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One of the funniest of Abbott and Costello's early Universal films was Keep 'Em Flying which stuck with the tried and true formula established by Buck Privates.

The boys are working at a carnival with their pal Dick Foran who's a stunt flier. After a disagreement with management, all three of them quit and wind up in the Army Air Corps.

For Foran he gets to renew a personal rivalry with William Gargan who's an instructor who had fired Foran once before in a civilian flying job. They're both interested in the lovely Carol Bruce who sings great and is a USO hostess.

The boys are up to their usual monkeyshines. Seeing both of them on the back of a speeding torpedo was as funny as when they repeated the same gag on the back of a bucking bronco in Ride 'Em Cowboy. And seeing them hit the silk at the end of the film is indescribable.

Martha Raye plays a dual role in the film as twin sisters, one of whom likes Abbott and the other Costello. Of course poor Costello doesn't realize they're twins and Martha's on and off attitude towards him is baffling. Later on the same twin gimmick was used by Betty Hutton in Here Come The Waves.

Gene DePaul and Don Raye wrote the original songs for this film and actually came up with an Academy Award nomination for one of their songs, Pigfoot Pete which Martha Raye sings and which is incorrectly credited in Academy records to another Universal Film, Hellzapoppin'. It's not bad, but it's really a poor man's Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy. The best song in the film is one interpolated for Carol Bruce when we first meet her as a nightclub singer, the Tommy Dorsey standard, I'm Getting Sentimental Over You.

Keep 'Em Flying is right in the great tradition of Buck Privates and In the Navy and still as funny today as when first made.

Blackie (Bud Abbott) and Heathcliff (Lou Costello) are the ground crew for barn storming pilot Jinx Roberts. They join the Air Corps as ground crewman where the fall for twin USO hostesses (Martha Raye).

The guys are still fun but they are stuck in a propaganda film for the military. I don't care about the Jinx story. So the movie is split into two. I enjoy the boys but when they're not on the screen, the movie stalls out. I also enjoy Martha Raye playing the duo role. She's great with the guys. I like half of this movie.

KEEP 'EM FLYING (1941) *** Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Martha Raye. One of A&C's very best: the boys as bumbling airfield jockeys and Raye as their identical twin girlfriends. Very funny bits including the first encounter with Raye(s) and the air finale.

Their fourth starring vehicle of 1941, "Keep 'Em Flying" shows the wear and tear of the duo's busy year. The films production values are more skimpy; evidently by filming on location at Cal-Aero in Ontario, California, the producers felt they could cut costs. This doesn't help A&C's flying sequences with their poor rear projection or the rescue sequence at the end, with all-too-obvious miniatures. The real flying stunt sequences sandwiched around them, however, are done well.

What saves the film are A&C's performances and the interplay between Costello and Martha Raye, who plays twins in the film. There are some truly funny moments, but not enough to elevate the film among their best. 6 out of 10.

Not their best, but by far not their weakest, the film provides the viewers with the duo in the Army Air Corps, or at least a training facility.

While there has been some comment on the wood and fabric airplanes in the film, filmed shortly before the U.S. got involved in World War II, many training facilities taught their students initially on such aircraft, just so they could learn the rudiments of flight. Later, the fledgling pilots would graduate to more state-of-the-art trainers.

Minor spoiler For the aero gags, the fabric airplanes worked well: in the "inverted" sequence, Costello's head wouldn't have been able to break through a metal skin.

I had this on VHS, and finally was able to locate it on DVD, in an A&C collection.