Keep 'Em Flying

Their fourth starring vehicle of 1941, "Keep 'Em Flying" shows the wear and tear of the duo's busy year. The films production values are more skimpy; evidently by filming on location at Cal-Aero in Ontario, California, the producers felt they could cut costs. This doesn't help A&C's flying sequences with their poor rear projection or the rescue sequence at the end, with all-too-obvious miniatures. The real flying stunt sequences sandwiched around them, however, are done well.

What saves the film are A&C's performances and the interplay between Costello and Martha Raye, who plays twins in the film. There are some truly funny moments, but not enough to elevate the film among their best. 6 out of 10.

Before rewatching this movie on YouTube, I watched a 9-minute short called Life with the Flying Cadets which was basically a trailer for this film as it shows many scenes from it especially the ones with stars Abbott & Costello. It basically told of the value of those men training to fly for whatever awaits them. Now Keep 'Em Flying was the second A & C movie I saw as an 11- or 12-year-old kid in 1979 when it showed up on TV late Saturday night on "The Abbott & Costello Theatre" which was devoted to showcasing all their Universal product. The first was Hold That Ghost. Anyway, here Blackie (Abbott) and Heathcliff (Costello) are associates of daredevil flyer Jinx Roberts (Dick Foran who had also appeared with Bud and Lou in In the Navy and Ride 'Em Cowboy) who all get fired from the fair and they all swear off women but then they go to a nightclub where singer Linda Joyce (Carol Bruce) is performing her last engagement before going to the USO. Of course, Jinx is smitten with her and ends up working near her at a cadet training center. Blackie and Heathcliff follow and encounter two waitresses at a cafe there but since they're twins-Barbara and Gloria (both Martha Raye)-and they don't appear together when they all meet, confusion reigns! I'll just now say that this was even more funny now than when I first saw this all those years ago, that's for sure! I especially thought that routine in which the Abbott character tells the Costello character to not make any orders since they're short on money and he's offering to share his order only for Costello to renege quickly because Abbott keeps insisting he order something was much better than a similar routine Laurel & Hardy did in Men O'War which was my last review before this one. Speaking of L & H, the producer of this picture was Glenn Tryon who was previously an actor who, among his earlier appearances, was in the short 45 Minutes from Hollywood which was the first time Stan & Ollie were in the same Hal Roach short-having first previously appeared together in The Lucky Dog for another company-though they missed actually being together in that one. And if the names of Carol Bruce and Martha Raye are familiar to you, you probably saw them in their later years during the late '70s when Ms. Bruce had a recurring role as Mama Carlson in "WKRP in Cincinnati" and Ms. Raye likewise had such a role as Mel Sharple's mom in "Alice"! A few more things about this movie: I thought the moving torpedo and the standing-on-the-wing-of-a-flying-plane sequences involving Lou were partly convincing enough to me to excuse the obvious use of moving background projection (it should be noted that Pat, Lou's brother, was the stunt double for these segments), that the serious parts of the Jinx storyline was fine with me, and that the musical interludes were entertaining enough especially Carol and Martha's "The Boy with the Wistful Eyes" number. So that's a high recommendation of Keep 'Em Flying. Oh, and continuing my reviews of A & C and L & H doing similar movies, my next one will be on the latter's Our Relations in which Stan and Ollie have their own set of twins encountering mistaken identity...

Fun Abbott and Costello movie with the boys following their friend (Dick Foran) into the Air Corps. Foran's character is hard to like and his romantic subplot with pretty Carol Bruce is a bit nauseating. Those are the negatives. The positives are Bud and Lou have several funny bits. Martha Raye is also fun in a dual role. This isn't one of their best but I find myself returning to it more often than some of their classics, so that says something. I love the old planes so that's probably part of it. Anyway give it a look. Abbott and Costello never disappoint.

KEEP 'EM FLYING (1941) *** Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Martha Raye. One of A&C's very best: the boys as bumbling airfield jockeys and Raye as their identical twin girlfriends. Very funny bits including the first encounter with Raye(s) and the air finale.

One of the funniest of Abbott and Costello's early Universal films was Keep 'Em Flying which stuck with the tried and true formula established by Buck Privates.

The boys are working at a carnival with their pal Dick Foran who's a stunt flier. After a disagreement with management, all three of them quit and wind up in the Army Air Corps.

For Foran he gets to renew a personal rivalry with William Gargan who's an instructor who had fired Foran once before in a civilian flying job. They're both interested in the lovely Carol Bruce who sings great and is a USO hostess.

The boys are up to their usual monkeyshines. Seeing both of them on the back of a speeding torpedo was as funny as when they repeated the same gag on the back of a bucking bronco in Ride 'Em Cowboy. And seeing them hit the silk at the end of the film is indescribable.

Martha Raye plays a dual role in the film as twin sisters, one of whom likes Abbott and the other Costello. Of course poor Costello doesn't realize they're twins and Martha's on and off attitude towards him is baffling. Later on the same twin gimmick was used by Betty Hutton in Here Come The Waves.

Gene DePaul and Don Raye wrote the original songs for this film and actually came up with an Academy Award nomination for one of their songs, Pigfoot Pete which Martha Raye sings and which is incorrectly credited in Academy records to another Universal Film, Hellzapoppin'. It's not bad, but it's really a poor man's Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy. The best song in the film is one interpolated for Carol Bruce when we first meet her as a nightclub singer, the Tommy Dorsey standard, I'm Getting Sentimental Over You.

Keep 'Em Flying is right in the great tradition of Buck Privates and In the Navy and still as funny today as when first made.