Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 75: The Mocambo (1941-1958)

A UFO hovers ominously over the Mocambo on Sunset Blvd.

The VHS release of Look Back in Angora.

There are several fine, lovingly made documentaries about Ed Wood. The three best known examples—Look Back in Angora, Flying Saucers Over Hollywood, and The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood, Jr.—were all released in the early-to-mid 1990s. That tracks. Rudolph Grey's book about Eddie came out in '92, Tim Burton's biopic followed two years later, and several of Ed's movies were either being issued or reissued on VHS back then. It was a good time to be an Ed Wood fan.

Perhaps the best documentaries about Edward D. Wood, Jr. are the man's own films. From his crude cowboy drama Crossroads of Laredo (1948) to the formulaic porn loops he worked on in the 1970s, these motion pictures truly capture Eddie's life and times. Jean-Luc Godard famously said that "film is truth 24 times a second," and Ed Wood's movies show how true that (slightly pretentious) maxim is.

Take Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) as an example. You want to see what Vampira, Tor Johnson, Bela Lugosi, and the rest of the Wood gang looked like back in the 1950s? They're all in Plan 9, alongside many other members of Eddie's oddball entourage. And you can't tour Quality Studios as it was during those years, but you can see the scenes Eddie filmed there, including that infamous cockpit aboard American Flight #812. You know, the one with the shower curtain and the circular slide rule.

Plan 9 is a treasure trove of detail about life in Eisenhower-era America. Here, you'll see examples of 1950s fashion, technology, social attitudes, architecture, and consumer products. Just look at the huge Fords, Dodges, and Buicks that zip across the screen. People didn't know what "fuel economy" even was back then. And check out the Coca-Cola bottles and the L&M cigarette package on the table outside Jeff and Paula's home during the scene in which the Trents are interviewed by Col. Edwards (Tom Keene) and Lt. Harper (Duke Moore). Nostalgic movies set in the 1950s, including Ed Wood (1994), scramble to get these kinds of period details correct. Plan 9 doesn't have to scramble. Eddie just used what was available in Los Angeles at the time.

Coke and cigarettes in Plan 9 from Outer Space.

One of the most remarkable passages of Plan 9 arrives at about the 17-minute mark. Much has already happened by this point in the movie. Vampira and Bela's characters have died, had their respective funerals, and risen from the dead. Pilot Jeff Trent (Gregory Walcott) has spotted a flying saucer and confessed this remarkable event to his supportive wife Paula (Mona McKinnon). Two bumbling gravediggers (J. Edward Reynolds and Hugh Thomas, Jr.) and lumbering Inspector Clay (Tor Johnson) have been killed by zombies. After all this, Reverend Lynn Lemon presides over Clay's funeral ("The bell has rung upon his great career.") with Vampira watching from the bushes and UFOs hovering overhead.

What follows is a remarkable, newsreel-esque montage lasting about a minute and a half, comprised of both stock footage and newly filmed pick-up shots, augmented with hyperbolic narration by Criswell and dramatic library music. The point of this montage is to show that the three saucers are brazenly flying over major American cities, including New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, ultimately attracting the attention of the military. What had been a series of intimate, interconnected stories about a few characters (a grieving old man, a married couple, some police officers) is now a national phenomenon.

Unsurprisingly, most of the montage focuses on Eddie's adopted hometown of Hollywood. Criswell tells us that the three saucers were spotted "high over Hollywood Blvd." as we see amazed motorists pointing at the sky. A fictional newspaper called the Hollywood Chronicle is first seen coming off the printing press, then being read by a suit-wearing man (supposedly Ed Wood himself). Its banner headline reads: SAUCERS SEEN OVER HOLLYWOOD. A slightly crumpled copy of the Chronicle is laid out on a table at a diner, surrounded by various cups and silverware. Finally, a tubby drunk staggers through an alley and picks the paper up off the sidewalk before waddling out of frame.

Meanwhile, the saucers fly over the headquarters of CBS, NBC, and ABC. But then, for reasons known only to himself, Eddie has the aliens visit Sunset Boulevard, and we get a glimpse of what the glitzy Sunset Strip—a 1.5-mile stretch of road through West Hollywood cluttered with clubs, stores, and billboards—looked like 60 years ago. There's a shot in which a saucer soars over the Crescendo, a nitery that lasted from 1954 to 1964 and played host to top jazz, folk, and comedy acts of the day. Everyone from Louis Armstrong to Bob Newhart gigged there. The joint was named after the GNP Crescendo record label and was owned by GNP honcho Gene Norman. (The club is long, long gone, but the label is carried on today by Gene's son, Neil.)

