Abbott & Costello Go to Mars (1953)

May 7, 2003

by Nathan Shumate

abbottncostellogotomars

Directed by Charles Lamont
Written by D.D. Beauchamp and John Grant
Starring
- Bud Abbott
- Lou Costello
- Mari Blanchard
- Robert Paige
- Horace McMahon

Despite the fact that their film outings proved nothing so much as their true forté in short skits, Abbott and Costello still managed to make plenty of movies. I guess the allure of seeing Bud and Lou forty feet high kept people coming back. And it’s not like those movies were actually bad (well, maybe Jack and the Beanstalk was). In fact, I think they probably played very well in venues like drive-ins; the plots were always so thin as to be almost incidental, so one could be distracted for several moments (wink wink, nudge nudge), then come back to the proceedings on screen, enjoy what was going on, and not feel like anything of consequence had been missed.

Lou, naturally, is a likeable lunkhead; he’s Orville, a grown-up orphan who now works at the orphanage himself. Bud, naturally, is a harried working man; he’s Lester, courier for a Super-Secret Scientific Laboratory. Orville almost hits a policeman with his motorized model airplane and dives into the back of Lester’s delivery van to hide; Lester unwittingly drives him back to the Super-Secret Scientific Laboratory. Ta-dah! Instant comedy team!

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The scientists of the Super-Secret Scientific Laboratory, led by the good-natured Dr. Wilson (Robert Paige), are making a rocketship capable of interstellar travel. Why, you may ask, do I insist on capitalizing the name of the Super-Secret Scientific Laboratory? Because hey, they deserve it. These guys, after all, have been able to construct a huge gleaming rocketship that they keep plainly visible outdoors in the hills, and yet no one has heard anything about it until Orville accidentally sees it. Then, of course, genial Dr. Wilson decides that Orville better not go home just yet, not until they’re ready to tell the papers. (No, this is not played as being an ominous or overbearing thing. It’s just assumed that someone in authority like Dr. Wilson should be able to decide to detain Orville in peacetime for seeing a secret but non-military project. Heck, the scientists of the Super-Secret Scientific Laboratory are a multi-national lot — this whole thing could be considered borderline treasonous! Foreign powers on U.S. soil; what’s next? Black helicopters? United Nations concentration camps? I’m just imagining the current leaders of the John Birch Society watching this in rapt awe as children…)

Not only that, but unlike the U.S. of A., which makes its spacecraft juuuuust barely able to get wherever they’re going, these scientists made an extra-powerful rocket, and THEN discussed where to go when it was finished. The moon? Nah, everyone can already see it from Earth; it’s not exciting enough. Should it be Mars or Venus, then? (Assuming, I suppose, that all three planets just happen to be on the same side of the sun right then.)

“Well, MY hair’s dry.”

The vote ends up not mattering, though, because while the scientists have convened, Dr. Wilson has sent Lester and Orville to pack some supplies into the rocketship. And sooner than you can say, “What does this button do?”, the two are spacebound.

Well, not exactly. Lester tries desperately to steer, which means that the ship does plenty of loop-de-loops as Orville crashes around the cabin, and zooms down New York street,s barely missing the Empire State Building. (Give yourself extra points if you predicted that a drunk guy would be the main witness when the rocket flies into and out of the Lincoln Tunnel.) And while I don’t usually like to rip on dated SFX, the rocket effects here are poor even for 1953. The superimposition leaves the shadowed portion of the rocket invisible against the background image, and the rest of it isn’t terribly opaque either. I can see the next day’s headlines now: “SEMI-TRANSPARENT SPACE SHIP BUZZES NEW YORK!”

Then Lester pushes another button, and the rocketship goes on autopilot and lands. Where? On Mars? No, but that’s what Lester and Orville assume. No, they’re actually just outside of New Orleans — and it’s Mardi Gras! (Like I needed to say that last part. If New Orleans is in a movie, it’s ALWAYS Mardi Gras. With one exception.) So when Lester and Orville leave the rocket in spacesuits and wander into town, they’re confronted by nothing but people wearing big paper mache heads, which they assume is just how Martians look. Ha! Comedy! Of course, the shtick depends on the “fact” that during Mardi Gras, New Orleans is populated by nothing but costumed revelers — that even the waiters in restaurants wear them. And the diners too.

“So yesterday I tried to drive to work in the lampshade again…”

Right about here the movie starts becoming something different, because two escaped cons in the bayou saw Lester and Orville leave the rocketship, and go aboard themselves to change out of prison stripes and into extra spacesuits. Harry (Jack Kruschen) is the smart one, and Mugsy (Horace McMahon) is, well, the kind of character who’d be named Mugsy. Done up in the spacesuits, the go into down and rob a bank using the stunguns from the ship, then hightail it back to the ship to wait for Lester and Orville to fly them away. The latter two soon arrive back, having been mistaken for those OTHER two spacesuit-wearing guys who robbed the bank.

And from there, we head right into a different movie again. The robbers force Lester to push more buttons and get them into space, where their path to either Mars or Venus is a toss-up decided by the planets’ competing gravitational pull. (Uh huh.) They end up heading to Venus, having the expected gravity-less hijinx along the way. And when they land on Venus, Orville says that the fog (Venus is foggy, you know) makes it look like Los Angeles. See? They landed back on Earth thinking it was Mars, and now they land on Venus, thinking it’s Earth! It’s funny, see!

And who lives on Venus? Oh, come on. You’ve been watching these movies long enough to know that it’s nothing but beautiful immortal women (played by Miss Universe contestants, no less) who got rid of men long ago but now have the hankering for a man around the house. Orville is the first one they see, so immediately they make him their king, though Queen Allura (Mari Blanchard) still holds a grudge against the entire gender because four hundred years ago, her husband was unfaithful. Think Orville will be able to keep his mind on just one woman, with an entire planet of eager beauties thronging around him? Hmm…

Which is exactly what all us men suspected women did when we weren’t around anyway…

As far as I’m concerned, the real movie didn’t begin until they got to Venus. To a large degree, the plot seems like it was made up as they went along, and they didn’t hit the really meaty storyline until two-thirds of the way through. The trip to New Orleans seems like an overlong side trip, rather than an integral part of the proceedings.

Venus, on the other hand, is what really works, hinging largely on the conceit (which runs through so many of Abbott and Costello’s movies) that Lou Costello is counterintuitively attractive to beautiful women (man, I have got to put on some weight). That is, until Queen Allura uses the widescreen TV to show the Venusians what REAL men look like. This is good schtick, folks.

In fact, what the movie lacks in coherence, it almost makes up in schtick. We get Costello using a comically-poor Italian accent, stunts with magnetic moonboots, the standard complement of pratfalls, and a heaping helping of faceslapping and other violence. In fact, the first half hour is almost Stooges-like in its use of comedic abuse.

Lou gets his own Fortress of Solitude.

And the addition of the two convicts, while one of the tiredest “I can’t think of what to do next” story techniques, is intriguing because the cons are a pseudo-reflection of Abbott and Costello themselves, with a similar dynamic. Bud and Lou probably thought it would be too unsympathetic for them to play dedicated criminals in any of their films, but here we get at least a glimpse of what that would have been like.

And as a closing note… despite the title, Abbott and Costello never do go to Mars. The go to New Orleans thinking it’s Mars, and they go to Venus, but then it’s back home for them. I guess, with the made-up-as-they-went-along plotline, they discovered they had enough script pages for a full feature without getting that far.