The Naughty Nineties (1945)

the audience applauded

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

"Ah yes! Has Michael Finn been around lately?" (from W.C. Fields in "The Bank Dick") Lou was the master of the comedy "slip and fall". Lou often talked "aside" to the audience, just like "Groucho". Also, he fought back quite well, and was smarter rather than dumber. Very quick with a quip. (Could he talk fast.) Many great routines to recommend, including 'Who's on first". Catching a whale", "Shaving without a mirror"; but a surprisingly weak storyline. Even in the 1890's, most people knew that gambling was a pastime, not a moneymaker. Henry Travers (Clarence the Angel) plays the wryly-old riverboat captain with a big heart, but a weakness for pretty ladies and gambling. He loses the Riverboat Queen to the crooked gamblers and Abbott and Costello try to win it back with chewing gum on the roulette wheel and magnetic crooked dice. A few amusing songs, better than usual. The "slapstick" finish goes on far too long. It's tedious, not that funny. As always, a fast finish and everything turns out quite well. One of the "bad guys" falls for the Captains' daughter, and joins the riverboat. The other crooks go to jail in San Francisco.

The one and only reason to watch this film, as far as I'm concerned, is that it contains the full-length, and probably the best, version of the famous 'Who's On First?' routine. The delivery of that routine is perfect, and it's a few of the most side-splittingly funny minutes ever put on film, and since it takes up nearly ten minutes of the film's 76 minute run, you might as well just go ahead and watch the whole thing, but unless you're an Abbott & Costello fan, you could well skip it and not lose any sleep about it. The Naughty Nineties has a couple of good routines and gags, and two or three very funny scenes of physical comedy; Costello is always tons of fun and Abbott is the ultimate straight-man, and when they're together on screen the dynamic is always great. But there are far too many scenes where only one of them is featured, and those always fall short; and the truth is, once you pass the 'Who's On First?' scene, nothing else comes close.

Abbott and Costello had either run out of routines by this point or they had such fondness for their already classic ones that they reckoned it was reasonable to rehash them. They even draw their trophy chestnut Who's On First, which by the time this movie came out was so completely ancient it's amazing they don't go red. Indeed, it's acknowledged film trivia that one can hear camera operators struggling to stifle their laughter during the scene. I think there was an audience back then that was far less disdained during the studio era, moviegoers who go to laugh, jump or cry not so much at surprises or fresh revelations but at fulfilled expectations, expectations so particular that they could literally be duplicated from what they'd seen many times before.But regardless, each time I've put myself through this emergency outing, I've laughed hard and frequently. Above and beyond the arbitrary Who's on First? centerpiece, The Naughty Nineties features the too-funny schtick where Costello sings during an audition while Abbott is hollering instructions to the crew to adjust the backdrop curtain. Costello thinks the directions are for him and he follows them, by singing higher or lower, or on one foot. It all relies on Costello's inimitable gift for physical comedy. There's also the scene where one of the wicked gambler's accomplices slips poison into his wine. He catches on, distracts her and swaps their glasses. But she does the same to him, and then they get into bluffing the swap. There is also the sketch where Costello inadvertently bakes feathers into a cake and the pieces are fed to everyone in the tavern. When they all take a bite, they end up coughing up the feathers until the entire bar is overflowing with them. Then there's the old routine where Costello and the villain mirror each other's actions, which can also be seen in the Marx Bros. classic Duck Soup. The scene where Costello tussles with a real bear, thinking that he's wrestling Abbott in a bear suit. Bears were frequently deployed in Abbott and Costello routines.Universal was so eager to keep them in the theaters that they didn't have any principles about what class of material they played. And the one in this case is an emphatic case of floating shipwrecked debris. There are wicked gamblers and a sweet old showboat captain. They are so much superfluous baggage. This is, as usual, just an Abbott & Costello romp, with the boys giving a routine imitation of themselves in their golden days.

This is definitely Abbott and Costello's best movie. Loads of hilarious antics and slapstick, plus "Who's on First?" is one of the funniest scenes on film. I thought this movie was better than "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" (generally seen as their best film).