On the night this footage was shot, "cool jazz" singer June Christy was performing there. An appreciative write-up in the June 10, 1957 edition of Billboard said that the chanteuse "seems to have reached full showbiz maturity." Soon-to-be-controversial comedian Lenny Bruce was also on the bill. A banner advertising cabaret singer Frances Faye is seen in the background. Faye's 1959 album Caught in the Act was recorded at the Crescendo.

Flying saucer over the Crescendo club. Inset: a Billboard review of June Christy's act.

Eddie cuts to another drunk (production assistant and future For Love and Money director Don Davis) staggering out of a cocktail lounge, a bottle of wine still in his hand. He shields his eyes, apparently from the brightness of the UFO, then looks down skeptically at the bottle. "There comes a time in each man's life," says Criswell, "when he can't even believe his own eyes." This bar, incidentally, seems to be a real location. The address over the door is clearly visible as 4092. If this is meant to be Sunset Blvd. as well, that address now corresponds to a parking lot.

Don Davis shields his eyes from the harsh light of truth.

The Mocrumbo in Slick Hare (1947).

When the film cuts back to the UFO, it's no longer dangling over the Crescendo but over the Mocambo, a plush night club that stood at 8588 Sunset Boulevard from 1941 to 1958. The place was demolished decades ago, barely outliving its co-founder Charlie Morrison; an H&M now stands in its approximate spot. Throughout most of the 1940s and 1950s, however, it was one of West Hollywood's true hot spots, attracting movie star customers and top-flight musical and comedy talent.

(Our poor Plan 9 drunk, incidentally, is so disoriented by this that he sets the bottle of wine down. It's a classic example of the "no more for me" trope.)

Abbott & Costello, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Edith Piaf, Bob Hope, and too many more to mention played the Mocambo. And the clientele? Everyone from Charlie Chaplin to Judy Garland went there. Practically every major movie star you can name from that era. Liz Taylor, Clark Gable, John Wayne. The list goes on and on. They came for the exotic, Latin-inspired decor (including many live birds!), the big band music, and the opportunity to dance the night away. This was a place to see and be seen.

Ed Wood himself visited the Mocambo at least once, according to Kathy Wood. "We went to clubs like the Brown Derby, Ciro's, Mocambo," she told Rudolph Grey in Nightmare of Ecstasy, "but not much. We sort of stayed home and got drunk."

For a club that lasted less than two decades, the Mocambo had a seismic impact on popular culture. Remember the Tropicana, where Ricky worked on I Love Lucy? Yeah, that was based on the Mocambo. Lucy and Desi were fans of the place. Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny spent a whole cartoon, Slick Hare (1947), at a parody of the Mocambo called "the Mocrumbo," where a flashing neon sign advises patrons that they'll have to make a "small down payment" on the $600 dinners offered within. In the cartoon, the restaurant is depicted as a star-studded but chaotic and disorganized place, where crates of vegetables are left to rot on the floor and the refrigerators are dripping with grease. This was supposedly based on writer Michael Maltese's real-life observations! But who cares when Bogey and Bacall are regulars?

Eartha Kitt is the purrrrrfect headliner for the Mocambo.

In the stock footage from Plan 9, seductive singer-actress Eartha Kitt is headlining at the Mocambo. This film might have been taken during Kitt's much-publicized 1953 stint at the club. How wonderful, then, that Ms. Kitt made a cameo in the Ed Wood-scripted I Woke Up Early the Day I Died (1998). Below is a blurb from the December 10, 1953 issue of Jet about Kitt's three-week stand at the Mocambo, plus a vintage photograph showing an alternate angle of the famous marquee. Apparently, Greece's King Paul and Queen Frederika had attended a Mocambo floor show, and Los Angeles mayor Norris Poulson was shocked by the lyrics of Miss Kitt's flirty songs like "C'est Si Bon" and "I Wanna Be Evil." The scandalous publicity only made her performances at the Mocambo more popular.

