Keep 'Em Flying

Blackie (Bud Abbott) and Heathcliff (Lou Costello) are the ground crew for barn storming pilot Jinx Roberts. They join the Air Corps as ground crewman where the fall for twin USO hostesses (Martha Raye).

The guys are still fun but they are stuck in a propaganda film for the military. I don't care about the Jinx story. So the movie is split into two. I enjoy the boys but when they're not on the screen, the movie stalls out. I also enjoy Martha Raye playing the duo role. She's great with the guys. I like half of this movie.

As a reviewer wrote elsewhere, the only way to watch Bud and Lou's movies is in sequence. 'Buck Privates' was perhaps a better story, but 'Keep 'em Flying' sees Lou put in probably his finest performance. This time the boys are perfectly integrated into the story and their gags flow along as part of the natural sequence of events.

There is an excellent rapport between Martha Raye and our heroes, which becomes evident in the USO canteen sequence. Not only was Martha a fine singer and dancer, she was a great comedienne. Without giving away the gag, the fact that it runs on so long and still remains funny is testament to the trio - or "quartet's" skill in working together.

Okay, I love this movie and given a limit of 10 movies to take to a desert island, this would be included. But that says something, doesn't it?

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.

Not their best, but by far not their weakest, the film provides the viewers with the duo in the Army Air Corps, or at least a training facility.

While there has been some comment on the wood and fabric airplanes in the film, filmed shortly before the U.S. got involved in World War II, many training facilities taught their students initially on such aircraft, just so they could learn the rudiments of flight. Later, the fledgling pilots would graduate to more state-of-the-art trainers.

Minor spoiler For the aero gags, the fabric airplanes worked well: in the "inverted" sequence, Costello's head wouldn't have been able to break through a metal skin.

I had this on VHS, and finally was able to locate it on DVD, in an A&C collection.

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...