User Reviews

Poor man's answer to Abbott and Costello. Leslie Goodwins directs Wally Brown and Alan Carney as a couple of Army Privates in this low-budget RKO comedy. Jerry Miles(Brown) and Mike Strager(Carney)are a couple of GIs on leave and wrangle invitations to a dinner party at a female boarding house. It seems the cook falls ill with scarlet fever causing the house to be quarantined. Bumbling soldiers with a house full of perky women...innocent enough. Funny? Well...I guess so. Brown and Carney honed their comedy in vaudeville and ended up making a couple more inexpensive money makers for RKO. Other cast members: Richard Martin, Margaret Landry, Patti Brill and Erford Gage.

When the highlight of any movie, especially a comedy, comes within the first 20 minutes and consists of two "fair to midlin'" impressions by one actor of another (Edward G. Robinson and Charles Laughton, in this case), you probably ought to skip it.

This humorless Wally Brown-Alan Carney film was directed by Leslie Goodwins. The story and adaptation were co-written by someone who went on to receive two Academy Award nominations for Writing, William Bowers, though they were for dramas not comedies.

It's about three persons from different walks of life who are brought together when they were drafted by the Army during World War II. Two of the boot camp rookies, played by Brown and Carney (who does the impressions), are goof balls to one straight, played by Richard Martin, and their Sergeant (Erford Gage, who will remind you of Mark Metcalf's Doug Niedermeyer in Animal House (1978)). Though I don't really care for the "Three Stooges" humor, I much prefer it to this poor attempt at imitating it.

Jerry Miles (Brown) is in show business when he gets his draft notice; Mike Strager (Carney) is a truck driver in a loading line when he gets his; and Bob Prescott (Martin) is playing the piano. There are the usual, comic mishaps one has seen done better in films like Buck Privates (1941), and then we learn that Prescott's uncle is a colonel (James Hamilton, uncredited, notable character actor also known as Perry White on TV's Superman) on the base.

Since Prescott had the highest score on the entry aptitude tests, he's applied for officer's training, but his association with Miles and Strager continually jeopardizes his future. Soon the three find themselves on leave, being picked up by the lovely Peggy Linden (Rita Corday) for a dinner party at her home.

Miles meets Patsy (Patti Brill), Prescott gets to know Peggy, while the chubby Strager is left to holding an egg through a door and its jam (don't ask). When a doctor (Henry Roquemore, uncredited) arrives to check on the cook and mis-diagnoses her condition as "Scarlet Fever", Mr. Linden (Byron Foulger, uncredited) returns to find that his home has been quarantined. Of course, Sergeant Burke doesn't believe his men when they call him, so he comes to the house and is told he can't leave it for two weeks either. Pat O'Malley appears, uncredited, as a policeman. Fortunately (?), the doctor corrects his error so that "we" can witness some more adventures.

Next the "boys" find themselves A.W.O.L. (Absent WithOut Leave) in San Francisco, some 60 miles from where their training maneuvers are taking place. After some misadventures on the docks (in which you will see William Haade and Tom Kennedy, uncredited), and then in an Army hospital, they make their way back to Sergeant Burke & company.

There isn't much more except for the film's horrific ending in which these three "soldiers" are actually shown to be part of group of men being sent to fight the enemy ... now that's really NOT funny!

Thankfully, the film runs little more than an hour. Unfortunately, it's followed by a sequel Rookies in Burma (1943).

Wally Brown and Alan Carney, the poor man's Abbott and Costello, play a pair of bumbling GI's (What else?) who, after causing chaos in basic training, somehow get invited to a party where the cook comes down with scarlet fever, causing the entire household to be quarantined. When the funniest part of a comedy comes in the first twenty minutes with the fat guy (Carney) doing impressions of Robinson and Laughton, it's best to turn it off right there and then. A rich playboy type (right out of Abbott and Costello's Buck Privates) befriends the boys and later accompanies them on their misadventures. If you feel you must, the best time to watch this is at three in the morning with a bottle of whiskey at your side. That way, when you awaken the next morning you can convince yourself that it was all a dream brought on by too much booze.

Even though the Abbott and Costello film "Buck Privates" was two years old when this was released, it was the prototype for what every military comedy strive to be. This second string military comedy features are RKO's brief imitators of Abbott and Costello, Alan Carney and Wally Brown, who were somewhat talented in their own right but would suffer inevitable comparisons to Universal's box office gems just as Olsen and Johnson were. the team tries to do everything that Abbott and Costello did but at three times the speed, and that makes the comedy often forced and corny. One the boys does imitations of Edward G Robinson and Charles Laughton which do create some brief chuckles.

What is here in the brief running time of 66 minutes is basically a series of sketches where the two clowns, drafted into the Army against their will, create chaos and end up quarantined in the home of a local social light and then somehow end up on special assignment at a San Francisco base we're all of a sudden they are on a boat heading to active duty. God help their sergeant and any of the other troops around them! There's nobody familiar in the supporting cast even worth mentioning, but somehow this managed to have a sequel, rookies in Burma, which is basically more of the same and half a star less in my rating.