Customer Reviews

Hook, Line and Sinker

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I think it's thier funniest film ever; too short if anything. This 2004 Digiview transfer doesn't look too bad; especially when the original movie's age is considered. "Hook, Line and Sinker" was the team's fifth film and was directed by Edward F. Cline who had directed W.C. Fields in "The Bank Dick" and "My Little Chickadee" and directed Wheeler and Woolsey in two other films "Cracked Nuts" and "High Flyers" (Their last film). The plot has Wheeler and Woolsey as insurance salesman, who go into the hotel business at the sight of a pretty girl, Mary Marsh (Dorothy Lee, who appeared several times with the team including their first film "Rio Rita"). Marsh is running away from home because she does not want to marry the man her mother has chosen for her. When Wheeler sees her he instantly falls for her and wants to help her run her hotel, which has been abandon for years.

This is one of the very worst prints of any film I have ever seen on DVD!!! Wheeler and Woolsey are a very funny comedy team who starred in at least a dozen films in the 1930's, they seemed on the verge of being a real cult act in the 1990's when American Movie Classics ran almost their entire RKO filmography. Alas, today an old movie on American Movie Classics is one from the 1960's and while Turner Classic Movies owns the rights to the RKO library, they don't show much of W&W whose humor is a perhaps a little too low rent for TCM's "classy" image. It's a shame because they are genuinely funny, ingenue Dorothy Lee is a doll, and this actually is a good movie so I hate panning this DVD but the print quality is deplorable. TCM is going to have to air those W&W films eventually because people can only sit through so many showings of the same MGM classics over and over so I would just wait for them to air this if I were you.

Near the beginning of this film a character calls Wheeler and Woolsey "delightfully unfunny", talk about truth in advertising!

I'm not a big fan of Wheeler and Woolsey's comedy but I continue to watch their films mostly because they are rare. I've seen 7 of their films, TCM has been playing them quite often. Their films are harmless but, for me, not very engaging. Wheeler and Woolsey were a very popular comedy team for RKO in the 1930s but time has not been kind to them. How do I know they were popular? Because they made 21 films together. Let me tell you the way Hollywood works, they won't let you keep making films if they get nothing out of it. So someone was watching their films.

In the past I've defended Laurel & Hardy's 1940s films such as "Saps at Sea", "Air Raid Wardens", and "A Chump at Oxford". I've even defended Buster Keaton's talking pictures; "Bedroom, Bath & Parlor", "Speak Easily", and "The Passionate Plumber" and while I find Wheeler and Woolsey just as harmless and light as those films they have not left as big an impression on me. Rest a sured there is ALWAYS at least one good gag in their films. If it's really good there are two or three, the films are too short for there to be more. But as time has shown their comedy isn't as fresh as Chaplin, Laurel & Hardy, Bob Hope or the Marx Brothers.

"Hook, Line and Sinker" was the team's fifth film and was directed by Edward F. Cline. Who had directed W.C. Fields in "The Bank Dick" and "My Little Chickadee" and directed Wheeler and Woolsey in two other films "Cracked Nuts" and "High Flyers" (their last film). The plot has Wheeler and Woolsey as insurance salesman, who go into the hotel business at the sight of a pretty girl, Mary Marsh (Dorothy Lee, who appeared several times with the team including their first film "Rio Rita"). Marsh is running away from home because she does not want to marry the man her mother has chosen for her. When Wheeler sees her he instantly falls for her and wants to help her run her hotel, which has been abandon for years.

To be honest the plot isn't important. The whole reason we are going to wtach this film is strickly because we want to see Wheeler and Woolsey, right? At first I found the film slow, but slowly started having a good time and managed to actually have a smile on my face, could I actually start becoming a fan?

I wrote a review for their film "Kentucky Kernels" and at the time I thought that was their best film. I've since changed my mind as I've seen more films by them. I now think "Peach-O-Reno" is the best with "Hook, Line and Sinker" a distant second.

The film has some bright spots near the end and Woolsey, while not in the ranks of Bob Hope or Groucho Marx, can deliver a one-liner. I found a scene between Wheeler and Lee involving a gun out of character but again the film is worth seeing if for any reason because it's rare. And I even look forward to seeing more of their films in the future.

Bottom-line: Slightly better than most of the Wheeler and Woolsey films I've seen. Has some good moments here and there. It's a harmless silly movie good for those of us who enjoy comedies from the time period.

These guys are new to me - but the film is not bad - nothing on the level of even the lesser Laurel and Hardys or Marx Brothers of the '40s, more reminiscent of a taem like Clark and McCullough, but they have a way of keeping the viewer interested - dialogue is at times very witty; other times, bizarro bad.

Plot is typical of the period - something about a coupla Insurance Salesmen who happen upon a rich girl running away from home - actually driving away from home in a brand new coupe - who is en route to the family hotel, not to hideout but to prove that she can run a business and is not the pampered kid whose main raison de'etre is to wait for the family financier (who hangs out with some very questionable characters) to propose to her. As it turns out, she's alot more interested in an Insurance Salesman - I couldn't tell ya if it's Wheeler or Whoolsey, but it doesn't really matter.

The hotel finally opens and it's "open house" on the guests' valuables. Alot of foolish horseplay with guns but it stays on course.

for the unititated, this is a very earlie "talkie", one of the first motion pictures to have sound striped on the celluloid and not on a syncronized disc - hence the actor's speaking unnaturally loud (into some hidden microphone). Another disconcerting aspect is the still awkward adjustment from silents to sound. The reactions are "big", as if facial features and body movements must drive the plot.

Print is sub-standard but not something to reduce the rating more than one star.

The movie is easily a **** movie, but this Digiview copy looks horrible.

