Late last year I wrote an article for MovieFanFare on the final screen appearances of six classic movie comedy teams (Abbott and Costello, Hope and Crosby, Laurel and Hardy, Martin and Lewis, the Marx Brothers, and the Three Stooges). Not counting the potentially still-active Cheech and Chong or the Monty Python troupe, and with a knowing exclusion of Burns and Allen and Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, I thought the most popular laugh ensembles of the 20th century were covered, so I was pleasantly surprised to see a couple of comments from readers on a team I omitted, the truly madcap duo of John “Ole” Olsen and Harold “Chic” Johnson.
Veterans of the Vaudeville and Broadway stage, radio, and television as well as motion pictures, Olsen and Johnson were as well-known in their 1930s and ’40s heyday as the sextet listed above, but in the nearly 40 years since their deaths they’ve been relegated to second-class status alongside such acts as Wheeler and Woolsey, the Ritz Brothers, and Brown and Carney. The nine films they starred in rarely gave Ole and Chic the chance to re-create the frenetic and free-form manner of their live performances. It’s clear, however, that their style was, if not a direct influence on, than certainly a precursor to the likes of TV’s Ernie Kovacs, Your Show of Shows, and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, as well as such movie madmen as Mel Brooks (who named a townsperson after them in Blazing Saddles) and the Airplane! crew.
First joining forces in 1914, when Johnson replaced the pianist in a quartet Olsen had assembled, the pair would go on to form their own stage act filled with well-worn jokes and wild sight gags. Their success on the boards would lead to a trio of musical comedies for Warner Bros. in 1930-31: Oh, Sailor Behave, Fifty Million Frenchmen and Gold Dust Gertie. None of the three set the box office on fire, with the boys usually playing second fiddle to a pair of young singing lovers (a fate that befell most comedy teams of the era), although Sailor did have a good scene with the boys trying to find a man with a wooden leg by shooting passers-by with a pea shooter. After this first cinema fling, Olsen and Johnson returned to live shows and began work on an revue entitled Everything Goes, which would eventually become known as Hellzapoppin.’
In 1936-37 Ole and Chic starred in two films for the fledgling Republic Pictures. Country Gentlemen featured them as con men selling worthless gold mine bonds who head to a small town to fleece the residents of a soldiers’ home, only to wind up saving the veterans–and a pretty hotel owner Ole’s fallen for–from losing their money to a would-be casino builder. The second film, All Over Town, found the fellas playing (of all things) stage comics who help put on a show at supposedly jinxed theater. Once again, both movies featured some good dialogue between the pair but little to make them rise above the pedestrian plots.
Olsen and Johnson’s big break came when Hellzapoppin’ hit Broadway in September of 1938 and went on to play for over three years and a then-record for a musical of 1,404 performances. Each one of those performances, apparently, was unique. Songs and sketches would be moved around or discarded, ad libs were the order of the day, and cast members would run through the aisles posing as messengers and delivery men or would be planted in the audience for stunts (in one case, a man would sit down and a coat hanger would zip down from the balcony on a wire, he’d put his jacket on it, and it would then zoom back up). The play’s popularity led Universal to bring Ole and Chic back out West for a third–and ultimately final–crack at making it on the big screen. It was their most successful try, but would also be the most frustrating.
Hellzapoppin’ the movie at first tries to capture the show’s anarchic spirit. A theater projectionist (once and future Stooge Shemp Howard) starts showing the film-within-a-film’s opening sequence of people singing while they’re being tortured by devils in Hades, where Olsen and Johnson promptly arrive by cab (“That’s the first taxi driver,” quips Ole, “that ever went straight where I told him to!”). The scene soon shifts again to become the set for the film-within-a-film-within-a-film (!), where the boys tell director Richard Lane and scriptwriter Elisha Cook, Jr. that they’re not happy with the changes being made to the show and the addition of a love story, to which Lane says, “This is Hollywood. We change everything.” This all takes place with the duo and Lane changing costumes as they wander from stage to stage, including an Arctic set complete with a sled named Rosebud (“Thought they burned that,” says Chic). From there the movie settles into its conventional plot, with propmen Ole and Chic helping playwright Robert Paige win the hand of socialite Jane Frazee. Along the way, however, there are funny supporting turns by Mischa Auer as a real Russian nobleman posing as a fake Russian nobleman, Hugh Herbert as a disguise-happy detective, and Martha Raye at her brassy, man-hungry best. There are also a trunkful of visual gags imported from Broadway, a cameo by the Frankenstein Monster, and some clever breaking of the fourth wall (the boys talking to Howard in the projection booth, and a scene with them sitting in front of the film commenting on the action that feels like a ’40s version of Mystery Science Theater 3000).
