Up in Smoke

After gambling away the money "The Bowery Boys" rose to help a polio victim, Huntz Hall (as Horace Debussy "Sach" Jones) contemplates revenge on the unscrupulous bookies. Declaring, "I'd give my right arm, I'd give my life, I'd give my very SOUL!" he summons Byron Foulger (as "The Devil"). Calling the well-horned informant "Mr. Bub" (for Beelzebub), Mr. Hall receives tips on winning horses every day. Things go immediately wrong, and Hall's winning picks put him in danger with bookmakers. Even worse, "Satan" wants Hall to surrender his soul...

After a string of dull entries, the long-running film series picks up a little steam for the "The Bowery Boys" penultimate adventure. Hall doesn't do anything different, but the devilish bits with Mr. Foulger work well. Watch for good routines with fast-talking Earle Hodgins as a car dealer and mouth-popping Fritz Feld as a psychiatrist. There is also a good scene with Stanley Clements (as Stanislaus "Duke" Coveleskie) and Hall punching each other through a door opening. Eddie LeRoy (as Blinky) and David Gorcey (as Chuck) get a few lively lines, too.

***** Up in Smoke (12/22/57) William Beaudine ~ Huntz Hall, Byron Foulger, Stanley Clements, Eddie LeRoy

The Bowery Boys are collecting funds for polio victim Little Ozzie. Sach is supposed to take the money to the bank. Instead, he gets taken to a crooked bookmaker and loses all the cash in a horse race. In a fit of rage, Sach offers his soul to get revenge and the devil answers the call.

This is a Bowery Boys film with Sach but without Slip. I don't know how the studio thinks this would work. This is simply a guy fulfilling his contract and nothing more. There is something missing. It's half missing.

After UP IN SMOKE (1957), the Bowery Boys had one last movie in them, IN THE MONEY, even though the series had essentially run out of steam years earlier, about when Leo Gorcey left, following the death of Gorcey's father, Bernard, who'd played soda shop owner Louie Dumbrowsky in the series. (Gorcey's last was CRASHING LAS VEGAS, 1955.) Seven more films followed Gorcey's departure, with Huntz Hall taking the lead, and Gorcey's function being filled by Stanley Clements in the role of Duke, who wears a suit, tie and sharp fedora in the manner of adults of the era, but looks nothing like a Bowery "Boy." Hall's Sach is still the lovable goofball, while Clements' Duke is the dyspeptic straight man, with none of Gorcey's charm or vocabulary-mangling wit.

UP IN SMOKE offers up the premise of Sach seeking the devil's help to earn money after he's been conned by a gambling ring into betting and losing the $90 the boys have raised for a neighborhood kid with polio. The devil appears in an elegant old-fashioned dress suit, complete with top hat and horns, and, in exchange for Sach's soul, agrees to provide tips on winning horses for a week. To make a long story short, the plan backfires day in and day out, but not before the gambling ring gets tough on Sach and his friends in order to find out the source of the daily tips.

It's never very funny, but there is one redeeming element in the film. Byron Foulger has a grand time playing the mild-mannered, velvet-voiced Beelzebub, or "Mr. Bub," as Sach calls him. He oozes with snaky charm, but is quick to take advantage of Sach at every opportunity and torment him in subtle, clever ways. The maneuver by which Sach ultimately manages to elude his fate is actually set up very well and plays out in a genuinely suspenseful fashion in a racetrack finale mixing cheaply made studio shots with stock racetrack footage. It also reveals quite a bit of daring and initiative on the layabout Sach's part. Beelzebub's final outcome is handled in quite an amusing and—dare I say it?—even sympathetic manner. Foulger (1899-1970) was a dependable character player and bit part actor who spent most of his career playing harried bank managers, tellers, desk clerks and other kinds of functionaries. This role gave him the chance to spread his comic wings and he wasted no time in running with it, basically stealing the film from Hall, Clements and the rest of the cast.

Quite a number of old-school Hollywood character actors are on hand. Fritz Feld plays an irate Mittel-European psychiatrist trying to examine Sach who gets so flustered at his patient's unflappability that he winds up on the couch himself subjected to Sach's questioning. It's an amusing scene and even features one of Feld's trademark mouth pops. Other dependable old comic/tough guy players in the cast include Benny Rubin, Ralph Sanford, Joe Devlin, James Flavin, and, in the role of Mike, the coffee shop owner taking the place of Louie Dumbrowsky, Dick Elliott. Another familiar face, spotted as a desk sergeant, is John Mitchum, Robert's lesser-known brother. He would play a cop again, some years later, in the role of Inspector DiGiorgio alongside Clint Eastwood's Inspector Callahan in the first three Dirty Harry films.

The Bowery Boys made 48 films...48! And that's not even counting the films they made as the Dead End Kids, the East Side Kids and other variations on the group of young jerks. So it's not at all surprising that by the latter films, the formula had gotten very, very old. In fact, Leo Gorcey (after the death of his father) quit the films and yet they still continued making them with Huntz Hall the star of these craptastic pictures. Even for fans of the films, these last few pictures were pretty limp and unappealing...though this one is a bit of an improvement...surprisingly.

While it is their second to last film, at least "Up in Smoke" is a bit of a departure for the gang...such as it is. As usual, the boys are out of money but this time Sach says, offhandedly, that he'd sell his soul to the Devil to know the winners of horse races. Well, wouldn't you know it but Satan immediately appears and offers him a deal...one week of long-shot horse race winners for Sach's miserable soul. The problem is that Sach is a total idiot and again and again and again he keeps screwing up and missing out on the big money. In the process, they get the attention of some gamblers...and these gamblers are pretty nasty.

The best thing about this film is seeing Byron Foulger playing the Devil. This very familiar character actor is excellent as a very nice and dapper Devil. I also enjoyed the ending...but I also think the filmmakers missed a golden opportunity. Think how wonderful it would have been to make this the last film AND it ended with Sach going to Hell!!

A refreshingly entertaining entry for the latter day Bowery Boys franchise, and that was not an easy thing to be by this time where we had lost leading goon Leo Gorcey for his replacement, Stanley Clements. Though the long-running series was winding down to its final gasp, Huntz Hall as the scatter-brained Sach is a lot of fun here, involved in a comical plot where he sells his soul to the Devil (Byron Foulger) in order to have the horned one supply him with the names of sure-winning horses at the race track. (Unsurprisingly, another group of crooks try to extract the information for themselves). Foulger is a delight in the character of Satan. **1/2 out of ****