Cinematically, each era produces bits of musical nonsense that could only have come from that time. Just as Breakin’ 2: Electric Bugaloo could have only been made in 1984, Oh, Sailor Behave! can only hail from 1930, a moment in the talkie transition marked by creaky stage properties of forgettable songs, unfunny schtick, and impudently, gloriously inane plots. The taste for lavish musicals died as quickly as it flowered in that year, and the result is a movie that, while intended for Technicolor, was released in black and white. It’s now available on demand from Warner Archive, looking and sounding none too spiffy for its obscurity in the vaults.
Based on the Broadway comedy See Naples and Die by Elmer Rice (most famous for serious and experimental dramas), the story is set in a Naples with singing gondoliers, but it might as well be Ruritania and the hotel is more or less the Grand Budapest. The unimportant romantic plot involves a bland semi-operatic couple (Charles King, Irene Delroy) whose big problem is that she married a penniless Russian prince (Lowell Sherman) who’s been blackmailing her sister Mitzi. There’s also something about a Montenegro general (Noah Beery) and his mistress (Vivien Oakland), leading to possibly the only happy ending in musical comedy history that involves an onscreen political assassination (although I’m not prepared to swear to that).
The opening credits list Elise Bartlett as Mitzi, even though we never see this character, who’s in London. This leads us to speculate that her footage must have been cut when the studio was tinkering with the movie to turn it into a vehicle for stage comedians Olsen and Johnson, later famous for Hellzapoppin and other unseeable Universal productions.
The duo gets about half the screen time doing schtick as sailors. Many sources, including the description on the DVD box, note that their hijinks feel unrelated to the rest of the film, but that’s not really so, and everything in the picture is fundamentally irrelevant to everything else, just as all the plotlines in a classic Marx Brothers movie are irrelevant to each other. (The difference is genius.) In that sense, it’s more like a thrown-together dream than a movie. The maritime team are supposedly tracking a man with a wooden leg, and the general walks like he’s got a wooden leg, but this point is never wrapped up and wouldn’t make any more sense if it were.
Johnson comes across like Eddie Cantor imitated by a drunken infant. Half his act is whooping and swooning in a manner that looks effeminate, although the boys chase a local honey (Lotti Loder) and utter various cracks to indicate their straightness. “Now I know he’s got us wrong!” exclaims Johnson when a “funny Italian” majordomo (Gino Corrado) says “I love you boys!” In another scene, Olsen asks, “Haven’t you ever been drunk enough to kiss a pretty girl on the neck?”, to which Johnson shrieks as though pinched (as he does to everything) and replies “Oh, I’ve been drunker than that!” We could make an observation on the changing taste of comedy, but to be fair, nobody at the time thought it was hilarious either.
Since this is a musical, much time is given over to romantic semi-operatic warbling from the lovebirds, while as much time is devoted to the comic duo’s jazzier ditties. There’s a big 11 o’clock number that leads to just about everybody in Naples running around and jumping on tables, though nothing is ever quite as entertaining as it sounds on paper.
Director Archie Mayo had handled a previous Rice property, the experimental reverse-chronological drama On Trial, released in both silent and sound versions in 1928 and now lost, alas. He had better luck with crime melodramas, although one of his last pictures was a Marx Brothers movie, A Night in Casablanca. Again, the difference is genius.
If you’re a connoisseur of that special brand of surrealism to be found in musicals, and if you’re in the right mood and know what you’re getting, you can stare in fascination at this effort, which conveys the paradox of being zippy and lumbering at the same time. Others will heed the advice of another comedy title: “Sailor Beware”.