High Flyers

TCM ran a couple of the Wheeler and Woolsey movies a couple of months back that I hadn't seen, so I recorded them in order to be able to do posts on them. First up is what actually turned out to be the team's final film, High Flyers.

We don't actually see Wheeler and Woolsey for the first several minutes, as there's an establishing scene at one of those rich estates. After a musical number, we're introduced to the Arlingtons, wealthy Horace (Paul Harvey) and his ditzy wife Martha (Margaret Dumont), who is into crystal balls and other occult stuff. Mr. Arlington is having a bunch of jewels being brought over from Europe, and doesn't want anyone to know that the jewels are arriving on a certain ship the next day. Having said that, he's dumb enough to tell a newspaper editor, Mr. Hanlon (Jack Carson in an early role), about it, as a way of saying how he doesn't want the press to publicize this information.

Never mind that Hanlon is actually a crook who has an idea for how to steal those jewels. He's going to commandeer a seaplane, and get one of his henchmen already on board to steal the jewels and throw them overboard in a hollowed-out life preserver. (As if nobody would see this happening.) The seaplane will pick up the jewels, and then drop them off in a cove where Hanlon is waiting. And he's got two pilots. Cut to a carnival, where we see Pierre (Robert Woolsey) as a carnival barker getting people to see the airplane-like contraption in which his partner Jerry (Bert Wheeler) is riding. They've been passing themselves off as expert pilots, but the truth is that neither of them has flown a plane before. Worse, Pierre has committed enough fraud that he's wanted by the authorities in Philadelphia because of probation issues!

Not that the boys know that they're going to be getting stolen jewels; Hanlon tells them he's got press photos from some event in Europe that he wants to get before anybody else, hence the ruse to throw them overboard. Despite not having piloted any plane, let alone a seaplane before, and not realizing that Hanlon had actually stolen a Coast Guard seaplane, the two set off to get the life preserver. They are unsurprisingly spotted by the Coast Guard, who pursue after them, with bit of difficulty because the life preserver also has boxes of some sort of drug that causes the two of them to get quite high.

Since they're high and have never piloted a plane before, it can only end up in disaster, and eventually the two crash land. Wouldn't you know it, however, but they crash land right on the Arlington estate. Not that they know that the jewels they've found belong to the Arlingtons and they could save the day by delivering the jewels to Mr. Arlington. Instead, chaos ensues as Pierre and Jerry try to pass themselves off as undercover detectives, while dealing with the Arlingtons, their maid Juanita (Lupe Velez) and their daughter Arlene (Marjorie Lord).

Wheeler and Woolsey were decidedly second best, in part because they were working at RKO which never had the budget that other studios could command. I think the formula was also beginning to get stale; the two had been working together for almost 10 years, starting on Broadway and then making some 20 features. Woolsey was also beginning to get sick to the point of no longer being able to work; he died about a year after High Flyers.

Still, a lot of what made Wheeler and Woolsey work is here, and if you like their material it's not as bad as some reviewers suggest.