Sunday Film Series

          #6:  Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday  (France, 1953)

By Dale D. Dalenberg MD

I have to confess—I didn’t immediately take to Hulot when I first discovered him over 30 years ago.  This was one of my beloved high school teacher Fred Hanley’s all-time favorite films, so it came highly recommended, and therefore I felt an obligation to watch it.  Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday is the second feature film by French comic director Jacques Tati (1907-1982, whose first feature film, Jour de fete, was #1 in this series.)  It is the first film where Tati played his signature character, Monsieur Hulot, a simple but loveable man of few words with a jaunty walk and an ever-present pipe.  I remember thinking that Hulot was not very funny, because you could see the set-up of his jokes a mile off.  The humor seemed droll and over-calculated.  But nowadays, I have a new appreciation for Tati and his creation Monsieur Hulot.   It is probably the difference between me (an American) watching Tati (a Frenchman) in my 50s as opposed to in my 20s. The charm of Hulot is irresistible after all. 

Tati is obsessed with the timing and mechanistic details of comedy.  He meticulously sets up situations which are funny, if predictable, in their denouement.  You know what it going to happen ahead of time, but you sit enthralled by the geometric details of the set-up, and when it comes time for the punch-line, Tati’s jokes play out a lot like setting up a row of dominos, then hitting the end domino and watching what happens. There is a tension and release effect, even if you don’t laugh.  Much of the hilarity comes from repetition.  In Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday there are recurrent funny bits involving hats—hats getting caught on things, getting hooked like fish on poles, getting accidentally exchanged with other hats, and so on.  Hulot’s automobile, a rickety tin can of a vehicle that works only intermittently, gets stalled on hills, loses pieces on the roadway, is another recurrent joke that runs through the film.  The repetition is funny, even if not all the jokes are.  Even a squeaky door in the dining hall becomes a running gag as you anticipate who is going to go through the door, then who is going to forget something and, having squeaked the door once, have to turn right around and go back through and make it squeak right away again. 

But there is much more to Jacques Tati’s masterwork than is apparent on the surface.  This charming tale of a loveable misfit who creates merry mayhem in a beach-side vacation resort is also a social commentary. In context, the film shows France not long after the Second World War relaxing and trying to enjoy itself at the seaside, getting back to leisure and fun after a truly trying era.  And yet, Tati depicts numerous characters who can’t seem to settle into the mood--men making deals around tables, an intellectual with his nose in a book spouting Marxist nonsense.   

It is pointless to argue that Jacques Tati was the spiritual successor to Charles Chaplin, because they were each individual artists with their own visions unto themselves.  However, they do share a common thread.  Their films are full of charm and pathos.  They draw on vaudeville and pantomime for much of their humor.  Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday is not a silent film, but there is really no line of dialogue that carries the plot forward.  It is almost as silent as Chaplin’s Modern Times, which is and isn’t a silent film also.  My favorite moments in Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday are sight gags that are quite devoid of sound.  The camera pans to the hands of the chef cutting slices of the roast for dinner as the diners file into the dining hall.  He cuts thin portion after thin portion, but then the fat guest walks in, and you see the chef alter his routine and slice a really thick slice.  The juxtaposition of the fat guy in the background and the alteration of the pattern of the chef slicing the roast is Tati’s visual comedy, subtle but at its best hilarious, at its most mundane still an expression of his meticulous study of the timing and geometry of comedy. 

But don’t ever be fooled into thinking that Tati is just a vaudevillian who made some funny French movies that are too subtle for many Americans to find funny anymore.  Tati is an incisive social commentator.  Hulot is full of characters who are stereotypes from French society.  The seaside resort is a microcosm of that society.  In future films, as we gradually revisit the works of Jacques Tati, we’ll encounter Tati’s greatest theme for commentary:  man vs. modernity (Chaplin hit this one as well, again singling out Modern Times.)  Stay tuned. 