A press clipping about Eartha Kitt's appearance at the Mocambo in West Hollywood.

Broadcast pioneer Larry Finley.

You sharp-eyed viewers will have noted by now that there is another venue visible next door to the Mocambo. That's Larry Finley's Restaurant, located on the same premises and named after the New York-born radio and TV broadcaster. Larry was then appearing on radio station KFWB (980 on your AM dial). These days, KFWB plays all Mexican music, but from the 1920s to the 1950s, the station aired a variety of programming during radio's so-called "golden age." Stars like Bing Crosby and Ronald Reagan got their start on KFWB, in fact.

By the 1950s, the beefy, balding, gregarious Finley—said to have possessed "the voice with a smile"—was hosting his nightly, six-hour talk show, Larry Finley Time, from the Sunset Blvd. restaurant. That fact was advertised quite prominently on the sign outside. I guess the idea was that you could stop by for a meal or a drink and see a genuine radio show, complete with celebrity guests, being produced right in front of you. Good old Larry kept the party going until 4am every night. By the end of the 1950s, however, KFWB had switched over to playing rock & roll music and would become quite a powerhouse in that field.

Largely forgotten today, Larry Finley (1913-2000) was an interesting character in his own right. Over the course of his 86 years, he pursued a number of careers, including nightclub manager, with various degrees of success. His after-hours broadcasts made him one of the first late-night talk show hosts. He tried to start his own radio network but could never get it off the ground. On the plus side, though, he was one of the first to see the potential of video and audiotape and became a leader in that industry. When he died in April 2000, the Los Angeles Times eulogized him as such but also mentioned the radio shows and the Sunset Blvd. restaurant.

Had it not been for Plan 9 from Outer Space, I might never have heard of Finley, the Crescendo, or even the Mocambo. That's why I say that Ed Wood's movie, as outlandish as it is, serves as an incredible documentary of the 1950s.

Okay, here's my pitch for the Jenga movie

C'mon, who else was realistically going to star in the Jenga movie?

It's going to happen one way or another. With The Angry Birds Movie already in theaters and a Tetris movie on the way, it's only a matter of time before Jenga: The Movie is put into development at Universal or Paramount. Someone's getting a payday out of this. Why shouldn't it be me? I want to be the one to write this thing. So here's my pitch.

The Dark Tower.

We start with a flashback to the late 1980s, when the first commercially-produced Jenga games hit the market. A severely nerdy high school kid, Wes Zwolinski (even his name means he's last at everything), develops an almost supernatural knack for the game, and his skills start to attract the attention of the other kids his age, including his longtime crush, Noreen. An intramural Jenga championship is soon organized, and Wes deftly defeats a number of opponents. In the final round, he is pitted against rich kid and bully Chas Van Landingham, who has heretofore made Wes' life a living hell. Even Wes' normally distant father, George (Stacy Keach), has shown up for the event and sits in the front row. Just when Wes seems on the verge of winning, Chas distracts him with an especially cruel taunt. Wes knocks over the Jenga tower in such alarming fashion that one piece becomes airborne and hits George right in the face. The victorious Chas exits the high school gymnasium with Noreen on his arm, while George is taken off in a stretcher, unconscious. Wes is devastated. 

Cut to the present day. Wes is now a scruffy, forty-something man played by Adam Sandler. He works in a mall shoe store owned by Chas (Jason Bateman), who treats him horribly and who is now married to Noreen (Jennifer Aniston). Wes' glory days are long behind him. He gazes at a stack of shoeboxes piled improbably high and sighs deeply, thinking of what might have been. Chas walks by and slaps him on the back of the head, causing him to topple the tower of boxes. Wes' home life is no better. He sleeps on a forlorn couch in the basement of his parents' home. George, grouchier than ever, still bears a scar on his face from the long-ago tournament incident. He criticizes Wes without mercy. In the interim, Wes has had a son named Josh with his now-ex-wife Carla (Leah Remini). Wes has a good relationship with Josh; in fact, it's the only bright spot in his life. They play board games together, but Wes won't even look at Jenga. Too many memories. 

