High Society

"Bowery Garage" General Manager, General Superintendent, and General Treasurer in overalls Leo Gorcey (as Terence Aloysius "Slip" Mahoney) finds his absent-minded mechanic Huntz Hall (as Horace Debussy "Sach" Jones) sleeping on the job. Waking the hapless helper only causes a car wreck. But, the vehicle's owner thinks Mr. Hall might pass for "Terwilliger Debussy 'Twig' Jones", the long-lost son and heir to a family fortune. Hall accompanies Mr. Gorcey and fatherly Bernard Gorcey (as Louie Dumbrowsky) to the Jones' Larchmont, New York estate...

David "Condon" Gorcey (as Chuck) and Benny "Bennie" Bartlett (as Butch) appear in the opening and closing scenes.

Perceiving Hall as an easy to control idiot, money-grubbing adults want Hall to claim his fortune from its rightful heir, young Ronald Keith (as Terwilliger Debussy "Twig" Jones III). Young Keith isn't going down without a fight, however. Hall and Gorcey in "High Society" leads to laughs, of course, with the latter's expectation they might meet a couple of "debu-tramps" and settle into the upper-crust treading a funny line. "The Bowery Boys" movie series had been sputtering in earlier years, but some of these final Gorcey-Hall team-ups are relatively smooth and successful, considering.

***** High Society (4/17/55) William Beaudine ~ Huntz Hall, Leo Gorcey, Ronald Keith, Bernard Gorcey

Now how anyone at the Motion Picture Academy could possibly have confused this High Society with the classic High Society that came out the following year is beyond me. But they did and contributed to one of the great faux pas in the history of Hollywood.

This film which came out in 1955 through a clerical error of massive proportions got an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay which must have sent writer/director Edward Bernds into cardiac arrest. The better known High Society came out in 1956 so the Academy did not even get the year right. Bernds had the graciousness and good sense to turn the nomination down.

With no Cole Porter songs or Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra to sing them, this High Society involves a scam to use one Horace DeBussy Jones in a scam to deprive young heir Ronald Keith of the inheritance from his grandfather Terwilliger Jones. Since that is Huntz Hall's actual character name, the very high falutin' nature of that name with a little doctoring of Hall's actual birth certificate and certain other unscrupulous relatives have manufactured another heir.

Someone not as essentially decent as Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall were would have wanted a decent cut of the scam when they found out about it. But they wouldn't be the Bowery Boys then.

This rather ordinary entry in this series becomes a Hollywood legend. Positively stupefying.

The thirty-seventh Bowery Boys film is another tired effort that sees an old plot being reused. This time Sach believes he has inherited a fortune so he and the gang go to collect, which leads to comedy gold. Well, more like comedy pyrite. In many ways, the Bowery Boys movies remind me of the Colorforms I used to play with as a kid. You know, those things where you can place characters like Batman into various backgrounds. Well the Bowery Boys did that with plots. They basically would use this sentence as the structure of their entire series: Sach gets ___ and the Bowery Boys must travel to ___. Each movie they fill in the blanks with a different word but it's basically the same thing each time, particularly in the 1950s films.

This one's notable only for the bit of trivia that it was mistakenly nominated for an Oscar because it was confused with the musical of the same name that starred Bing Crosy, Frank Sinatra, and Grace Kelly. There's not much fun to be had here. Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall go through the motions and most of their jokes fall flat. Even Bernard Gorcey, who is usually the bright spot in these things, does nothing to impress here. The other two "boys" aren't worth mentioning. One of the villains is played by Miss Kitty from Gunsmoke, so there's that. The music is also annoying in this one. Fans will want to see it to check it off their list but I doubt anybody else will find it worth their time.

It's not one of the better Bowery Boys pictures -- by the mid 50s the gang seemed pretty tired. It's main interest is seeing Amanda Blake just before Gunsmoke and, hell, I'd never turn down a chance to see Leo and Huntz, even when they're not at the top of their game.