1) It is mastered from a copy of a copy of a copy of a 16mm C&C television print. The focus is very soft & the contrast has washed out whites & crushed blacks.

2) This DVD runs only 64 minutes, 10 minutes shorter than the original movie. Apparently the original TV print had been cut by some TV station to get more commercials in.

The sad thing is that TURNER HOME ENTERTAINMENT released an excellent LASERDISC (and probably VHS tape) in 1991. That version ran the full 74 minutes, with perfect contrast showing all grey tones, and a sharper focus. I don't know why that master was not used.

Typical outing with Wheeler and Woolsey. The plot is irrelevant, of course, as they toss of their usual brand of punning dialog exchanges. This one features their frequent screen partner, Dorothy Lee, whose presence enlivens the proceedings. This particular DVD contains a rather poor-quality print of this film, however, but considering the cost, it's still a fun addition to any classic comedy collection.

There are plenty of poor quality DVDs on the market, and this is one of the worst. This is an amusing Wheeler & Woolsey comedy, but the copy is taken from a duped and edited C & C Television print; the original runs 74 minutes and this copy runs 62! To add insult to injury, this is a bad dupe; the climactic shoot-out takes place in a darkened hotel, and here it looks like they're in one of those Warner Brothers cartoon caves where only the eyeballs are visible. Bad sound, bad picture quality, and edited to hell-yuck! Anyone in the market for this title should get the Alpha Video edition, which is the best copy of this title currently available (and it's complete).

WHERE did Digiview get this truly terrible print? This writer expected the source to be one of the 16mm home-movie editions that circulated years ago (with C & C television titles). This DVD seems to derive from a clumsy bootlegged copy of same. Details are washed out and there are actually scenes missing.

The film itself is an enjoyable antique, vintage 1930, with Bert and Bob fast-talking their way into helping Dorothy Lee salvage a rundown hotel and fend off gangsters. A good early-'30s cast helps (Jobyna Howland, Ralf Harolde, Stanley Fields, Natalie Moorhead) and there are enough vaudevillian jokes and bad-pun groaners to satisfy comedy fans, but video collectors can certainly do better than this particular edition. Digiview DVDs are generally an excellent value for the money, but not this time.

Although the DVD cover proclaims Wheeler and Woolsey as "one of America's most beloved comedy duos", they are not one of the best remembered. As a reminder (or an introduction), Bert Wheeler is the younger, wavy-haired member of the team and Robert Woolsey is the one who looks like the offspring of George Burns and Groucho Marx, with the cigar, glasses and the part in the center of his hair that looks like it was done using an X-Acto knife. They made quite a large number of films together in the 1930s, but the team hasn't really stood the test of time the way that Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, other comedy teams of that time have. The few films of theirs that I have seen are mostly inoffensive -- nothing spectacular, but an entertaining diversion for a couple of hours.

HOOK, LINE AND SINKER fulfills that description in everything but the time-factor (this movie is only sixty-two minutes long). The plot can be summarized quite quickly. Two insurance salesmen quit their gig and get into the hotel business after meeting a young heiress. Naturally, a bunch of scam artists, thieves and crooks show up for the hotel's grand re-opening, intent on stealing all the goods they can get their hands on. The DVD box blurb refers to the villains as "oddball characters", but I found them mostly bland and uninteresting. The one thing I kept thinking about was that the "Duchess" character really ought to have been played by Thelma Todd.

However, the story is mostly irrelevant. The movie is basically an excuse to have Wheeler and Woolsey stand next to each other (occasionally with a third person) and fire off one-liners at each other. This is a typical exchange:

Policeman: "You broke a traffic law!"
Woolsey: "Can't you make another one?"

The comedy is very vaudevillian in nature and is a corny mixture of puns, word play and simple misunderstandings. The production is very stagey, with the plot used mainly to move the characters from one set to another to mix up the background on which the jokes are told. If you're in the mood for this, it can be quite enjoyable. If you have a low tolerance for cheap wisecracks and dumb humor, then you may want to stay away. Personally, I enjoyed the film. But that said, I only picked it up because I discovered it selling for an entire dollar. I can't imagine myself watching it many more times.

The DVD edition I'm reviewing is the Digiview Productions release. The picture quality is quite bad, but it's hard to say whether the fault lies in laziness/cheapness at the DVD company or the age of the material. Certainly, there exist other movies from this era in much better condition, but one can't tell whether this print simply had a harder time than others over the last seventy-five years. The picture is blurry and out of focus in spots. The framing seems a bit off too, so there are a few scenes where the actors' heads are cut off. The sound quality is also not stellar, being tinny, muffled and scratchy.

That said, this is not a CITIZEN KANE where the viewer's inner film student will be scanning the background looking for hitherto unseen details. This is just a cheaply made, quick comedy where the poorness of the DVD doesn't really detract much from the overall experience. On the other hand, there were a few gags rendered nonsensical by the medium. For example, at one point a woman con artist is walking up a flight of steps when out of nowhere there is a smallish explosion behind her. I presume we were supposed to see a grenade or the like falling out of her handbag, but with the picture quality being so poor, it looks like she just stepped on a landmine.

Another difficult-to-see gag occurs when Wheeler and the heiress love-interest (played by Dorothy Lee, a frequent collaborator with W/W) haggle over how many children they should have in married life. They keep punching up numbers on an old cash register, but the poor DVD picture quality leaves the audience bewildered as to what figures they are discussing.

The more I watch the films of Wheeler and Woolsey, the more I like them. I can't see them ever seriously rivaling my affection for other comedy stars of that era, but they have a kind of innocent charm to them. HOOK, LINE AND SINKER is a pleasant way of spending an hour.