A problem arises when Wes gets behind on his child support. (Don't judge him too harshly. He gets taken in a Nigerian e-mail scam.) He may lose contact with Josh forever if he can't raise some money quickly. He walks around his neighborhood, thinking about what to do. Just then, a flier gets carried along by the wind and hits Wes smack in the face. He studies it. It's an all-ages Jenga tournament with a whopping $25,000 prize. Wes knows what he must do. He goes into training in order to regain his Jenga skills. Having previously established that Wes' favorite show in the 1980s was ALF, the character of ALF (still voiced by Paul Fusco) becomes sort of a wisecracking mentor to Wes, appearing to him in visions. "Who the hell are you talking to down there?" George wants to know. 

It all leads up to the big Jenga tournament. An initial joke is that most of the contestants are much, much younger than Wes. But our hero carries on anyway and advances through the various rounds. Some of the opponents are very eccentric indeed, including a jumpy, bug-eyed fellow played by Steve Buscemi. Kill Bill, El Topo, and numerous Sergio Leone films are referenced and parodied during this passage of the movie. Jenga inventor Leslie Scott makes a cameo here, too. Naturally, the final round comes down to a rematch between Wes and Chas, with Wes' whole life on the line.

So what do you say, Hollywood? Do we have a deal or do we have a deal? You know how to reach me. My contact info is in the sidebar at the right side of the screen. Let's talk.

Mill Creek comedy classics #23: "The Groom Wore Spurs" (1951)

Ginger Rogers and Jack Carson in The Groom Wore Spurs, as depicted in this Punch cartoon from 1951.

The flick: The Groom Wore Spurs (Universal release of a Fidelity Pictures production, 1951) [buy the set]

Current IMDb rating: 5.6

Director: Richard Whorf (Till the Clouds Roll By; lots of TV series, including The Beverly Hillbillies [he directed about one-fourth of the 274 episodes], Gunsmoke, and My Three Sons)

Actors of note: 

• Ginger Rogers (Top Hat, Monkey Business, Swing Time; beloved screen partner of Fred Astaire; Oscar winner for Kitty Foyle)

• Jack Carson (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Arsenic and Old Lace)

• Joan Davis (star of TV's I Married Joan, which has the catchiest theme song ever)

• Stanley Ridges (Sergeant York, To Be or Not To Be)

• John Litel (The Sons of Katy Elder, Key Largo)

• James Brown (The Godfather of Soul... nah, this one's a white character actor who appeared in Irma La Douce and Targets and was a regular on TV's Rin Tin Tin and Dallas)

• Victor Sen Yung (The Good Earth, Flower Drum Song)

The gist of it: Lady lawyer A.J. Furnival (Rogers) is thrilled that her new client is cowboy movie star Ben Castle (Carson). She becomes a fawning fangirl in his presence, though she tries to maintain her professional composure as an attorney. It seems Mr. Carson has run up a $60,000 gambling debt he can't pay to vicious gangster Harry Kallen (Ridges), and he wants A.J. to negotiate a settlement with the crime boss. Against the advice of her nosy roommate Alice (Davis), A.J. accompanies Ben on a private plane to Las Vegas to meet Kallen face-to-face. Once they arrive in Sin City, Ben goes into his well-rehearsed seduction routine, and the two abruptly decide to get married.

Later, when A.J. learns that Ben was using her because her father was a famous attorney who had defended Kallan, she is understandably upset and goes back home to get an annulment. But Alice advises her to move into Ben's place and start playing the role of his wife. She does, and before long she realizes that Ben is nothing like the character he plays in the movies. He's just a spoiled actor who can't ride a horse or play a guitar to save his life. But Ben has genuinely fallen in love with A.J., and the two do have a certain romantic chemistry. When Ben is wrongly suspected in Harry Kallen's murder, A.J. uses her legal smarts to get him out of a jam and find the real killer in the process.

The film's misleading poster.

My take: This is the second behind-the-scenes Hollywood comedy I've seen in this set, and like Hollywood and Vine, it's a lightweight affair without any real sting to it. Ginger Rogers was on the downward slope of her career when she made this flick,  having committed the unforgivable movie industry sin of turning 40. The glory days with Fred Astaire were long over, and she was appearing in low-budget, low-ambition films like this one, still radiating the charm that made her famous but not getting scripts that were worthy of her. After a few more years of this, she moved further down the Hollywood ladder to television, guest starring in various anthology series but never actually landing a recurring role on any program. These roles dried up in the mid-1960s and Ginger concentrated on stage work both here and in Europe for the last two decades of her career, emerging occasionally to judge a beauty pageant or appear on The Love Boat. So there's a cloud of disappointment hanging over this film from the get-go.