Hellzapoppin’ had the misfortune to premiere in late December of 1941…perhaps not the best time for a belly-busting laughfest, but it was a mild success. Ole and Chic would again bite the Tinseltown hand that fed them in 1943 with Crazy House, which begins with the duo shooting themselves by cannon onto a Universal lot driven to panic by the news of their arrival (even Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce’s Dr. Watson, in cameos, are aware of the tumult). When studio execs decide they want nothing to do with another Olsen and Johnson picture, the fellas decide to hire some co-stars, shoot it themselves, and auction it off to the highest bidder. This flimsy premise, in a manner similar to their previous film, tends to overload the goings-on with musical numbers and shunt the duo off to the side. Also like Hellzapoppin’, Crazy House is packed with supporting players. Shemp is back, appearing in various costumes as he tries to sell Ole and Chic a deck of cards (“It’s a good deal”), an anchor (“fresh off the boat”), and so forth, along with Percy Killbride, Edgar Kennedy, Allan Jones, and the poor man’s Martha Raye, Cass Daley. Crazy House is a typically frantic farce that includes more than a few in-jokes about the boys’ moviemaking experiences–such as when Olsen buzzes the studio chief to tell him that “Universal’s most sensational comedy team” wants to see him, only to be told “Oh, Abbott and Costello! Send them right in!” It failed, though, to equal Hellzapoppin’s box office draw.
The following year would see Olsen and Johnson enter the realm of the haunted house spoof with Ghost Catchers. Once again playing varitations of their real selves, Ole and Chic are owners/stars of a bizarre New York City nightclub who help their new neighbors, Southern colonel Walter Catlett and singer daughters Martha O’Driscoll and Gloria Jean, find out who’s trying to scare them out of their recently-rented brownstone. The movie wavers between laughter and spookiness in the style of Bob Hope’s The Ghost Breakers and Abbott and Costello’s Hold That Ghost, which Ole and Chic dismiss as “a very unbelievable picture”…even as candles move and their hats, jackets and shoes fly off of their own volition. The songs and dances, as always, tend to overpower the comedy, and the plot was already showing its age in 1944. Still, it’s hard not to like a movie where Ole says about a pair of bearded dwarves they’re following to the villains’ hideout “they’ll probably lead us to Snow White,” only to have one of the little men turn around and yell at him, “Snow White? SNOW WHITE?! Everywhere we go! EVERYWHERE WE GO!”
The duo’s final Universal film–their last, in fact, feature film appearance–was 1945’s See My Lawyer, adapted from a Broadway play the fellas didn’t star in, As such, their brand of screwball humor…and the requisite musical numbers…had to be awkwardly shoehorned in. Playing nightclub comics who insult and torment the patrons to get out of their contract with owner Franklin Pangborn, Ole and Chic wind up buying the club from him and inheriting a mess of lawsuits, leading to a courtroom climax that never lives up to its potential.
After the disappointing returns of See My Lawyer and their release from Universal, Ole and Chic would go on to perform in various stage revues and, like other acts of their era, made the jump to TV in 1949 with the variety series Fireball Fun-for-All. The laughter finally stopped when Chic Johnson died from kidney problems in 1962 and Ole Olsen passed away the next year. Interestingly, the boys are buried in adjoining plots in a Las Vegas cemetery. While people often talk about how the Marx Brothers’ movies never allowed them to operate at full comedic speed the way they did on the stage, an even stronger case could be made for Olsen and Johnson. Their ’40s films showed how they, perhaps more than any other team back then, recognized the unique opportunities for jokes that the silver screen presented, and one wonders what they might have accomplished with bigger budgets and a freer hand.