The Dawn of “Science-Fiction”: A Hugo Gernsback magazine from 1929

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

February 9, 2015

It is hard to believe these days, considering its popularity in the movies and pervasiveness on bestseller lists, but science fiction has only been around for less than 100 years.  Much has been written about the origins of science fiction.  I grew up on such analyses, reading Sam Moskowitz and Brian Aldiss, among others.  I eagerly read Lucien of Samosata, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Mary Shelley (and I cheerfully defended Aldiss’s view that Frankenstein was the first true science fiction novel.)  But everyone in the science fiction world knows that “modern” science fiction didn’t begin until sf got magazine publications of its own, and that all started with Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories in 1926.  

But Gernsback held onto Amazing for only a few years before he lost it to a bankruptcy, and during those years he had labelled what he was publishing with the clunky term “scientifiction.”  Emerging quickly from the bankruptcy of his publishing company, probably with the use of illegally purloined mailing lists from the old company, Gernsback launched and started to seek subscribers for a pair of new magazines, this time with the newly minted term “science-fiction” to describe the contents.  The magazines were Air Wonder Stories and Science Wonder Stories, which merged after 11 and 12 issues respectively, to become Wonder Stories.  Featured here is the Dalenberg Library copy of the 3rd issue of Air Wonder Stories, dated September, 1929.   The stories are uniformly awful, but with the Gernsback “Wonder” publications, science-fiction was off the ground (so-to-speak) and was destined to get much, much better over the years.  I love this magazine, not because it is any fun to read, but because it bears the historical ambience of being a science-fiction publication that was put together when the term “science-fiction” was only a few weeks or months old.  

Hugo Gernsback believed that science-fiction would be a vehicle for science education.  This issue of Air Wonder Stories is full of Gernsback’s attempts to make it a worthy vehicle for such a purpose.  Gernsback lists an advisory panel of aeronautical experts who supposedly were to “pass upon the scientific principles of all stories.”  There is an editorial by Gernsback on “The Airplane of the Future.”  There is an aviation forum, “Aviation News of the Month,” and a quiz to test the readers’ aviation knowledge.  But what Gernsback got from his fiction authors (and this is true of all his publications) was pretty much standard pulp magazine adventure stuff with enough aviation or science thrown in to qualify for publication in one of the new science fiction  magazines.  Frankly, I doubt that there was ever a story in any Gernsback magazine that ever actually taught anybody anything about science or aviation.  

The lead story in Air Wonder No. 3 is a run-of-the-mill Yellow Peril story with aviation trappings by Harl Vincent, the typical model of a writer who was already writing for pulps and added some scientific trappings to get into the new magazines.  In fact, the story is titled “The Yellow Air-Peril,” and that is what it is:  a typical Yellow Peril story with air stuff thrown in, enough to qualify it for Air Wonder Stories.  If anybody recalls Yellow Peril stories these days, they usually think of Dr. Fu Manchu.  But such stories were popular between the World Wars, and they even lived on into the 1950’s and early 1960’s (after the Japanese atrocities of World War II helped cement the image that Asians could be really, really evil.)  “The Yellow Air-Peril” has a Buddhist conspiracy bent on world domination.  It seems like Buddhism would not be your usual inspiration for an insidious, Oriental world domination plot, considering that Buddhists are usually imagined as peaceful and meditative.  But Harl Vincent’s story has it that the Buddhists are really riled up about almost being wiped out in India shortly after they got started and then almost being wiped out again in China in the 9th Century.  Vincent (1893-1968) showed up periodically in science fiction pulps and digests until the Second World War.  Peter Nicholls’ indispensable Science Fiction Encyclopedia (1979) describes Vincent’s writings as “vigorous but crude.”  I’ll second that.  There is heroic sacrifice, the destruction of a secret installation, an aerial dogfight, and a marriage proposal under fire all packed into this story, but none of it is actually exciting, given prose as flat as a pancake.  

