Jack and the Beanstalk (1952)

Directed by Jean Yarbrough
Written by Nat Curtis
Songs by Lester Lee
Starring
- Bud Abbott
- Lou Costello
- Dorothy Ford
- Shaye Cogan
- James Alexander

As big a fan as I am of Abbott and Costello, I have to admit that their best work was in short skits and variety shows, both on radio and television. It seems that their style of comedy wouldn’t let them really construct the basis for a feature film unless it was by a particular well-used gimmick: Stick the boys into a pre-made and familiar scenario. (I feared that, after the death of Jim Henson, the Muppets were going to become my generation’s Abbott & Costello, and not in a good way; whereas The Muppet Christmas Carol seemed like an ideal vehicle to get them back on their feet, Muppet Treasure Island indicated an ominous trend of retelling public domain stories in felt. Muppets From Space certainly didn’t bring the Muppets back to the quality of their Henson days, but at least it forestalled what could certainly have become a tired gimmick very quickly. End of digression.)

The most remembered of such Abbott & Costello vehicles were the “Meets (and Buries) a Universal Franchise” films, but Jack and the Beanstalk follows the same broad outlines. Unfortunately, it doesn’t come close to even the least of the Universal entries (whichever one you think that is) in terms of humor or memorability.

“You remind me of my mudda…”

Consciously harking back to The Wizard of Oz, the present-day prologue in black and white has a couple of theater actors, Eloise and Arthur (Shaye Cogan and James Alexander) who may not be able to get to their performance, since they can’t find a babysitter for Eloise’s troublemaking super-intelligent little brother Donald (David Stollery). No, no one ever mentions where their parents are. In desperation, they call an employment agency, where Jack (Lou Costello) and his manager Deke (Bud Abbott) have just shown up looking for babysitting work. (Deke is Jack’s manager. Yeah, it’s lame.)

Once into the home (hired with no background check, no references — not so much as even a first and last name! How’s THAT for a different era?), Jack tries to put Donald to sleep by reading Jack and the Beanstalk, but soon it’s Donald reading to Jack, who slips off into sleep and dreams the rest of the movie (in color, reversing the common wisdom of dreaming in black and white).

Jack is, naturally, Jack, single idiot son of an impoverished mother (Barbara Brown) in a land terrorized by the cloud-dwelling giant who killed his dad. There are some added complications to the plot as well; it seems the local princess is scheduled to marry the neighboring prince, when each is abducted by the giant shortly after meeting Jack (gosh, that’s almost as suspicious as Murder She Wrote). The princess, by the way, is Princess Eloise, and the prince is Prince Arthur, and yes, it’s the two actors from the prologue. Apparently somebody really liked The Wizard of Oz.

“Who dressed him like this?”

Jack and Mom, meanwhile, are suffering from giant-induced famine, and so Jack takes their milkcow Henry in to town to sell to the butcher, Mr. Dinkelpuss (Abbott), who proceeds to bilk Jack out of his beef for a handful of “magic” beans. (Then the giant snatches the cow too.) In a rare variation on the story, Jack’s mother doesn’t fly into a crying rage, but instead sadly tells her dimwitted son to plant them and maybe they’ll grow.

They do, and by the next morning the entire village has gathered to look at the beanstalk — including Dinkelpuss, who hadn’t meant to sell him real magic beans, and who wants his cow back. Jack decides to climb the beanstalk to the giant’s cloud to rescue the princess, and maybe also to get back the gold egg-laying chicken that used to be their means of support. Dollar signs light up in Dinkelpuss’ eyes at that, so he insists on going along.

At which point… we’re punished for some unknown misdeed by being forced to sit through an incredibly lackluster musical number while they climb, performed by singing and dancing townspeople. And Lou. (Stop singing, Lou. I mean it. I’ll chop the damned beanstalk down myself, I swear I will.) It’s padding, pure and simple, and it’s not engendering kind feelings on my part.