The direction feels a little flat, and the jokes mostly land with a dull thud. I wish Ginger's character, A.J., had been written a little more worldly and less trusting. That would have allowed Jack Carson to be even more of a selfish, womanizing slob than he already is. Carson provides what little pep the film has, getting some comedic mileage out of his role as a phony "Hollywood cowboy" who effortlessly slips into the role of a strutting Western hero whenever he appears in public but is utterly useless behind closed doors. Probably my favorite scene in the film is the one in which Ben Castle registers at a hotel in Vegas and manages to say everything a Western hero should say under those circumstances. The film's longest comedy sequence takes place when A.J. cheerfully barges into Ben's room when the actor is suffering from a terrible hangover. The scene eats up many minutes of screen time but it never quite rises above "moderately amusing." A subplot with a disgruntled, hard-drinking maid is basically a non-starter, too.

Comedienne Joan Davis -- a woman born to play the heroine's wisecracking best friend -- was a star on the rise at this point in her career. Her character, advice-giving busybody "Aunt" Alice, reminded me a lot of another Alice -- the maid played by Ann B. Davis on The Brady Bunch. Joan has a rather mannish appearance in this film, and I was surprised when she openly acknowledged this fact. Evidently, this was an actress without vanity.

Meanwhile, the plot kind of breaks down at the three-quarter mark. Apparently realizing that the "romantic comedy" aspect of the story was going nowhere, the filmmakers decided to turn The Groom Wore Spurs into an "action comedy" for its noisy, chaotic conclusion. Speaking of giving up, the film's score is credited to Emil Newman, but Emil must have had better things to do that day because the finale is set to well-worn classical chestnuts by Rossini and Von Suppe*. This makes the movie feel even more cartoonish, and the story loses whatever connection it had to humanity or the real world. By the way, The Groom Wore Spurs was based on a short story by Robert Carson (no relation to Jack) called "The Legal Bride." It was serialized in Collier's magazine in 1949, and you can read some of it if you care to.

Is it funny: Oh, it'll do in a pinch, I guess. I might have chuckled dryly once or twice. Given the ripe premise, however, this could and should have been much funnier. The cast is game, but this film needed a better, more focused script and livelier direction. As it is, The Groom Wore Spurs is as potent as room-temperature ginger ale. Everyone looks a little bored, as if they'd all rather be somewhere else, and the film kind of plods along until a hectic climax that marks a drastic change in tone from the rest of the movie. This is the cinematic equivalent of a homework assignment that's completed aboard the bus on the way to school.

My grade: C+

* To be fair to Emil, though, he did write a pretty cowboy ballad for this film.

P.S. - The film has no negative black stereotypes, but it sure does have a negative Asian stereotype. Victor Sen Yung, who was born in San Francisco and lived in America all his life, plays Jack Carson's obedient houseboy, Ignacio. The servant's rapid, unintelligible speech is one of the movie's lamest running jokes. Worse yet, there is one cringe-inducing scene in which Victor Sen Yung lip synchs to a sped-up recording of a song from one of Ben's movies, under the assumption that this is what Chinese people's voices sound like.

Mill Creek comedy classics #11: "Hollywood and Vine" (1945)

If you like the intersection, you'll love the movie.

The flick: Hollywood and Vine (PRC Pictures, Inc., 1945)

Current IMDb rating: 5.8

Director: Alexis Thurn-Taxis (A Night for Crime, The Yanks Are Coming)

Actors of note: 

• James Ellison (I Walked with a Zombie)

• Wanda McKay (The Lady Eve, The Great McGinty)

• Franklin Pangborn (All Over Town, Now Voyager, The Bank Dick)

• Ralph Morgan (The Life of Emil Zola, first president of the Screen Actors Guild)

• Prince Michael Romanoff (restaurateur and "professional impostor")

• Daisy (twenty-seven Blondie movies between 1938 and 1950)

• Emmett "Pappy" Lynn (Night of the Hunter, The Ten Commandments)

Intersections of note: Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street, Los Angeles, CA 90028, today the location of a sushi restaurant, an Irish pub, a parking lot, and an empty retail space.