The cover depicts a story by one “Bob” Olsen (about whom I know nothing) titled “Flight in 1999.”  The colorful Frank R. Paul covers for Gernsback’s publications are always more visually arresting than the stories they are based upon, and this is no exception.  There is a tethered floating platform hovering above a city, and people in flying suits flitting about it, and a passenger ship somewhat akin to a dirigible coming in for a landing.  We learn in the story that the people’s suits, the platform, and the ship remain aloft thanks to a material called “gravanul.”  Whereupon it is worthwhile to mention that the greatest stylistic flaw of most Gernsback-era science fiction stories is the need to stop the story to explain the science (or pseudo-science in most cases).  In this particular story, the “gravanul” is explained by a father to his inquisitive child.  The explanation given is that the suits create energy fields that neutralize the attractive force of gravity.  I had a friend once whose dad always explained when he inquired about something, “It’s a chemical reaction, Son.”  The explanations in Gernsback-era science fiction stories are about like my friend’s dad’s explanations.  There is an answer, and it usually interferes with the action and flow of the story, but you really don’t end up having a meaningful answer, much less learning any actual science.  

Sunday Film Series #5: Broadway Danny Rose (USA, 1984)

Broadway Danny Rose.  

A Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe Production.  Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Nick Apollo Forte.  Editor Susan E. Morse, A.C.E.  Production Designer Mel Bourne.  Director of Photography Gordon Willis, ASC.  Executive Producer Charles H. Joffe.  Produced by Robert Greenhut.  

Written and Directed by Woody Allen.  

An Orion Pictures Release (1/27/1984).

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

February 5, 2015

I have to admit it:  I was wrong about Woody Allen.  

For a long time I believed the conventional wisdom about Woody, which was that he made funny movies in the 60’s, had his artistic peak with Annie Hall and Manhattan in the late 70’s, alienated his popular audience with self-indulgent films like Stardust Memories (1980), and then spent the past 3-1/2 decades making small art films that were of interest only to New York intellectuals.  That would have been my summary of Allen’s career until a couple years ago, but now I realize how totally wrong I was.

I started realizing the error of my ways when I caught up with Small Time Crooks (from 2000) about 10 years after it was released.  It was, quite unexpectedly to me at the time, one of the funniest movies I had ever seen.  I couldn’t believe that Woody Allen was still that funny, as a screenwriter and as an actor, so many years since his comic masterpieces of the 1960’s and 70’s.  

So by now, I have done a thorough re-evaluation of Woody Allen.  My conclusion:  that he is a national treasure, one of our greatest living film-makers.  And unlike what I used to think, he never lost his way. He has been on-point all along.  It just took me about 30 years to catch up with him.  

I remember Siskel & Ebert trashing Stardust Memories in 1980, and back then, I didn’t like it either, and I couldn’t sit through it.  But I re-screened it again this year and loved every minute of it.  Woody was really having a joke at our expense back then.  It just took us a few decades to get the joke.  The film, about a has-been comic film-maker who is forced to go to a film festival honoring his work, spending an entire weekend fending off the mindless adulation of his old fans while he relives the memories of several past romances, may have seemed overly self-indulgent in 1980.  But today, after a lifetime of great film-making, the movie seems pivotal.  It is not only a better evocation of Fellini than Fellini ever made himself, it is Woody Allen signaling a change in the direction of his films.  It seemed at the time that he was saying he was not going to make comedies anymore.  But what he was really saying is that he was done making the kind of silly sketch comedies like his episodic Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex and his send-up of thick Russian novels Love and Death.  

Repeated viewings today of Woody’s 1960’s classics show that, while they are wonderfully memorable comedies from that era, they are mostly just strung-together comic sketches about on a par with a very good episode of “Saturday Night Live.”  I used to think that Allen’s films like Sleeper were masterpieces, but when I re-screen them today, I find them to have much less of an emotional punch than many of his later, more mature films.  In fact the only light comic film he made prior to his great artistic peak with Annie Hall that I would still call a masterpiece is Take the Money and Run (1969), because it is hands-down one of the funniest movies ever made, the product of a young comic genius pulling out all the stops to make his first big cinematic splash as writer-director.  So, while Allen’s 1960’s comedies are delightful, they are not necessarily the great films that we have come to expect from Allen in later years.  

