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82 | Sight&Sound | April 2020ABBOTT & COSTELLO:
THE COMPLETE UNIVERSAL
PICTURES COLLECTION
Arthur Lubin, Jean Yarbrough, Charles Lamont et al;
US 1940-55; Shout! Factory; Region A Blu-ray; 2,285
minutes; 1.33:1. Extras: theatrical trailers; stills galleries;
production notes; audio commentaries; featurettes:
Abbott and Costello: Their Lives and Legacy, Abbott and
Costello: Film Stories, Abbott & Costello Meet Castle Films;
out-takes from Pardon My Sarong, It Ain’t Hay, Hit the Ice,
Little Giant and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein
Reviewed by Nick Pinkerton
I can’t say exactly where Abbott and Costello
stand on the spectrum of popular culture,
between that which has been somewhat
intellectually redeemed and that which is still
regarded as irredeemable – my impression is that
they have for some time been stuck somewhere
beneath Laurel and Hardy and just above, say,
the Ritz Brothers – but this much I know: theEltinge Burlesque Theater on 42nd St in New
York City. The following year they put on
the double yoke and teamed up, with Lou
playing the easily duped, easily frightened
manchild and Bud the stiff straight man,
jumped into radio feet first, and in short order
found the picture people come a-calling.
In One Night in the Tropics the fellas appear
under their own names, as they will not do
again until the two seasons of The Abbott and
Costello Show (1952-54), one of their supreme
achievements, in which they play unemployed
layabouts living in a shabby studio-set
neighbourhood peopled wholly by grotesques,
including the hulking fortysomething future
Stooge Joe Besser as a ‘child’ named Stinky,
wearing an ill-fitting Little Lord Fauntleroy get-
up. (This is not the only Three Stooges crossover- Shemp Howard pops up in a number of the
Universal films, with Besser in 1949’s Africa
Screams.) In their films, however, the duo are
almost always hung with a number of colourful
name-tags: Algy Shaw and Wellington Pflug in
South Seas paradise parody Pardon My Sarong
(1942) serves as a representative sample.
In their first movie they operate as occasional
comic relief from the romantic plotline, which
boys still play. A few years back on a visit to the
National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown,
New York, I passed a group of adolescents
on a field trip watching the ‘Who’s on First?’
routine, as seen in 1945’s The Naughty Nineties,
and reader, that tough crowd was losing it.
Among convinced Abbott and Costello
converts, many of us have been whiling away
the winter months with Shout! Factory’s 28
film, 15-disc Blu-ray set, which encompasses
their entire cinematic output at Universal
Pictures, beginning with 1940’s One Night in
the Tropics and ending in 1955 with Abbott and
Costello Meet the Mummy. For the novice, this
will either prove too much or not enough- in my experience Bud and Lou are an all-or-
nothing proposition, something you either
take or leave, like coriander or Frank Zappa.
The artists were both born New Jerseyites:
William Alexander ‘Bud’ Abbott of Asbury
Park; Louis Francis Cristillo, almost ten years
younger, a native of Paterson who’d bummed
around Hollywood as a stunt man – his facility
with the poetry of the pratfall is abundantly
on display here – before coming back east to
work the burlesque circuit, where in 1935
he met Abbott when both were playing the
Big phoney: Lou Costello (left) and Bud Abbott in Abbott and Costello in Hollywood (1945)Against all odds, the over-elaborate,
Pirandellian gags of the poor
man’s Laurel and Hardy are still
funny. What’s that about?HE’S WITH STUPID
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