The Bashful Bachelor

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.

Although to our sophisticated coastal ears Lum And Abner seem woefully out of date, back in the day they were quite the radio hit with a group of devoted listeners in the red states. A whole lot of people knew and loved the residents of Pine Ridge, Arkansas like they were their own neighbors.

Radio stars Norris Goff and Chester Lauck brought Lum And Abner to the big screen and both certainly were able to sell their rustic personas to the movie-going public, they really looked the parts they voiced on radio.

In this story Lum is having woman troubles and is looking to propose to the girl of his dreams Zasu Pitts. But he feels he's not led a heroic enough life for her to consider him. Remember this is Zasu Pitts we're talking about.

In any event after trying to make himself a hero with partner Abner and nearly getting him killed, Abner screws things up by delivering the proposal to Constance Purdy, a widow with a few extra mouths to feed. When Purdy threatens Lum with a breach of promise suit, he might be forced to marry her.

I'm not going to go into the rest. Lum And Abner I've described before as gentle rustics that the red state took to their hearts. They were the forerunners of such television shows that Paul Henning later did like Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, Green Acres.

If you were a fan of those shows, you'll love Lum And Abner.

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.

Better than expected. Okay, it's no knee-slapper, but the chuckles keep coming as the two cornpone dimwits manage to stumble their way from one silly misfire to the next. What grabbed me most is how un-telegenic the cast is. It sure ain't Hollywood's usual glamor crowd. Good thing there's the lovely Currie to soften my eyes after all the un-lovelies, especially Lauck (Lum) who looks like me when I forget to shave and the wife threatens to leave. Nonetheless, the pacing's good, the antics non-stop, while the train bearing down on the camera gave me a real jolt. To me, it was a fun look at the past, especially when dimwit Abner looks into the phone receiver instead of talking into it and says to a puzzled Lum, "I've got to see who I'm talking to". Top that cell-phone Hollywood.

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??)