While I used to think that the early Allen films were the great ones and that the films from the early 1980’s were rather slight by comparison, my opinion is quite the reverse these days.  Re-screening Allen’s first six films from the 1980’s has been a joyous expedition of re-discovery.  I have loved every moment of re-visiting this stellar half dozen:  Stardust Memories (1980), A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), Zelig (1983), Broadway Danny Rose (1984), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986).  They are each comic masterworks, much more cohesive as films go, more thought-provoking, more balanced (like Chaplin’s films) between moments of hilarity and moments of pathos, than the “sketch comedies” that Allen was making prior to Annie Hall and Manhattan.  

In recent years, Allen has become known as a woman’s director for the way he can extract career-defining performances from his leading women.  I dare to say that facet of Woody Allen’s legend started with these 1980’s films, as he extracted timeless, memorable performances from Mia Farrow.  Allen’s break with Mia Farrow was epic, legendary, and irreversible with the revelation in 1992 that he was having an affair with her adopted daughter, a girl Woody helped raise.  For many, Allen’s sexual transgression has made it difficult to enjoy his films.  The uncomfortable parallels between his personal life, his screen-writing, and his on-screen persona, make for interesting analysis.  I personally prefer not to stand in judgment.  Even if Allen violated an unwritten code of ethics by marrying Soon-Yi, it is arguable that he has largely vindicated himself by staying married to her for over two decades and raising a family with her.  Or perhaps he’s been forced to live in his own personal hell, because he knows it would have been the end of his legacy if he hadn’t made the Soon-Yi marriage work.  I can’t say; I’m not a part of Allen’s personal life, just a part of his audience.  At any rate, Allen’s split with Mia Farrow paved the way for him to give other actresses (such as Cate Blanchett) career-defining moments.  In the past 23 years, since Mia Farrow, Woody Allen has given a succession of actresses better roles than most of the rest of the movie industry, which is regularly scolded for largely treating women as sex objects. 

Broadway Danny Rose has Woody Allen playing a small-time theatrical agent with a penchant for representing sideshow acts, like a one-legged tap dancer and a blind xylophonist.  He sees his big break on the horizon with managing a has-been nightclub crooner (played by Nick Apollo Forte) on the verge of a comeback.  Problem is that the crooner is having an affair with a floozy from a mob family (played by Mia Farrow) and cannot seem to function unless she is around to give him warm fuzzies.  When she petulantly refuses to attend the show where the crooner is auditioning for his big comeback, Allen is dispatched to calm her down and drag her to the show to ensure that the performance comes off without a hitch.  Various hilarious adventures ensue, full of trademark Woody Allen moments.  New York City is on display, as in most of Allen’s films.  In one of the funniest scenes of the move, we even get to see the warehouse where the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade floats are stored.  By the end of the film, Allen is channeling Charlie Chaplin, heaping on the pathos, having lost the contract with the singer and having also lost the girl, serving turkey TV dinners for Thanksgiving to the sad assemblage of talent he still represents.  Mia Farrow knocks on the door to ask for an apology, and he turns her away.  Then, in the closing shot, he chases her down the street to give her another chance, a poignant ending reminiscent of Chaplin and the flower girl at the end of City Lights

The Sunday Film Series, #4: State Fair (1945)

Twentieth Century Fox presents Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “State Fair”

Starring Jeanne Crain, Dana Andrews, Dick Haymes, Vivian Blaine, Charles Winninger, Fay Bainter, Donald Meek, Frank McHugh

Music by Richard Rodgers, Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, screenplay by Oscar Hammerstein II, from a novel by Philip Stong, adapted by Sonya Levien & Paul Green, produced by William Perlberg

Directed by Walter Lang

Photographed in Technicolor

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

January 24, 2015

The third musical by Rodgers & Hammerstein, following “Oklahoma!” and “Carousel,” this is the only one written directly for the big screen.  The greatest team in Broadway musical history, even today, they wrote a total of eleven shows, one of which was directly for the movies (this one), and one of which was originally for television (“Cinderella.”) 

