BEFORE: If you're playing along at home, right about now you probably think I've gone off the deep end (assuming you didn't think that about me already). "Why is he watching these crappy Abbott & Costello films, from late in their career?" Well, I had taped "Abbott & Costello Meet the Invisible Man" and I was waiting for the one where they meet Jekyll & Hyde, but TCM chose to run these two films instead, so I took the opportunity to close out that DVD. And then a few months back I saw how I could use the two films as a bridge between pirates and fairy tales, and that sealed the deal for me. From a scheduling aspect, I couldn't ask for a better lead-in for tomorrow's film. That should be my new mantra: "This will all make much more sense tomorrow."
THE PLOT: Abbott & Costello's version of the famous fairy tale, about a young boy who trades the family cow for magic beans.
AFTER: This is a film that wanted SO badly to be the next "Wizard of Oz". My guess is that after its release in 1939, "Wizard of Oz" had become a cinema classic by 1945 or so (you can sort of see evidence of that in "A Christmas Story", with the Oz characters appearing in a Christmas parade) so that sort of dictates the structure here. The framing sequence is in sepia tone, and the extended middle fantasy sequence is in color. The actors from the opening scenes all have their parts to play in the fantasy sequence (the very tall cop becomes the giant, and so on...). And the townspeople perform a song and dance at the end that might as well be called "Ding, Dong, the Giant is Dead".
The problem is, "Wizard of Oz" had a huge budget for make-up and effects, and this film obviously was made on the cheap. The "Giant" is just a really tall guy, the Talking Harp's lips never even move, and the most stunning effect is probably the accelerated growth of the bean plants. The actors were very obviously replaced by dummies for the stunts. Plus there are probably a dozen ways to simulate the effect of a giant picking up a cow and making it "disappear", but they went with the easiest - dim the lights, move the cow, and turn the lights back on - problem is, that looks nothing like what it's supposed to represent. But if the giant was big enough to block out the sun, that would mean he was about 500 feet tall, and then it turns out he's only like 7'2".
I wonder about what it felt like for Abbott & Costello at this point in their careers, knowing that they were putting out an clearly inferior product. They'd been making films together for over 12 years at this point, and this was probably what they knew how to do - there probably wasn't a way for them to make a more serious film, so the non-solution would have been to just keep on keepin' on. I faced something similar back in film school, what I call my "creativity crisis", when I realized that the ideas for my student films weren't very good, and if I was going to continue, I needed to present an idea for a senior thesis. I had nothing that I felt confident about, but fortunately I had enough credits to graduate early, so I took the opportunity to get my degree and get out before people realized that the well had run dry. Then I decided to go to work for people more creative than myself, in order to get their ideas on the screen, instead of my own.
There's something that doesn't really work with the "Jack and the Beanstalk" story. (Reason #547 for me not to have a kid: I would nit-pick the HELL out of fairy tales.) If Jack is so simple, why does his mother send him to sell the cow, why can't she do that herself? For that matter, why do they sell the cow to get money so they won't starve - why don't they just eat the cow? And we get that Jack got swindled out of the cow to get the magic beans - but then the magic beans really ARE magic, so did he get snookered, or not? Is he stupid or smart?
While I'm at it, how does the giant get down from his palace in the clouds to terrorize the town, before the beanstalk is grown? Does he fly back to his castle, or can he jump really high? This is all left unclear. And if he's got another way down, why does he follow Jack down the beanstalk and leave himself so vulnerable? God, I wish I'd asked all these questions when I was a kid. It really would have put that lady reading stories at the library in her place.
Starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Buddy Baer, Shaye Cogan, James Alexander, Dorothy Ford.
RATING: 3 out of 10 exploding eggs
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