The Bashful Bachelor

Famous Variety headline might have been written for this. I was unfamiliar with this comedy team. I watched for Zasu Pitts who is top billed but is very a supporting role. Its not really funny but interesting from a sociological perspective. Otherwise its a regional stereotype without wit. Or a minstrel show in white face. Or an expression of contempt by Hollywood for the deep south. I dunno. Some people seem to like it.

Some big, fun names in this chapter of the radio-show-moved-to movies duo Lum and Abner. In this one, we also get Grady Sutton (was in some of the W.C. Fields films) and Zasu Pitts is "Geraldine". We also get to see Marni Nixon as "Angela Abernathy". Nixon dubbed in the singing voice for many of the singing stars of the 1950s and 1960s. In this story, the widow Abernathy (Nixon) is trolling for a husband and father for her horrible children. As usual, the guys are too busy helping out the local folks to make a profit at their own store. They end up with a horse, and then there's something about a kidnapping. None of this makes much sense, but we have fun going along for the ride. Very low key, safe, family entertainment. Also watch for larger than life Oscar O'Shea (plays the Squire); was in many of the great films, frequently background or uncredited roles. Directed by Malcom St. Clair, who also directed their "Two Weeks to Live". A fun way to knock off an hour and twenty minutes. Lots of puns, jokes, and witty thoughts.

This movie was made for a 1942 audience, and it is part of a celebrated radio duo, Lum and Abner, coming to film at their fans' request. The story is simple: Lum wants to impress a lady so he forces Abner to help him look like a hero. The story revolves around that, and with a few side elements: an obnoxious widow who wants to marry Lum and a horse race against a nasty local businessman between a horse for which Abner had traded their general store's delivery vehicle without first consulting Lum. And there is a bit about bad eye glasses worn for all the wrong reasons.

Yes, the movie is sophisticated in that respect, and it is not without its seams, but if you like goofy comedies from this era – and I most certainly do – you should enjoy this film. It is not the best of the Lum and Abner films, I don't think, but it is not markedly inferior. For my wife and I, it was an enjoyable view.

Lum and Abner were a radio duo popular during the 30's and 40's. Their success led them to make a series of movies featuring their characters (Chester Lauk plays Lum and Norris Goff plays Abner). Now, I have never heard their radio program, so I can't vouch on the quality of the show, but if the Bashful Bachelor is any comparison, then my God, America was REALLY starved for entertainment back then.

Lum and Abner run a general merchandise store in a town, Abner's trading addiction somehow gets him a horse which they train for the local horse competition (which a nasty businessman has also a horse in). There's also a plot of Lum trying to woo a local lady in town by trying to be a hero, some bit about glasses, cans keep getting falling down and so on.

It's plain to see that this is one jumbled mess, Some plots disappear for a while, making us wonder what happened to them, and this is totally unnecessarily longer then it needs to be (which tells me that they padded this story heavily.. why? WHY??)

Orson Welles didn't just plunk down in a sea of stupidity. That apparent stupidity had been working for decades on key elements of reflection in narrative. Here's a great example.

It consists of dumb hee-haw jokes. The two characters who are almost the whole show are two country bumpkins in a long tradition of bumpkin humor. They do stupid things and we laugh.

Simple.

But check out a few intelligent notions lurking beneath the surface. The jokes come from two reflexive notions.

The first is that everyone gets new, faulty glasses that distort their vision. Near and far are thrown out of whack. So the difference between what they see is mapped in a way to what we see and this distance between what makes sense to us and them.

The second idea is more cinematically reflective. One of these dopes is in love. He wants to be seen as a hero. We see his imagining at the very beginning as a movie in his head. We as viewers literally enter his internal movie before we enter the "real" one. The plot of the real movie involves him trying to make a fake movie so his love will see him as a hero

These aren't turned into egghead humor. I believe it significant that the writers probably had no intellectual intent in using these devices. But they are there, both of the then reinforcing each other as if the structural diagram were drawn first.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.