I became interested in Richard Rodgers, because it dawned on me one day that more Americans have heard and loved his compositions than most other 20th Century composers, and perhaps he should be regarded among the greatest, up there with Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copeland and the like.  But I didn’t know that much about the overall arc of his work, so I decided to seek him out and try to listen to more.  Pretty soon I realized that one of the joys of Rodgers is that there is a seemingly inexhaustible treasure to be discovered, a trove that spreads over some 900 songs and 43 Broadway musicals.  The other thing that I soon discovered was the amazing contribution of his lyricist Oscar Hammerstein to American musical theater in a career that stretched from before 1920 until his death in 1960.  After you familiarize yourself with the idiom of Hammerstein songs, the clever word-play is unmistakable.  I used to think that he was just a lyricist and that lyricists were disposable because the composer of the music did the hard work, but I was wrong.  Hammerstein was the architect of the musicals he wrote for, usually writing the entire book and shaping the music as much as the composers he collaborated with.  And his influence was far-reaching.  Stephen Sondheim is often spoken of as a disciple of Hammerstein for instance.  

Richard Rodgers is sometimes dismissed as a serious composer because he almost always relied on others to orchestrate his works, so that much of the Richard Rodgers sound that we know is only partially his own work.  The usual orchestrator that is most identified with Rodgers is composer/arranger Robert Russell Bennett, who tirelessly gave the sound we most recognize as the Broadway sound to countless works over 6 decades beginning in 1919.  I personally don’t think that this fact detracts from Rodgers’ pre-eminence as a 20th Century popular composer.  After all, we live in an era where song-writers who can’t even read music are adulated as fine writers (Lennon & McCartney come to mind) even though they actually never “wrote” any music in the sense of putting notes on a page.  To cite one of Richard Rodgers’ more famous works, the score to “Victory at Sea” was mostly written by Robert Russell Bennett, all except for a dozen key themes that Rodgers contributed, but it still stands as inimitably a Richard Rodgers composition.  Along the same lines, the famous orchestral version of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” (originally written for the piano, as are the drafts of Richard Rodgers’ songs) is an orchestration by Maurice Ravel.  We don’t think anything less of Mussorgsky for that, nor should we think anything less of Rodgers.    

There is such a thirst for more shows by Rodgers & Hammerstein that State Fair has been retro-fitted from the movies back into a Broadway show.  First, more songs were written for a less successful 1962 movie remake.  It was then adapted to the stage in 1969.  A new version, with a new book, was prepared in 1992 and came to Broadway in 1996.  This official modern Broadway version is much expanded musically from the original film of 1945, which had only 6 songs; the Broadway version has all 6 of those, plus 2 songs that had been cut from Oklahoma!, plus 2 from the score of Pipe Dream, and 1 from Me and Juliet.  Thus, the Broadway version of State Fair not only draws on the 1945 movie, but it is a pastiche of lesser known Rodgers & Hammerstein material that was deserving of being revived.  

State Fair (1945) is actually a re-make of a non-musical 1933 film based on a novel (by a real Iowan) about a Midwestern farm family’s preparations for and adventures at the Iowa State Fair.  It is a sweet and gentle film, altogether wholesome family fare, that rises above its corniness.  The movie is undeniably gorgeous, with a Technicolor sheen that makes it seem larger than life despite the rather ordinary, every-day goings-on that are happening on-screen.  But most memorably, the score is luscious.  It only takes until the second song in the film to realize that we are witnessing timeless cinema.  “It Might As Well Be Spring” is one of the most soaringly romantic songs Rodgers & Hammerstein ever wrote, as the ingénue realizes that she is having spring fever during the wrong season of the year and longs to meet the man of her dreams.  The number deservedly won the Academy Award for Best Song.  That song and others have you humming or whistling the melodies long after the screening is over.  

The tensions that drive the story-line in State Fair are mild at best.  The film is mostly just a slice of life story without much in the way of conflict or resolution. The most suspense offered up regards which housewife is going to win the pickle and mincemeat judging at the fair.  The farmers’ hog, in contention for the grand prize, falls sick, and you think he’s going to have to drop out of the contest, but he rallies and wins anyway.  You think for a moment that the ingénue has fallen for the wrong man, a player who is going to kiss her and disappear, but he turns out to really love her and comes to get her in the end.  Frankly, I would have liked to see the pig die, just to spice up the film a bit.  But this is a gentler film than that, propelled by a sense of mid-Century nostalgia for an America that probably never really existed, and helped along by a sumptuous score that has you singing along, even after the closing credits.  Knowing it is Rodgers and Hammerstein, you can hear a preview of greater things to come.  A snippet of the song “It’s a Grand Night for Singing” makes you just certain that it is about to morph into “My Favorite Things” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s later masterpiece The Sound of Music. . .reason enough to seek out this charming little film.  

