Cracked Nuts (1931)

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Back in the 80's I was flipping through channels and I found this movie. I didn't know what it was but I knew it was funny. I caught it in the middle and they never said the name of the movie. I've been looking for it since and nobody knew what I was talking about. So if there's someone else out there in my shoes, I'm going to make a review that will be searchable. Because right now there's NOTHING on the internet like what I'm about to write.(minor spoilers) Twin cities of Amos and Bamos. We'll call Amos "B" and Bamos "A". That's so you don't get confused.Then they ended up drinking 100 year old hooch. Zup said you need to respect old age.At another point, Wendell said something wrong and Zup said, "Don't you know the King's English?" And Wendell said, "No. Is he English?" And of course Zup wants to be executed by something modern like an airplane. They accommodate him and he sits in a royal airplane bombing target chair.Weird stuff, but good.Now that I've provided something for a search engine to find, hopefully anyone else out there frantically looking for this movie will be able to find it. I just watched the whole thing on TCM, uninterrupted. Nice.Overall I found it to be really good. Like a cross between a Marx Bros and an Abbot and Costello movie. I was never in on the whole "Wheeler and Woolsey" thing but now I might just give them a chance.A lot of their banter when looking at the miniature battlefield was textbook Abbot and Costello. But the overall absurd situation was pure Marx.Also of note, the mean aunt is introduced very early in the movie. About 10 words in and you'd swear she was Endora from Bewitched. She sounds like Endora but she looks like Carol Burnette. She is neither of these.Boris Karloff has a bit part in this movie as an opportunistic scam artist. The one guy calls him Boris. It looked like it might have been a mistake but they missed it in editing so they just went with it. He was already an established actor by then and he made a kagillion movies in 1931. I'm guessing it was easier just to leave it in than to try to get ahold of Karloff and get him to re-shoot that one scene. It didn't take anything away from the story, so if it was me I'd have just left it in as well.Korny gags, silly puns, unbelievable situations. If you like this sort of light-hearted romp, then you might just enjoy Cracked Nuts. Plus it's just a little over an hour long. They crammed a lot of funny into a short space.Oh, I also FFed over most of the song and dance scene at the bottom of the staircase. I've never been one for that sort of thing. But at one point it looked like the guy stumbled back, lunged forward again, and began singing way too close to the girl's ear. If you look at the mechanics of that one move it looks pretty goofy. And she began laughing at him, leading me to think it wasn't planned.

Wheeler and Woolsey were a mixed bag in the minds of the public, but today, they have been re-discovered after decades of obscurity, first thanks to the old version of "American Movie Classics", then of course, "Turner Movie Classics", where they live on today. Only a few of their movies made it out onto VHS during the heyday of that disappearing media, and a few ("Dixiana", "Half Shot at Sunrise", "Hook, Line and Sinker") ended up on the public domain. Laser Disc manufacturers saw a market for their films ("Imagine Entertainment" back in the early 1990's) and a majority of their movies ended up there as well. Fortunately, as VHS sales have dwindled and Laser Discs have seemed to fallen off the face of the earth, the Warner Brothers Archive (ironic, since all but one of their features came from RKO Radio) has released pretty much all of their films, about ten of them into a special set, the rest individually."Cracked Nuts" is one of their best early films, as it is very elaborate and sort of ahead of its time. It pre-dates "Duck Soup" by two years, and one comedy routine (concerning the town of "Watt") was a decade before Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First?". Wheeler and Woolsey here play old pals who run into each other in a Ruritanian country still under the old monarchy but threatened by constant rebellion. Both are rivals for the throne and are pitted against each other thanks to former king Stanley Fields and two trouble-making rebels, one of them played by Boris Karloff. Ironically, two years after this, they would appear in a similar film, "Diplomaniacs", which saw them representing Native Americans at a Warsaw peace conference.Here, Wheeler gets the romantic story, paired with Dorothy Lee and fighting for her affections with her possessive aunt, the always amusing Edna May Oliver. Wheeler and Lee get to do a song and dance routine here which results in a kick-fest between the two of them and the imperious Oliver, a parody of the slap dance sequences Wheeler and Woolsey had done as far back as the original "Rio Rita" on Broadway and on film. The slapstick highlight of the film is a sequence where King Woolsey (as "King Zup") is seated outside his palace as the cross-eyed bomber Ben Turpin drops missiles on him and Wheeler desperately tries to protect his pal. Some of the comic asides between Woolsey and former queen Leni Stengel miss their target, but then a few land straight on. "Cracked Nuts" may not have the same impact as "Duck Soup", but there are moments when it almost reeks of genius.

That's the way they do it in comic strips when a bad joke takes place. In that case, "Cracked Nuts" would be festooned with these literary exclamations, due to the great number of bad jokes. I take a back seat to no one in my admiration for Wheeler and Woolsey, but this picture must represent the nadir of this very funny comedy team's association.The inane screenplay is not very good, about Wheeler becoming the king of a mythical kingdom, of which Woolsey is already the king. You can see a very young-looking Boris Karloff as one of his advisers, and also one of Hollywood's best character actresses in Edna May Oliver, who steals most of the scenes she's in. There's a good song and dance number between Wheeler and his girlfriend, Dorothy Lee.And that's about it in this very disappointing, unfunny comedy. This one is a far cry from "Half Shot At Sunrise", which is one of their best.

Wheeler and Woolsey made this romp about revolutions, assassinations, and romantic shenanigans, with a supporting cast including Dorothy Lee (who doesn't have much to do), Edna May Oliver (funny in fits and starts but not on screen enough), Boris Karloff (unmemorable), and Ben Turpin (cross-eyed as ever).There are some cute and funny bits - the opening sequence with Wheeler and the elevator; the 'What' and 'Which' sequence with the map; the flying bombs; the aunt and the shower; and so on.The one musical number for Wheeler and Lee is awful, nowhere near their usual standard, and actually becomes tedious and irritating very quickly.'Cracked Nuts' is mildly diverting but not particularly good as a whole; it is one of the team's weaker efforts. Although W&W are always good value and entertaining, their co-stars have a poor script to work with and not much of a plot.