The gist of it: Martha (McKay), a pretty young lass on her way to Hollywood, stops for lunch at a little hamburger stand operated by the eccentric and talkative Pop Barkley (Lynn). There, she attracts the attention of successful playwright Larry Winters (Ellison), who follows her to Tinseltown, where he's working on the adaptation of his Broadway hit, Grandfather's Follies. Thinking it belongs to Martha, Larry brings along a talented little stray dog (Daisy) whom he dubs Emperor after Strauss' Emperor Waltz, which was playing on Pop's jukebox when he and Martha met.

Martha eventually does reconnect with Larry, who passes himself off as a newcomer named "Larry Summers" and takes up residence in a modest bungalow near Martha's. Soon, Larry's bosses and his snooty fiancee are searching frantically for him. Meanwhile, Emperor becomes a big Hollywood star whose overnight success leads to a zany custody battle involving most of the other characters.

"Uncle Carl."

My take: I wonder when Hollywood started turning its cameras back at the movie business, realizing its own industry was as bizarre and fascinating as any scenario a writer could dream up. One of the little joys of this movie is the chance to see a now rather quaint-looking version of Hollywood, a place where people still went to the Brown Derby and the Trocadero.

Watching this movie in 2013 was like seeing the innocent first draft of Barton Fink or Mulholland Drive with all the surrealism and seediness taken out. The "pretending to be poor" thing, too, seems like a harbinger of John Landis' Coming to America. While he's pretending to be a pauper, Larry takes a job at a drugstore, where he works for fussbudget Franklin Pangborn who does his trademark "prissy queen" routine again. The movie never comes out and says it, but I'd like to think that the place is Schwab's Pharmacy.

The studio in the film is called Lavish Pictures, where the members of the Lavish family all have phony-baloney jobs (like "Assistant to the Assistant Story Editor") and phony-baloney offices (with numbers such as "7 and 3/8ths"). I'd imagine this was a swipe at the Laemmle clan, whose founder inspired this famous quip from Ogden Nash: "Uncle Carl Laemmle/Has a very large faemmle."

Sharp-eyed MST3K fans will note that this film was released by the poverty row studio called PRC Pictures, which stands for "Producers Releasing Corporation" and not "Penile Replacement Corporation," as Tom Servo had it.

By the way, I wonder if any scenes from Hollywood and Vine wound up on the cutting room floor because there are some subplots which never get wrapped up. One running gag, for instance, has tough-looking gangster types come into the drugstore and cryptically request a "banana surprise," which makes Franklin Pangborn very nervous. Nothing ever comes of this, though. And there's a wraparound story in which Pop Barkley tells some reporters how he came to be enormously wealthy, but I don't think this was adequately explained either.

Daisy the dog, the actual star of this movie.

Is it funny: Occasionally. As a satire of the motion picture business, Hollywood and Vine is fairy toothless. Studio chiefs are penny-pinching blowhards who keep their whole family on the payroll. Romances are manufactured for the benefit of the press. Directors are temperamental divas. Aspiring actors are likely to end up working in drug stores. I knew most of that.

Because of Daisy, Hollywood and Vine has plenty of bark, but the script has no bite. The movie lavishes much more attention on the dog than it does on the rather dull human love story supposedly at the center of the plot. I guess it's funny watching the talented pooch roll over, play dead, bark on command, close doors, and hide objects when necessary, but it's obvious that the animal is waiting for cues from a handler who is just off-camera. At the time, Daisy was in the middle of a very hot movie career, playing the role of the Bumsteads' dog in a series of cheap-but-popular comedies based on the Blondie comic strip. What's really funny in this film is the "star treatment" lavished on Daisy/Emperor, including lawsuits and charges of tax evasion. I chuckled quite a bit during the Empreror Goes Hollywood montage. After all, like Elvis Costello once said, "You're nobody 'til everybody in this town thinks you're a bastard." Or a bitch, so to speak.

Ellison and McKay play their parts straight down the middle, so most of the comedic dialogue in the film is given to the supporting players like "Pappy" Lynn, whose crazy old coot character quickly wore on my nerves. I did like the way his character wound up figuring into the film's longest-running gag at the very end, though.

My grade: B-

P.S. - Not a Negro stereotype in sight here. No minorities of any kind, in fact.