be cheered up and needing a morale boost fell for Abbott and Costello during those four horrible years. They were the morale boosters in chief and they became the most popular and the most rich actors in Hollywood during those years. But, as the war began to wind down, so did the popularity of the boys. They needed to start making changes and you see this happening in a lot of their films moving forward into the 1950s.

When this film was released in 1945, Germany had already surrendered a few months before and Japan was just a few months away from surrendering. The war was over and the feelings and attitudes of a post-war America were beginning to change. Also, television was just on the horizon. People were looking towards other things to do or see.

As this film opens up, Dexter and Sabastian (Bud and Lou), get work on a showboat named the River Queen. Dexter is an actor and Sabastian is his trusted "assistant". The owner of the River Queen, Captain Sam Jackson (Henry Travers), falls into the scheme of a handful of con artists, who are bent on getting the showboat for themselves, so they can run their illegal gambling casino. This is something Sam wants nothing to do with. It takes the help of the boys to come help save the Captain and his daughter, Caroline (Lois Collier), from these dastardly criminals.

What sets this film apart from a lot of Abbott and Costello's films from the same time period is this one features a smorgasbord of their different and classic acts, including their best, "Who's on First". Another thing a person needs to know about Abbott and Costello is their talent, their act and all their skits grew out of the vaudeville era. Working in vaudeville meant you were working with everybody. All the talent shared their acts, jokes and skits with each other. It was part of the vaudeville culture. So, when you see the Three Stooges, or Wheeler and Woolsey or even Martin and Lewis, do the same joke or skit that Bud and Lou did, that shouldn't be considered a negative. It's how things were.

It is true this film is not a great one. There are moments that seem sloppy in their design. It makes you wonder if the whole process was becoming stale to whoever was involved in the film or was it just becoming overly repetitious. This is most evident during the "duck shoot" skit. We may be laughing at the absurdity of it all, but we also aren't buying that any of this could possibly fool anyone. What was interesting about all of this, is watching this tired, formulaic development, that would eventually become Abbott and Costello's main direction once they get to television in the 1950s. Foreshadowing maybe?

This film is still worth a watch. It has some rough edges and might seem a little plastic in its design, but overall is a delight to see. They give us one skit after another. They intertwine all of that with a little story and textbook characters (for this kind of a romp), that get us to the end, but adults might seem slightly robbed, because there is a childish nature to some of the performances that happen in the film. But, who cares? It's Abbott and Costello, who were legends of their day. They didn't need to answer to nobody. They were the richest guys in Hollywood. You don't do that when you are making bad stuff. Plus, anything with "Who's on First", is a gold mine.

6.2 (D+ MyGrade) = 6 IMDB.

THE NAUGHTY NINETIES is one of those films of Abbott & Costello that is a favorite with their fans for the skits that are in them: the plot about the trio of gamblers plotting to take the showboat away from good old Captain Sam (Henry Travers) is tolerable, because it can be ignored. We like the old Captain, but we await the sketches involving the boys. In the end they help save the Captain, so they do become his pair of guardian angels - his "Clarences", if you will.

But the sketches are priceless, in particular the rehearsal sketch and the immortal WHO'S ON FIRST.

In another review I compared Bud and Lou with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Bud Abbott's persona is not like Oliver Hardy's, although both try to dominate (Bud, with more success) Lou and Stan. Ollie is quite self-important, but is (actually) as stupid as Stan is. His self-delusion is just added on the cake. But Bud normally is street smarter, and bullies Lou. He barks orders left and right to him, orders that Lou thinks he understands. The orders are in abbreviated form, using slang or short form descriptions that most people will understand, and that is doomed to confuse Lou.

In the rehearsal sketch, Lou is studying a song he wants to sing in the showboat show, and if he does it well Captain Sam will let him sing it. Bud is on stage helping direct the putting up of varying scenery. He is asked for help by Lou to help him, and to shut the little guy up, he half-heartedly agrees to do so. But he is concentrating on that scenery. So we hear Lou start singing "MY BONNIE LIES OVER THE OCEAN", and after awhile he hears Bud yelling "Higher", "HIGHER", "LOWER, etc. Of course Lou is not watching Bud directing the men with the scenery, and Lou raises and lowers his voice accordingly. The vast alterations eventually is too much for Lou, who falls into the orchestra pit while an oblivious Bud walks off stage.

