Fazendeiros Fracassados

The usual recipe for a Bowery Boys film... Huntz Hall, Leo Gorcey, and his father and brother, of course. in this chapta, Sach inherits a "plantation", but when they arrive, it's a broken down shack. and that shack is plunk in the middle of the feud between the Smiths and the Joneses. and Sach's last name is JONES! word gets around that a Jones is back in town, so the neighbors start shootin'. and gangsters show up... and the guys have to hold off the Smiths who shoot first and ask questions later. has a one-track plot... kind of drags on and on. ok, we get it, the neighbors don't want any Joneses around. not one of the better episodes. the early ones are so much better. Directed by Bill Beaudine, who made 31 of these with the Bowery Gang, and all in the 1940s and 1950s. Talk about milking the golden goose! this one was pretty much in the middle of the series.

Sach inherits property in rural hillbilly country. The gang arrives to find a rundown farm. Sach also inherits a local war with a rival family but he manages to hide his Jones name. Then a trio of criminals shows up looking to use the farmhouse as their hideout.

The Bowery Boys are headed into the hills. They are fish out of water. There is plenty of ridiculous rural comedy and a couple of babes. The bank robbers are a little left field but they are a good plot device. This is better than most Bowery Boys flicks. It's silly fun like always.

One day while idling at Louie's Sweet Shop on the Bowery, Huntz Hall learns he's now the proud owner of a nice bit of farm land somewhere in the South. So he and the rest of the Bowery Boys head down to Dixie where they do find Hall has a piece of land next to a family of rustics named Smith.

The only problem is that these folks just don't cotton to anyone named Jones. They think they've driven the Joneses out, but just the name Jones gets them thar trigger fingers to itch.

Add to that a group of bank robbers who've just robbed the bank in Hog's Liver Hollow who seek refuge at the Jones farm and you have the ingredients of the plot for Feudin' Fools.

The Bowery Boys were getting a little stale with this one. The comparisons to Abbott&Costello's Comin' Round the Mountain are fairly obvious and Bud&Lou's film is far better than this one.

Still Bowery Boys fans should like it.

The twenty-seventh film in the Bowery Boys series at Monogram has Sach inheriting a farm in Kentucky. The boys travel South and wind up in the middle of a hillbilly feud. A by-the-numbers plot if there ever was one, the only saving grace is the fish-out-of-water aspect of seeing the New Yorkers interacting with the hillbillies. The series was struggling by this point to come up with an idea that was even in the same zip code as original. Leo Gorcey still has a few chuckle-worthy malapropisms and Huntz Hall plays the buffoon to the hilt, but it all just goes so far. David Gorcey and Bennie Bartlett hang around in the background. You'd forget they were there except for the few times they're given something to do, like carry the bags for Slip. Bernard Gorcey, frequently the best part of the '50s Bowery Boys films, isn't in this one much but once he joins the gang in Kentucky things pick up. There are hillbilly jokes galore here like moonshine stills, revenuers, feuds, and the obligatory pretty farmer's daughter. My favorite part of the movie is this exchange between Slip and Sach:

Slip: "I think we better sympathize our watches." Sach: "You mean synchronize?" Slip: "I was usin' the past tense."

Feudin' Fools (1952)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Sach (Huntz Hall) learns that his Southern uncle has left him the family farm so he packs up Slip (Leo Gorcey) and two others and head south. Once there they realize that Sach's family is feuding with another, which leads to many problems but things take a turn for the worse when the boys get mixed up with a bank robber (Lyle Talbot). The shocking thing is that it took the series twenty-seven films before they'd tackle the redneck genre, which had been popular since the silent days. Everyone from Buster Keaton to Abbott and Costello had played city folk traveling to the south and getting involved with rednecks but it took a while for our Bowery Boys. They really should have waited because the jokes here are just downright pathetic, boring and feature not an ounce of imagination. Whenever you watch one of these films you can expect a few jokes to fall on their face but this one here has pretty much everyone of them doing so. I was really surprised to see how poorly written this thing was and the perfect example happens early on when the boys arrive in town and we get a good fifteen-minute sequence of them hiding in the cabin while the rednecks are outside shooting. We get a wide range of jokes from them trying to wave a white flag only to be shot at to the redneck looking in the window and Sach thinking they're a picture. Neither of those scenes are funny and they're actually the best written gags, which is rather scary. Both Gorcey and Hall appear to be mailing in their performances as there's not a touch of energy from either of them and this is especially true of Gorcey. Talbot is clearly just cashing a paycheck and none of the rednecks stick out in a good way. FEUDIN' FOOLS is certainly one of the series low points and it's rather hard getting through the short 63-minutes.