Caught Plastered

I had a couple of Wheeler and Woolsey movies on my DVR that haven't expired yet, and thought that I'd already done a post on Caught Plastered, having watched it already a few months back. But for some reason a search of the blog says I never wrote that post. So I watched it again to do a quick refresher and be able to do a full-length post on it here.

Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey once again play a pair of friends, Tommy Tanner and Egbert Higginbotham respectively. Also once again, they have to live by their wits, getting off a train in a small Midwestern city called Lockville as the movie opens -- except that it's a freight train they've been riding as hobos since they have no money. They make their way to a drugstore, where they meet the proprietress, "Mother" Talley (Lucy Beaumont). She's thinking of selling the place to get the money to go to a retirement home and because she can't afford to buy any more drugs being sold to the store by pharmaceutical rep Harry Watters (Jason Robards Sr.).

Meanwhile, at City Hall the polic chief, Morton, is getting raked over the coals. Lockville bills itself as the driest town in American, this being Prohibition. But the bootleggers have been able to keep bringing booze to town, threatening the town's reputation. Eventually, we learn that Harry is in cahoots with the bootleggers. Or, at least, the drug company he's a part of is using the alcohol syrup base in their patent medicines as a front for producing booze for regular drinking. Just can't adulterate the medicines too much or people might notice.

Tommy and Egbert decide they're goin to help "Mother" out by helping her turn the drugstore into a going commercial venture. To that end, they use their vaudeville skills to start an afternoon radio show on the local station that's designed to promote the drugstore. This attracts Peggy (Dorothy Lee), daughter of the police chief, and she winds up falling in love with Tommy because Bert Wheeler and Dorothy Lee were often romantically paired in the Wheeler and Woolsey movies.

Harry feels like he's getting tricked out of what he thinks he deserves as the right to take over the store to use it as a front for a speakeasy. So he decides to get Tommy and Egbert into legal trouble. He comes up with a new lemon syrup-based product, except that it's got so much of the "medicinal" alcohol in it that the fountain drinks based on this syrup aren't legal. Once Tommy and Egbert are arrested, Harry can get Mother to sign over the store to him.

Caught Plastered is one of Wheeler and Woolsey's earlier efforts, and frankly is a bit weak in the script department. There's also no real spectacle the way there was in the big numbers of some of the pair's other early movies like Rio Rita. There is the same rapid-fire vaudeville banter between the two, combined with what would be con artistry if the pair were supposed to be a bad guys. If you like Wheeler and Woolsey, you'll probably like Caught Plastered. But if you were trying to introduce people who have never heard of the pair to them, I'd start with a different movie.