The other sequence is even greater. If you say "Abbott & Costello" to anyone today, the phrase "Who's on First" comes up immediately. No other dialog of theirs is as memorable (not even that delectable skit about Niagara Falls). Indeed, due to the popularity of Baseball, the skit is honored in Cooperstown's Baseball Hall of Fame, and Bud and Lou are members of the Hall of Fame too (without being baseball players). No other comedy team approached such a signature dialog - for instance Groucho and Chico Marx did several fractured English discussions, such as "Why a Duck" in COCONUTS, but the dialog is not central to their reputations. Similarly Laurel & Hardy's use of "two peas in a pod" in THE SONS OF THE DESERT is classic, but not central to their reputation.

"Who's On First" works on the same principle as the rehearsal skit - Lou cannot follow the statements fed him by Bud, and yet Bud is not being intentionally difficult. He starts by explaining the crazy nicknames of the baseball players these days, and Lou never makes the logical connection that the nicknames can be terms like "who", "what", "I don't know", and "I don't care". Once I saw someone rewrite Abbott's description as "Mr. Who is on First base; Mr. What is on Second Base...etc." Actually the effect on Lou would probably be minimal: How many people have surnames like "Who" (this was years before the British Doctor in the futuristic tardis showed up). Moreover, they are nicknames, not proper names like "Unconditional Surrender" Grant, or "Old Hickory" Jackson. So it can't be "Mr. Who" or "Mr. I Don't Care".

Interestingly few people seem to be noting that the nicknames don't say much for these players. "Who", "What", "I Don't Know", "I Don't Care", "Today", "Tomorrow" suggests that each of the players has a failing, like "Who" suggests he is confused at the strategy of the team (who is going to be targeted by his team's pitcher on the opposite team), "What" suggests a lack of understanding orders from the team coach or captain, "I Don't Know" suggests confusion, and "I Don't care (the short stop) doesn't give a damn to be on the scene of where the ball falls when he is needed. Lou's willingness to play on the team, which we accept as his fondness of the game (and his constant image of being childlike) may actually have some merit - he may be a better player than these others.

The highpoint (to me) of the dialog is when, giving up momentarily, trying to comprehend Bud's apparent double-talk, Lou shows he can repeat the line-up's name, and describe a baseball play perfectly. Bud shows his approval of this rational approach - only to hear Lou scream out he doesn't understand what he himself has been talking about. To me that was the perfect conclusion of the great confusion known as "Who's on First".

In recent years stores have offered mechanical representations of political and entertainment figures reciting comments they are supposed to be famous for. There was one pair together: of Bud and Lou in costume from THE NAUGHTY NINETIES (Bud wearing the baseball outfit of non-existent St. Louis Wolves), reciting Who's On First. That is immortality folks.

This movie is too often considered great just because of the "Who's on First" routine. Now don't get me wrong, that is the best part of it, but there are other wonderful parts of it as well. This is the first costume piece that Abbott and Costello ever did. I don't know that it had to be set on a Riverboat, but it did give them the opportunity to do a lot of great gags. This movie also includes the classic "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean" routine where Costello thinks he is getting stage directions from Abbott and the "feathers in the cake" routine.

A couple of comments on "Who's on First": this is one of the funniest comedy routines ever, and you can be easily amused just by reading it. What makes it so great in the hands of Abbott and Costello is their ability to stay in character while doing it. Throughout the routine Abbott cannot understand why Costello doesn't get what he is saying, and Abbott tries many times, in vain, to figure out the names of the players. The routine seems to be shot in one take, and we are the better for it. Watch it many times and pay attention to only Abbott or Costello and you'll get what I mean about them always staying in character. They rarely look at the audience, the continue their thoughts (as their characters) and the fact that neither of them understands why the other is not making sense is what makes this work.