High Flyers

Some false advertising on the part of Wheeler&Woolsey as they run a carnival airplane ride leads the boys into a peck of trouble. Bert Wheeler is advertised as an air ace giving flying lessons.

This bit reminded of a Monk episode where Tony Shalhoub says he can swim because he took a correspondence course. Wheeler has read all on the subject of aviation but he's never flown and even Woolsey didn't know that.

So how stupid does that make crook Jack Carson who is trying to steal some valuable jewels arriving by ship from Europe? Carson's man steals them on ship and drops them over in a life preserver. Bert is supposed to take a seaplane over the spot they are dropped, retrieve them and give them to Carson who is to meet them on another boat. He says it's valuable pictures.

Anyway the boys make a mess of it when it's a police seaplane they steal and then after retrieving the swag get taken in by millionaire Paul Harvey, wife Margaret Dumont and daughter Marjorie Lord. With cops and Carson looking for them and the family dog stealing and burying the jewels the whole steps on the edge of absurdity.

Sadly this was Wheeler&Woolsey's last film with Bob dying a year later. And even more sad is that they seem to have been forgotten.

A pity because this film had some gems. Bert does a homage to Charlie Chaplin with Marjorie Lord with a Little Tramp routine. And Bob gets vamped by the maid Lupe Velez and they do a nice patter song and dance.

If you are a Wheeler&Woolsey fan this one is a bittersweet must.

'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.

The awesome comedy team of wheeler and woolsey, in one of their later full length films. Starts with a synchronized swimming bit in a pool, sung by "a chorus", according to imdb. W & W are Lane and Potkin, running a shady sideshow bit that is on the verge of getting in trouble with the law. They are working with Hanlon (Jack Carson) and get caught up in a jewel heist. They land (crash) a plane in the yard Horace and Martha, (a skinniy Margaret Dumont), mother of the bride to be. Lupe Velez is Juanita, the maid, who is clearly stealing the show. And maybe the jewels! It's fun... W & W's usual gags, wordplay, and pratfalls. Very loosely tied up in a plotline. Features an interesting pontoon Sikorsky convertible seaplane. See the trivia section for details. Directed by Ed Cline... he made five of these with the boys. Based on the play by victor mapes. It's good, but my personal favorite is Peach O Reno. Sadly, after so many great roles, Carson died young at 52 from cancer. Woolsey himself died at 50 of kidney failure, after making this film.

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.