Mummy's Boys (Fred Guiol, 1936)

Mummy's Boys, a horror-comedy that begins as a spoof of The Mummy but unravels into a thin series of gags from the comedy team of Wheeler & Woolsey, is no great shakes, but it's a fascinating time capsule. It's such a time capsule that it was probably already painfully out of date by 1937. It's creaky stuff, but there are a couple of quality pratfalls.

The film begins like a straightforward horror film, on a dark and rainy night, in the study of scientist/explorer Phillip Browning (Frank M. Thomas) and his daughter Mary (Barbara Pepper, filling in for Wheeler & Woolsey's usual vivacious sidekick/Wheeler love interest Dorothy Lee). Browning is one of the last survivors of a recent expedition/raid of an Egyptian tomb. Ten of the fifteen expedition members have died of "natural causes," and Browning is convinced the curse is real. He decides to go back to Egypt and return the stolen treasures in hopes of remaining alive. This opening scene has a real sense of style and movement, which unfortunately does not carry through to the rest of the film.

Enter Stanley Wright and Aloysius C. Whittaker (Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey), a pair of bumbling New York ditchdiggers who spot Browning's ad for expedition assistants in the newspaper. The pair not very convincingly pose as experts on Egypt but are somehow hired anyway, and sparks fly between Stanley and Mary. The Wheeler & Woolsey shtick in this particular film (maybe in their other ones, too?) is that Wheeler's Bert is a nice but simple-minded guy with a horrible memory. He can only remember things after he wakes from a deep sleep. Woolsey's Aloysius is a wisecracking, cigar-smoking schemer who overestimates his own intelligence and has a catchphrase ("Whoa-ohh-oh!") that is so stupid and is repeated so often that I couldn't help but laugh. Wheeler & Woolsey are no Laurel & Hardy (or even Abbott & Costello), but Woolsey sort of resembles a cross between George Burns with less charisma and Groucho Marx with less anarchic energy and quality jokes.

As the whole gang heads to Egypt by boat, the team picks up a new member, a stowaway named Catfish (Willie Best). Unfortunately, this is the racist part of the Hollywood time capsule. Best was, by the accounts of actors who worked with him in the theater, a deeply talented performer, but most of his movie roles were horrendous racial stereotypes in the Stepin Fetchit vein. He often played a wide-eyed, lazy, afraid-of-everything chauffeur, servant, or sidekick, forced to utter dialogue like "Who is dey?" This movie is no exception. At least he's credited by name. Some of his '30s films credit him as "Sleep 'n' Eat."

After some hijinks involving boat malfunctions, squirting pen ink, a sheik's harem, tent pitching, a tattoo parlor, needle phobia, and a map, the group makes its way into the tomb to return the loot. Guess what? Things are not as they seem. Attempted murder, hidden passageways, a huge needle, and mummy cosplay ensues.

Mummy's Boys, aside from the opening scene, a great pratfall on the boat, and a joke here or there, is nothing special. It really feels like one of those old movies that aired on Saturday afternoon TV in the early '80s while I was at my grandparents' house drinking grape Kool-Aid and waiting for wrestling to start. It was one of the last Wheeler & Woolsey films, followed only by On-Again, Off-Again and High Flyers, the latter of which Woolsey struggled to complete as his health was failing. He died of kidney disease in 1938. Wheeler's career was bumpy after the death of his partner. He appeared once in a while in movie and TV roles and had a Broadway run with Dorothy Lee, but the work wasn't as consistent as it had been with Woolsey. Wheeler died in 1968.

Director Fred Guiol (pronounced Gill) cranked out the second-tier comedies from the silent era into the 1940s and also directed some television in the '50s. He was also a producer and a screenwriter, with his most famous screenplay cowrites being Gunga Din and Giant. I'm going to leave you with the titles of some of Guiol's comedies as writer or director, which sound like fake titles a modern comedian would invent for old movies: Rich Uncles, Who, Me?, Should Crooners Marry, What! No Groceries, Don't Park There, Sure-Mike!, Flaming Flappers, Long Pants, The Hug Bug, Ukulele Sheiks, Sailors, Beware!, Pass the Gravy, Feed 'em and Weep, Skirt Shy, Campus Champs, What's Your Racket?, Silly Billies, Tanks a Million, Hay Foot, Mr. Walkie Talkie, and Botsford's Beanery.