Two Weeks to Live (1943)

Strong and Moving!

Sorry, this movie sucks

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

When I was quite young, Lum and Abner came on the radio for a 15 minute program every day-or so it seemed. The program was usually a dialogue between the two of them. There was not that much that was funny for a little kid, but their voices and speech were a treat.This movie is a pleasant easy-going version of their radio humor. A situation is set up for them to meet strange characters and get into comic situations. All of this had been done a lot before this; the oddball characters, the gags, the situations would all have been familiar to 1943 audiences. But the Lum and Abner characters with their distinctive "country" speech and their strange misunderstandings of the big city and the people in it , freshen things up quite a bit.This movies segues from one comic situation to another smoothly enough. If you don't find one funny, the next one will be along shortly, and it is likely to get a laugh out of you. Absolutely low pressure, easy-going humor.Try watching it when you're stressed out. This film will calm you down.

Two Weeks to Live... Starring old time radio guys Chester Lauck and Norris Goff, moved to the movie screen. And of course, Frank Pangborn as Mr. Pinkney. They inherit a railroad, and decide that being conductor is more fun than being president of the company. Then they are off to the big city for the wheeling and dealing of running the railroad. Lots of fun puns and quick one and two liners! The sound and picture quality are pretty rough, but these disks were probably copied after the copyright ran out (?). Lots of adventures, gags, fun characters that come and go. There IS a pretty good (if silly) plot line here, but it really doesn't matter... we're just along for the gags, jokes, punchlines. A fun watch, even if you never heard their radio shows back in the old days. Lots of outdoor location shots, and downtown LA. Too bad that as of today, none are listed in Locations on IMDb. Also liberal use of backdrops. Very Beverly Hillbillie-ish, but still a lot of fun. This is interesting, even just for historical reasons. If you haven't heard of them before, check them out at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lum_and_Abner . This is just one of a bunch of films they made in the 1940s.Directed by Malcolm St. Clair, who worked with ALL the biggies - Mack Sennett, Laurel & Hardy, Joan Crawford, Clara Bow.

Production values on this bit of nostalgia aren't terribly high, and many of the supporting characters aren't very believable, but this little movie is a joy to listen to. Lum and Abner are just as funny as they are on the radio.It's very clear that later shows owed a debt to these two great comedians; where would the Beverly Hillbillies and Andy Griffith been without them? Lum and Abner did a lot to bring rural America into focus, and to pioneer the "country-bumpkin-does-well-despite-himself" genre.This is one of several movies starring the denizens of Pine Ridge, Ark. I haven't seen the others yet, but I'll be looking for them.

Cute film. I wasn't familiar with the characters of Lum & Abner from radio or film, and my grandmother didn't really remember them, but we had a good time watching this.Two elderly small-town men from Arkansas are playing checkers at a country store when they learn that one of them has inherited a railroad from his deceased uncle. Before they even go talk to the lawyer, they sell $10,000 dollars worth of shares in it to the people in town, in order to raise the money to purchase land for a right-of-way for a spur line into their town.When they go to the city, they find the railroad is not quite what they thought, and Abner slips down a flight of stairs in the lawyer's skyscraper. After a visit to a doctor, and a mix-up of records, they believe Abner has just two weeks to live, and they must also find a way to pay back the townspeople. A helpful rhyming window-washer with an invisible dog suggests various ways to get money for doing high-risk tasks. Most of the time, they don't complete the task, or decide against it. They also unwittingly miss a couple opportunities to get all the money they need for things they've already done.In one scene, the movie oddly echoes Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotage (1936). In that film, one infamous scene involves a boy who's unknowingly carrying a time bomb, and the boy is taking longer to get to his destination than he's supposed to take. There's a particularly tense scene on a bus. In this movie, a character unwittingly carries a time bomb, takes longer than he's supposed to to get where he's going, and along the way temporarily hands the disguised bomb to a young boy, and to a young girl on a bus. I wonder if this was coincidental or not.Anyway, my grandmother and I enjoyed watching this.