1h 17min | Comedy, Musical | 26 July 1951
Director: Charles Lamont
Stars: Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Dorothy Shay, Margaret Hamilton.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043425/
As a musical, this is horrid. We get Dorothy Shay singing 5 story-songs about strange mountain folk. She's got a nice voice, and I marvel at her memory for tho long variety of lyrics, but they ain't stories I'm a want'n' t'hear.
The dialog is worse, because it's really thick H'wood hillbilly dialect, without the music.
The plot (to save me from watching this again): BA is agent to DS, the booked singer, and to LC, a stooge pretending to be a magician with LC as his emcee. His act fails, and the nightclub owner fires the lot of them. When LC saw a mouse in the club, he let out a special yelp that DS recognized as her clan's special call for help; they share a grandfather.
The grandfather left a secret to his direct descendants about buried treasure, but only grannie back home knows where 'tis. So they hed for the hills, and rekindle the feud with a rival clan by their presence.
DS meets a city man in the music biz who's a member of the rival clan, but she falls for him, and vice versa.
Grannie decides LC should be married before he can become the head of the clan and learn the secret of the hidden treasure. A young cousin sets her sights on LC as her intended. But LC wants DS, so grannie hooks him up with a witch (MH) to provide a love potion. After some mutual voodoo doll stabbing, and cash payment, LC gets the potion and feeds it to DS, who falls for him. Then he drinks the potion, and falls for the young cousin. Then she drinks the potion, and falls for BA. Later, a feud-rival drinks some and balls for BA (eyebrow up! This is a couple of decades before Deliverance ('72)); nothing sexual is displayed, but he leads LC to the mine that grannie revealed as the secret location. (The info was hidden in the concertina passed from grampa to LC.)
Everyone recovers from the potion just before gettin' hitched. At the mine, LC's cousins and A&C vie for access to the mine, and finally an elevator falls through the bottom of the shaft into Fort Knox. A&C are arrested. The End.
Then there's a congressional hearing about why two guys in a wooden elevator operated with counterweights was sufficient to break into Fort Knox. Testimony from architectural engineers, physicists and mathematicians just confuse the committee, so they pass a law that pi has value 3, and thousands of professionals are jailed for using 3.14159 or other approximations more precise than 3. Textbooks are burned, and no new technology works. Society eventually runs out of devices and electricity, and regresses to the iron age. Ayn Rand laughs her ashes off.
Universal, dir. Lamont; 5
