Stanley Wright and Aloysius C. Whittaker (Bert Wheeler & Robert Woolsey), take jobs as diggers for an archaeologist who plans to return artifacts to a tomb before the curse of the mummy gets him. With the aid of a subservient stowaway (Willie Best), Stanley and Aloysius take over the mission when the archaeologist vanishes.
Early film was filled with vaudevillians, who brought their wisecracking, audience-aware antics to the silver screen. Assuming this brand of humor was ever funny (it was before my time, and pretty much before anyone’s who is above ground), it rarely translated well to film which is both more intimate, as you can get much closer to the actor, and more impersonal, as the audience and the performer cannot interact. Yet the studios kept trying, and for a time, many vaudeville-inspired acts were popular, though time has washed most of this clean from popular culture.
And that leads me to Wheeler and Woolsey, a comic duo completely devoid of anything remotely amusing. Their twenty-one, quicky, low-budget films made a profit, but have rightfully been relegated to the dustbin of time. If you are unfortunate, you might accidentally stumble upon their work. Just keep walking.
Mummy’s Boys is a painfully unfunny feature. Even fans of the duo (if such people still live) admit that this is a morbid undertaking. The main “joke” is that Stanley forgets everything he is told until he has a nap. If there is any way to wring a laugh out of that absurd premise, the writers never figured it out. We aren’t even given the slapstick encounter with a mummy as one isn’t to be found in this mummy movie (makes me think another name for the picture would have been in order), just lots of comments about the mummy’s curse.
To add to the embarrassment, Mummy’s Boys also presents us with the “yesssum sirrr” mumblings of Willie Best in one of his too frequent, 1930’s, racist portrayals. Besides immediately taking on the servant role to the white ditch diggers, the character is so dim that he has no idea how he got into a box, except for saying, “everything went black.” And yes, that was supposed to be a joke.
I find it hard to believe that there was ever a time Wheeler and Woolsey or this poorly written mess were considered entertaining. But if so, that time has passed.