Wheeler & Woolsey

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bert Wheeler and Bob Woolsey

This article includes a list of references or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks in-text citations.
You can improve this article by introducing more precise citations.

Bert Wheeler (7 April 1895 in Paterson, New Jersey – 18 January 1968 in New York City) and Robert Woolsey (14 August 1888 in Oakland, California – 31 October 1938 in Malibu, California) were a famous American film comedy team of the 1930s who are almost totally unknown by today's public, although vintage-film buffs have rediscovered the team via cable television and home video.

The former Broadway stars re-created their stage roles in the 1929 movie musical Rio Rita. This established them as movie comedians, and they went on to make very popular comedy features through 1937, all for RKO Radio Pictures except the 1933 Columbia release So This Is Africa. Curly-haired Bert Wheeler played the ever-smiling innocent, and bespectacled Robert Woolsey played the genially leering “big idea” man that often got the pair in trouble. The vivacious Dorothy Lee usually played Bert's romantic interest.

The Wheeler & Woolsey pictures are loaded with joke-book dialogue, catchy original songs, painful puns, and sometimes racy double-entendre gags:

WOMAN (coyly indicating her legs): Were you looking at these?
WOOLSEY: Madam, I'm above that.

WOOLSEY (worried about a noblewoman): She's liable to have us beheaded.
WHEELER: Beheaded?! Can she do that?
WOOLSEY: Sure, she can be-head.

FLIRT: Sing to me!
WHEELER: How about One Hour with You?
FLIRT: Sure! But first, sing to me!

Among the team's better features: Hips Hips Hooray and Cockeyed Cavaliers (both 1934, both co-starring Thelma Todd and Dorothy Lee, and both directed by Mark Sandrich just before he was promoted to the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals); The Cuckoos (based on Clark and McCullough's Broadway show The Ramblers), Caught Plastered, Peach O'Reno, and Diplomaniacs.

The team faltered in late 1935; the last five Wheeler & Woolsey pictures were weakened by the combination of bad scripts, lower budgets, and uninspired direction. The team might have continued indefinitely, but Woolsey died of kidney disease on 31 October 1938, ending the partnership. Wheeler continued to work off and on until his death on 18 January 1968. His later appearances were mostly on television; his last theatrical films were two slapstick shorts for Columbia Pictures, filmed in 1950.

The duo, although largely forgotten now, were at the peak of their careers in the 1930s and were the biggest inspiration to the very well remembered Morecambe and Wise.