Rocky and Puddin’ Head (Bud Abbott & Lou Costello) accidentally swap a love letter between Lady Jane (Fran Warren) and Bruce (Bill Shirley) with Captain Kidd’s (Charles Laughton) treasure map. Kidd and Captain Bonney (Hillary Brooke) gather all the trouble makers together and everyone heads off to find his buried treasure.
I was a fan of Abbot and Costello when a kid. Each film was exciting, hilarious, and both unexpected and familiar. But that was a long time ago. You see, the comedy pair was aided by two things: the limited memory of a six year old, and the inability to rent films or catch them on 180 cable channels. I had to wait for them to pop up on one of our seven Chicago broadcast channels. That meant viewings were few and far between, and that’s how Bud and Lou look best. Since each movie has the two playing the same characters and doing the same jokes, limited access makes them shine. But now I’ve seen twenty or more of their features, and one pretty much looks like the next. Since a few of their flicks, though far from original, are performed better than the others, I like to stick to those, and Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd isn’t one.
It does stand out in several interesting ways. It was the second and last of their color pictures, and color has rarely looked worse. Flat, grainy, dull, and dominated by pastels, Ted Turner’s colorization process would have massively improved the look of the picture. Time hasn’t been kind to the cheap Cinecolor film, but Meets Captain Kidd never looked good.
It also has Charles Laughton slumming it as the title character. He wanted to try his hand at comedy, and while nothing to make Bob Hope tremble, he manages reasonably well. Laughton joins Bud and Lou carrying out the same tired routines and it is more amusing than it has any right to be. While we’re with those three, and the sexy Hillary Brooke as a fiery pirate captain, this is good, lowest-common-denominator, Saturday afternoon entertainment. And the brief scenes of swashing and buckling don’t hurt anything, although the failure of the Cinecolor is more obvious when we’re looking at ships positioning for battle.
But the film is also burdened with an underdeveloped love story between two characters we don’t know and don’t care about. It’s not a surprising addition. Many comedy films of the ’40s and ’50s had similar subplots. Call it a sign of the times. That isn’t to say it was ever a good idea, and it is unfit in every way here. Half way through the film you are likely to notice the two lovers and ask yourself, “who are they and have they been in this whole picture?”
Continuing with the poor practices of yore, the “action” stops from time to time for a song. With the swing era past, apparently no one knew what kind of music fits the ’50s. Their choice of imitation operetta has the advantage of being unexpected, although I can’t think of any other benefit. What does an uninspired, rip-off Nelson Eddy number sound like twenty years from its source? Don’t worry about it. It isn’t as if you’ll remember any of the songs after the credits roll.
A lackluster comedy with lackluster pirate antics, Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd isn’t a bad film. Young children are likely to be entertained, and it won’t bother you if you play it while reading the paper.