Let's start with the movie studio. Universal Pictures was Hollywood's smallest outfit, and their perennial flirtation with bankruptcy made growth difficult. Past skids into financial trouble had been averted by an unexpected fad for Gothic monster movies in the early 1930s, or a public fascination for perky singer Deanna Durbin in the later 30s. As 1940 dawned, however, the studio was once again on the brink of ruin.
Meanwhile, vaudeville clowns Abbott and Costello had been hired as supporting players in 1940's One Night in the Tropics. It was a low-budget programmer, the sort of thing the studio churned out thoughtlessly--the movie equivalent of a bag of Cheetos. And when it made back millions of dollars in profit, with audiences clamoring for more of those bickering comedians, Universal rushed the duo into their own starring vehicle, Buck Privates (1941).
For years they held steady as one of the top box office attractions in the country. Their enormously profitable and popular films were exceedingly cheap to make--even as the boys' demands for special treatment escalated. Universal almost could not make enough Abbott and Costello pictures to meet demand.
Pardon My Sarong was their third comedy of 1942, and the eighth they made overall. Written by their longtime writer John Grant with the help of Marx Brothers writer Nat Perrin, and the colorfully named True Boardman (now working on his third Abbott and Costello picture), Pardon My Sarong is a loose, rambling collection of comedy bits. The boys accidentally steal a bus, drive it into the sea, go on the run from the cops, pretend to be magicians, fight some sharks, get shipwrecked on a Pacific Island, and defeat the villainous schemes of some gem thieves. Or, more precisely, the film finds the boys maintaining a running sequence of rapid-fire banter and slapstick shenanigans.
It was their bread and butter, and the stuff that thrilled early 40s audiences. It was also, sad to say, the cause of some unseemly backstage strife. But for that, first some history.
William "Bud" Abbott was more or less born into showbiz, or at least its seedier edges. His father was a promoter for the Barnum and Bailey Circus and his mother was a stunt rider. Bud naturally moved into the "family business" as it were, and started a long grind of a career in burlesque. His specialty was playing the straight man--the guy who served the setups for the comic to land the jokes. It was a sweet gig--not nearly as demanding as actually making the laughs, and it paid way better. Louis Costello was nearly ten years his junior, born to a middle class family and nurtured as an athlete. He abandoned those opportunities to run away to Hollywood with a crazy plan of breaking into the movies--which he eventually did, but only after some detours.
The two crossed paths in 1935, although there are enough stories about how they came to be teamed together to make every version suspect. No matter, somehow they started playing together on stage, then on radio, and five years later they landed a contract at Universal and rocketed to stardom. It was there, on the studio lot, that the seams started to show.
Abbott played a bully, who constantly mistreated his helpless and hapless baby-faced colleague. He was a perfect straight man, almost the dictionary definition of the term, but his persona had been honed for stage sketches and isolated routines. As the team became a beloved American institution, and anchored feature length motion pictures several times a year, the question was begged: why does the little guy put up with this?
Problematically, that's what Costello started to wonder to himself. His partner excelled at what he did, but was that enough? Bud Abbott was not a physical comic, he didn't sing, he couldn't really act. Abbott and Costello movies would always be limited by what Abbott could be expected to contribute.
They kept their arguments private, but split up in 1945 after a petty disagreement proved the final straw. They eventually patched things up, reunited, returned to the screen to face Universal's roster of monsters in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) and went on to conquer television, before retiring their act in 1956 after a disastrous revue at a Las Vegas hotel.
In 1942, filming Pardon My Sarong, all of that was yet in their future. They were still young and new, but already hot enough to earn a higher caliber of costars: like leading lady Virginia Bruce, Preston Sturges favorite William Demarest, horror film star Lionel Atwill, and Western hero Leif Erickson. The film also finds time for several show-stopping musical numbers. Rock and Roll Hall of Famers the Ink Spots (comprised of Orville Jones, Charles Fuqua, Bill Kenney, and Deek Watson) made their second, and last, screen appearance here, and in one of their scenes were joined by acrobatic dancers Tip, Tap, and Toe.
Director Erle C. Kenton took over the Abbott and Costello films from their former director Arthur Lubin. Kenton was an ex-Keystone Kop whose background in both Mack Sennett slapstick and 1930s Gothic horror gave him a good grounding to handle the shifting tones of this mildly ambitious comedy. Originally titled Road to Montezuma, Sarong was fashioned in part as a self-conscious riff on the Bob Hope "Road to..." cycle and a spoof of the popular South Seas fantasies starring Dorothy Lamour. By the time Lionel Atwill shows up to chew some scenery as the heavy, Kenton tosses in some recycled music cues from Hans J. Salter's score to Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) for good measure.
Kenton hired choreographer Katherine Dunham to stage the various native dance scenes on the island, because he believed her to be the go-to expert for the dances of Tahiti. Dunham, an expert in Caribbean and African dance, figured he had confused Haiti with Tahiti, but a job was a job so why correct the man?
Pardon My Sarong was the second highest performing box office hit of 1942. With Costello and Abbott now earning a twenty percent cut of their films' revenue, it was a satisfying end to an enjoyable romp.
By David Kalat
Sources:
Leonard Maltin, The Great Movie Comedians.
Scott Allen Nollen, Abbott and Costello on the Home Front: A Critical Study of the Wartime Films
Barbara O'Connor, Katherine Dunham: Pioneer of Black Dance
James Robert Parish and William T. Leonard, The Funsters