“Hey — I can see my house!”

When everyone stops trilling and capering, Jack and Dinkelpuss get to the top and discover some massive (well, oversized) footprints. Then — oh, jeez, while Dinkelpuss wanders off, Jack goes into a solo musical number, all the time being watched by the lowering, hairy-faced giant (6′6″ Buddy Baer, the Giant From the Unknown, who also played a cop that Jack bumper-tapped on the way to the employment office — YES, WE GET IT! YOU REALLY REALLY LIKED THE WIZARD OF OZ!). Instead of merely stomping this annoying little man, the giant lets him finish his interminable song and run off — but not to worry, he soon scoops up Jack and Dink under each arm and makes his way back to the castle…

…Where the princess is being treated quite well by the giant’s captive housekeeper Polly (the none-too-short Dorothy Ford, who was — naturally — the girl behind the counter at the employment agency). The princess is one of those “I wish everyone would treat me like a normal person” types (who obviously doen’t realize that, given the milieu, that means she wants to be a disenfranchised chattel with no civil or property rights) — oddly enough, so is the prince (also in the dungeons), and since they’d never seen each other before, they take assumed names with each other, and neither knows the other is their betrothed. (One would think, again taking the milieu into account, that their complete set of perfect teeth would have been a dead giveaway, but…)

Jack, pressed into service as a house-servant, arranges a moonlight rendezvous for the pair, so that instead of conducting their own vapid musical numbers through stone walls, they can do it face to face. I don’t know anything about Shaye Cogan or James Alexander, but I can only assume that they were hired for their singing as opposed to their acting skills, as each has the charisma of a papercut, and together they have the combined chemistry of all the noble gases put together. (Actually, all the supporting players are pretty lousy all the way through. Maybe they were being kind and trying not to show up the romantic duo.)

“Who dressed him like this?”

After then a long and bad dance number where Jack romances Polly (he’s 5′3″, whereas she’s gotta at least top six feet — that’s instant comedy right there, isn’t it?), they get back to their escape plan, which is to construct catapults out of the springy trees growing right up against the castle wall. Um, yeah. That sounds like a good idea. No, really. You first.

Thanks to the fact that Jack inadvertantly fed teh giant’s chickens gunpowder the night before, they end up with a secret weapon for the long chase and fight scene tha leads to their escape. Naturally, there’s a daring escape via a swinging chandelier (I think it was Chekov who said that if a chandelier is shown in act one, it must be swung on by act three). Everyone gets down, Jack chops the tree, the giant makes a giant-shaped hole in the turf, and there’s time for yet another tiresome musical number before Jack wakes up back in Black-and-White-World and gets fired for sleeping on the job. The end.

Despite the fact that making a moderately entertaining movie along these lines should be a no-brainer, the entire movie is a series of bad decisions. The Oz-esque borrowings contribute nothing, as there’s no continuity or correspondence between the real characters and their dream counterparts (which was the whole reason that that gimmick was successful in The Wizard of Oz). Thus the entire prologue serves no purpose except to pad the running time, which, with aaaaaallllll the musical numbers, clocked in at 78 tedious minutes. The supporting cast, as noted, is forgettable at best, and the royal lovers actually pulled my TV screen concave with their sheer suckosity.

Warning: DO NOT LET THEM BREED.

What’s more, the script keeps Abbott and Costello apart from each other for huge stretches, and even when they’re in a scene together they rarely interact. Since the dream-Jack and Dinkelpuss are no more than passing acquaintances, they can’t give us that practiced repartee which drove all the successful Abbott & Costello acts. How can you have an Abbott & Costello vehicle with so little shtick? The only source of entertainment offered us is Lou Costello pratfalling and mugging constantly for the camera, and that wears thin very quickly without anyone or anything for him to play off.

It’s exercises like this that make you long for even their weakest encounter with a Universal franchise — or better yet, entice you to pull out that audiocassette of “Who’s On First?” and listen to them doing what they do best.