Pre-Code Parade: HALF SHOT AT SUNRISE (1930)

My first encounter with Wheeler and Woolsey came when I was still a kid, when I discovered the PBS series Matinee at the Bijou. The idea was to recreate the old-time Saturday matinee with a program of short subjects, a serial chapter and a feature film from the 1930s or 1940s. The show used public-domain films, including Paul Sloane's service comedy, which for many years must have been most people's first encounter with the RKO comics. I remembered little of the film nearly forty years later, except that I was deeply unimpressed. It took several more experiments with the pair, thanks to Turner Classic Movies, before I warmed to them. When Half Shot at Sunrise (slang for "drunk") was run last week as part of a day of Wheeler and Woolsey films, it seemed like time at last to give the picture another try.

I remain unimpressed. Half Shot was RKO's first original screenplay for their team, who had hit big in support of Bebe Daniels in 1929's Rio Rita and then appeared in two more Broadway adaptations, including their first starring vehicle, The Cuckoos. Many hands, reportedly including those of an uncredited Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, were involved in the screenplay. The result reduces Wheeler and Woolsey to a pair of generic girl-chases A.W.O.L. in World War I Paris. Woolsey has a stash of insignia and decorations allowing them to pass for any rank of soldier they please, and the pair are nimble enough to slip the armbands off a couple of MPs when needed. In the spirit of cherchez la femme these representative Americans try to hit on every female they encounter. Their seduction techniques include a lot of unfunny wordplay and even less funny fake French, all lacking the endearing naivete or the dyspeptic cunning that came to define Wheeler and Woolsey's screen personae in later films. It includes an interminable sequence at an outdoor cafe table where Wheeler desperately tries to get Woolsey to look into a mirror and notice the MP who is practically breathing over his shoulder. It really feels like you could have inserted any two comedians into the roles.

Strange to say, Half Shot hardly registers as a Wheeler and Woolsey movie until Dorothy Lee, Wheeler's usual dance and romantic partner on film, shows up as the colonel's daughter. From her arrival the film becomes more of a musical, as that was still expected from the team. My assumption is that most of the musical numbers were cut from the Matinee at the Bijou broadcast, since the movie runs 78 minutes on its own while the show ran for only 90 and had to pack in more content. They neither improve or degrade my opinion of the picture. The rest of it is wartime farce involving the confusion between secret military orders and equally confidential correspondence between the colonel and his French girlfriend, under the nose of his shrewish wife (Edna May Oliver). Everything works out for the best, of course, which is another way of saying that the film eventually ends. After this belated, and to an extent regretted second viewing, I can at least acknowledge that the film's failings aren't really Wheeler and Woolsey's fault; they were stuck with the material written for them. In hindsight, it was wrong for my younger self to hold this film against them, but it was impossible to know that until I'd seen more of them. First impressions aren't everything, I guess. Maybe I'll even enjoy a Ritz Brothers film someday.