But F Gwynplaine MacIntyre has it all wrong. The writers who were nominated for High Society weren't some delusional losers who thought some way they might actually win an Oscar. They were Hollywood veterans who had been in Hollywood for a quarter-century -- Bernds in fact started as a sound engineer at Columbia who worked on Frank Capra's 30s classics. Bernds and Ullmann toiled (profitably) in the world of B comedies and short subjects, working, in tandem or alone, on such fondly remembered endeavors as the the My Little Margie TV series, many Three Stooges shorts, some Blondie and Ma & Pa Kettle movies, and films starring Elvis, Brett Halsey, Zsa Zsa Gabor,Stanley Clements, Scotty Beckett (in a couple of Gasoline Alley pictures) and Rad Fulton.

They were fully aware of their place in the industry, and when they withdrew their Oscar nomination it wasn't for any self-serving reason but to spare the Academy any embarrassment when its writers branch screwed up so royally. As they said when they did so, the nomination "was clearly a case of mistaken identity." Ironically, although the MGM musical High Society is much better than the nominated Bowery Boys picture, I definitely prefer the best Bowery Boys films (Blues Busters, Blonde Dynamite, Live Wires, Bowery Bombshell) to the Charles Walters musical with Crosby, Kelly and SInatra.

'High Society', starring the Bowery Boys, is a bit more serious than most of their films, but otherwise extremely typical of their output ... except for one bizarre detail. The script of this Bowery Boys movie was nominated for an Oscar. Yes, it's true! The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences actually listed this movie on the 1956 Oscars ballot to receive an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay!

There's a catch, of course. Like every other Bowery Boys movie, 'High Society' got an extremely limited release (to road houses and neighbourhood cinemas), and then it vanished into oblivion pending its release to television. A few months later, MGM released a big-budget musical with a Cole Porter score, starring Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly. This movie was ALSO titled 'High Society'. (Can you see where this is heading?) Several members of the Academy rather ignorantly nominated this MGM musical for Best Original Screenplay. But 'High Society' (the Crosby-Sinatra one) was doubly ineligible for this award, as it was a remake of the Cary Grant-Katharine Hepburn film 'The Philadelphia Story', which in turn was adapted from Philip Barry's stage play. Any Oscar nominations for this movie's script should have been in the category of Best Screenplay Adaptation.

On the other hand, 'High Society' (the Bowery Boys movie) DID have an original story ... terrible, but original. As bad as it was, this movie (unlike the Crosby-Sinatra musical) was eligible for the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. When all those nominations came rolling in, some misguided schlub in the back room at the Academy allocated them to the Bowery Boys movie. I'd like to have seen the look on the faces of the four hacks who wrote this movie, when they got word that their Bowery Boys opus was up for an Oscar!

Now here's where it gets well and truly bizarre. Many Hollywood screenwriters have a perverse sense of humour. With a Bowery Boys movie on the ballot for best screenplay, there was a genuine risk that a significant number of screenwriters in the Academy would wilfully vote for this film, just to spite the Academy and watch some obscure hacks step up to accept the award! Immense pressure was put on Edward Bernds and Elwood Ullman to withdraw their script from nomination. Alas, both of these poor deluded scribblers had faint hopes of some day winning an Oscar legitimately, and they didn't want to anger the Academy by accepting an Oscar they'd won under false pretences. With great regret, Bernd and Ullman withdrew their Bowery Boys epic from consideration ... and never again in their careers were they within shouting distance of an Oscar.

I really wish that this movie had won. Unfortunately, 'High Society' (this one) isn't even a particularly good movie even by Bowery Boys standards. Bowery Boys fans will be disappointed to encounter fewer gags than usual here, and more sentiment. I'll rate this movie 2 points out of 10, plus a counterfeit Oscar. (I've got a crateful of counterfeit Oscars in my cellar, just next to the dungeon.)