(Some Spoilers) Almost totally unknown to todays movie going audiences the comedy team of Bert Wheeler & Robert Woolsey was one of the most successful, as RKO Pictures biggest money makers, as well as prolific, making some two dozen films in a span of just under ten years, of the 1930's.
It was in the mid 1930's when Robert Woosley started suffering from health problems that the comedy team started to go under and finally came to an end with Woosley's death at age 50 in 1938 of kidney failure. Ironically Robert Woosley died on Halloween of that year the very day that Orsen Wells made headlines with his unforgettable as well as shocking "War of the Worlds" broadcast on national radio.
"The Nitwits" is a both comedy murder drama with both Wheeler and Woolsey, as Johnnie & Newton,playing two cigar store employees who among other things have developed this truth machine that can force anyone who's put under it to tell the truth no matter how bad it would effect him or her. Even if the truth can send the person to prison for murder.
In the office building where Jonnie and Newton have their cigar stand record producer Winfield Lake, Hale Hamilton,gets a,threatening note from this person who calls himself the Black Widow. The Black Widow tells Lake to pay up, the amount of cash is never made clear, or die.
Getting top New York Private Eye William Darrell, Fred Keating, on the case doesn't at all help the concerned Winfield Lake with him ending up shot to death in his office by an unseen assailant. It's with the killer now targeting Mrs. Lake, Evelyn Brent, to come up with the blackmail money that PI Darrell suddenly and inexplicably decides, for the first time in his career, to give into the blackmailers demands!
While all this is going on Mr. Lake's pretty secretary Mary Roberts,Betty Grable,is implicated in his murder being that she was the last person to see him alive and also had a gun in her possession! A gun that her boyfriend Johnnie gave Mary as a present! It doesn't take long for both Johnnie and his friend Newton to get themselves in involved in Mr. Lake's murder in trying to clear the innocent Mary Roberts.
The killer himself is caught red-handed by Johnnie and Newton when he plops himself down on the chair that the truth detector, invented by Newton, is installed on. Screaming out uncountably that he's in fact the killer, the Black Weidow, the two "Nitwits" don't believe him thinking that the machine had malfunctioned! This gives the by now recognized, by the audience, Black Widow a new lease on life, as well as a scary Halloween skeleton custom, to end up murdering a number of other people including suspected killer, by the police, the auditor of M. Lake's enterprises Mr. Lurch, Arthur Aylesworth!
Hilarious final sequence with both Johnnie and Newton having it out with the Black Widow and his henchmen, as well as the bumbling police, as they end up throwing everything from beer bottles to one to five gallon jugs as well as the bathroom bathtub on top of their heads. There also Black comic Willie Best as Sleepy the building elevator operator who together with his neighborhood, Harlem, dice shooting friends uncover the secret way that the Black widow is to get his ransom money, through the ventilator shaft. That leads the killer, in his skeleton costume, to come out of hiding and scare the living hell out of Sleepy and his friends as well everyone else in the cast and audience until one of Newton's over-sized moonshine jugs puts him out of business.
It was in the mid 1930's when Robert Woosley started suffering from health problems that the comedy team started to go under and finally came to an end with Woosley's death at age 50 in 1938 of kidney failure. Ironically Robert Woosley died on Halloween of that year the very day that Orsen Wells made headlines with his unforgettable as well as shocking "War of the Worlds" broadcast on national radio.
"The Nitwits" is a both comedy murder drama with both Wheeler and Woolsey, as Johnnie & Newton,playing two cigar store employees who among other things have developed this truth machine that can force anyone who's put under it to tell the truth no matter how bad it would effect him or her. Even if the truth can send the person to prison for murder.
In the office building where Jonnie and Newton have their cigar stand record producer Winfield Lake, Hale Hamilton,gets a,threatening note from this person who calls himself the Black Widow. The Black Widow tells Lake to pay up, the amount of cash is never made clear, or die.
Getting top New York Private Eye William Darrell, Fred Keating, on the case doesn't at all help the concerned Winfield Lake with him ending up shot to death in his office by an unseen assailant. It's with the killer now targeting Mrs. Lake, Evelyn Brent, to come up with the blackmail money that PI Darrell suddenly and inexplicably decides, for the first time in his career, to give into the blackmailers demands!
While all this is going on Mr. Lake's pretty secretary Mary Roberts,Betty Grable,is implicated in his murder being that she was the last person to see him alive and also had a gun in her possession! A gun that her boyfriend Johnnie gave Mary as a present! It doesn't take long for both Johnnie and his friend Newton to get themselves in involved in Mr. Lake's murder in trying to clear the innocent Mary Roberts.
The killer himself is caught red-handed by Johnnie and Newton when he plops himself down on the chair that the truth detector, invented by Newton, is installed on. Screaming out uncountably that he's in fact the killer, the Black Weidow, the two "Nitwits" don't believe him thinking that the machine had malfunctioned! This gives the by now recognized, by the audience, Black Widow a new lease on life, as well as a scary Halloween skeleton custom, to end up murdering a number of other people including suspected killer, by the police, the auditor of M. Lake's enterprises Mr. Lurch, Arthur Aylesworth!
Hilarious final sequence with both Johnnie and Newton having it out with the Black Widow and his henchmen, as well as the bumbling police, as they end up throwing everything from beer bottles to one to five gallon jugs as well as the bathroom bathtub on top of their heads. There also Black comic Willie Best as Sleepy the building elevator operator who together with his neighborhood, Harlem, dice shooting friends uncover the secret way that the Black widow is to get his ransom money, through the ventilator shaft. That leads the killer, in his skeleton costume, to come out of hiding and scare the living hell out of Sleepy and his friends as well everyone else in the cast and audience until one of Newton's over-sized moonshine jugs puts him out of business.