Two Weeks to Live

Cute film. I wasn't familiar with the characters of Lum & Abner from radio or film, and my grandmother didn't really remember them, but we had a good time watching this.

Two elderly small-town men from Arkansas are playing checkers at a country store when they learn that one of them has inherited a railroad from his deceased uncle. Before they even go talk to the lawyer, they sell $10,000 dollars worth of shares in it to the people in town, in order to raise the money to purchase land for a right-of-way for a spur line into their town.

When they go to the city, they find the railroad is not quite what they thought, and Abner slips down a flight of stairs in the lawyer's skyscraper. After a visit to a doctor, and a mix-up of records, they believe Abner has just two weeks to live, and they must also find a way to pay back the townspeople. A helpful rhyming window-washer with an invisible dog suggests various ways to get money for doing high-risk tasks. Most of the time, they don't complete the task, or decide against it. They also unwittingly miss a couple opportunities to get all the money they need for things they've already done.

In one scene, the movie oddly echoes Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotage (1936). In that film, one infamous scene involves a boy who's unknowingly carrying a time bomb, and the boy is taking longer to get to his destination than he's supposed to take. There's a particularly tense scene on a bus. In this movie, a character unwittingly carries a time bomb, takes longer than he's supposed to to get where he's going, and along the way temporarily hands the disguised bomb to a young boy, and to a young girl on a bus. I wonder if this was coincidental or not.

Anyway, my grandmother and I enjoyed watching this.

Two Weeks to Live... Starring old time radio guys Chester Lauck and Norris Goff, moved to the movie screen. And of course, Frank Pangborn as Mr. Pinkney. They inherit a railroad, and decide that being conductor is more fun than being president of the company. Then they are off to the big city for the wheeling and dealing of running the railroad. Lots of fun puns and quick one and two liners! The sound and picture quality are pretty rough, but these disks were probably copied after the copyright ran out (?). Lots of adventures, gags, fun characters that come and go. There IS a pretty good (if silly) plot line here, but it really doesn't matter... we're just along for the gags, jokes, punchlines. A fun watch, even if you never heard their radio shows back in the old days. Lots of outdoor location shots, and downtown LA. Too bad that as of today, none are listed in Locations on IMDb. Also liberal use of backdrops. Very Beverly Hillbillie-ish, but still a lot of fun. This is interesting, even just for historical reasons. If you haven't heard of them before, check them out at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lum_and_Abner . This is just one of a bunch of films they made in the 1940s.

Directed by Malcolm St. Clair, who worked with ALL the biggies - Mack Sennett, Laurel & Hardy, Joan Crawford, Clara Bow.

Abner is mistakenly diagnosed as having only two weeks to live.

His partner gets the idea that they can make a ton of money by having Abner perform all kinds of dangerous stunts.

Very believable plot, right?

This is a throwback to a different time and place.

If you are a fan of two-reelers for the 40s, you're apt to recognize a few characters who pop up here and there.

Overall it's a silly and dumb movie that is OK for a rainy day but won't mesmerize you in any way.

The characters are so strange.

I guess they worked on the radio but didn't translate so well on film.

This is the first one of the Lum and Abner movies i have ever seen. I have heard a few audio tapes of the old radio show over the last 6 years and I have to say that from the time this movie started playing on my DVD player until the end of it I was laughing so much I feel this live movie is even more funny than the old radio show. It is so wild what old Abner has to get into after he and Lum are fooled into thinking that he has only two weeks to live. It is also so funny at the end when Lum is put in that rocket ship and crashes near that sign in Iowa thinking that he is just nine miles from the Planet Mars when the sign says "9 Miles to Mars Iowa" and it is such a funny movie with what those two get into! I would recommend anyone who likes comedies to watch this movie!

Chester Lauck and Norris Goff made the characters of Lum&Abner household names, in their time they were as famous on radio as Amos&Andy. Both men were fortunate in that they looked like the characters they played on radio so making films was a smooth transition for them. During the height of their popularity in the Forties before television they made a few films and Two Weeks To Live is one of them.

These two gentle rustics, proprietors of the local grocery store in Pine Ridge Arkansas find out that Abner has inherited a railroad and they start dreaming big. Turns out it's just a Hooterville Cannonball type line that carried ore from a gold mine that Abner's uncle owned back in the day that's long played out. In fact when probate and taxes are done they owe money. And they've sold right of ways to the various farmers back in Pine Ridge and they're in some deep debt now.

To pay it off they engage in various schemes as the plot moves from one crazy situation to another. Abner even gets a diagnosis mixed up with a man with Two Weeks To Live hence the title. Lum starts using Abner the way Crosby used Hope in those various Road pictures. They also get involved with saboteurs, a crazy mad scientist who wants to send one of the boys to Mars in a rocket, and a window washer with an invisible dog.

The production values aren't much, the film looks like it was shot with a brownie camera, still it's quite amusing. Lum&Abner were the predecessor for the Beverly Hillbillies, Andy Griffith and all sorts of television with a rural red state setting. Their naive and gentle humor is still amusing.