Sunday Film Series, #3: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (USA, 1948)

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

January 11, 2015

This was once the sort of low-brow comedy that didn’t get much play in my house while I was growing up.  My parents had little tolerance for Jerry Lewis, The Three Stooges, the original late ‘70s cast of Saturday Night Live, any of that.  What I saw of those things, I saw mostly on the sly.  Consequently, I thought for years that the series of Abbott and Costello comedies where the duo meet up with a succession of Universal Studios’ classic monsters were just cheap throw-away slapstick pictures designed to cash in on Universal’s 1930’s heyday.  Thankfully, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (the acknowledged best of these films) has in recent years undergone a complete reassessment.  For instance, it was inducted into the National Film Registry in 2001 as a film worthy of preservation in the Library of Congress.  

Actually, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is more of a nickname for the film.  The movie poster titles it Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein.  The on-screen title actually reads Bud Abbott Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein.  Nor does the title, whichever title you use, actually sum up the action.  The film is a full-scale monster fest with the comic heroes meeting not only Frankenstein, but also Dracula and the Wolf-man.  For all of Lou Costello’s silly reaction shots and the comic tream’s mugging for the camera, they are balanced by the monsters playing the straight men, and quite convincingly.    The Wolf-man’s desperation at his impending full moon transformation has Lon Chaney Jr. really sweating it as he begs to be locked up in his room night after night lest he hurt someone after he turns wolf.  There are some great special effects with Dracula morphing into a bat and back again. And, for all that he is so totally identified with this role, this is actually the only film where Bela Lugosi played Dracula in a sustained role outside of the original Tod Browning-directed Dracula from 1931.  

The plot has Abbott and Costello playing bumbling freight handlers who receive a shipment for a local house of horrors that turns out to be crates carrying the real Frankenstein’s monster and the real Dracula in his coffin.  Costello figures it out early, and is paralyzed with horror by the fact that the monsters are real, but the running gag is that Abbott never sees the evidence and thinks Costello is crazy.  In the meantime, the Wolf-Man arrives from London to warn everybody of the danger, but nobody believes him either.  The story culminates in Dracula’s attempt to revive Frankenstein’s monster by giving it Costello’s brain.  The film is a great showcase for a revival of Universal’s movie creatures that were so popular 10-15 years prior.   It is a template for many of the horror-comedies that came after.  In fact, as I re-watched this film it struck me that the animated Scooby-Doo series owes a lot to this movie.   

Bud Abbott and Lou Costello made 36 films together between 1940 and 1956 as well as doing lots of radio and television.  They were one of the three greatest comedy duos of the 20th Century, in my estimation.  Those duos were Laurel & Hardy, Abbott & Costello, and Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis.  It is fascinating how the careers of those three duos fit so neatly end to end, as if a crown of royalty were being handed down.  MGM dropped Hal Roach studios and the long-running Laurel and Hardy comedies the very year (1940) that Abbott and Costello premiered on the big screen.  Likewise, Martin & Lewis eclipsed Abbott & Costello fairly rapidly in the early 1950’s.  I like to think of Abbott & Costello as a kind of opposite to Laurel & Hardy.  With Abbott and Costello, the straight man was Bud Abbott, the thin guy.  The short, plump guy (Lou Costello) was the dim-witted comic one.  With Laurel and Hardy, Oliver Hardy (the plump guy) was the straight man (more or less), and Stan Laurel was the dim-witted, funny one.  Like Stan Laurel, Lou Costello had to stand up to a fairly abusive partner.  In fact, some of the verbal abuse, and the tendency to haul off and slug each other, seems almost harsh and detracts a bit from the comedy these days, but allowing for a little outdated crudeness, the films of  both duos remain surprisingly funny, even as they have aged.  The Abbott and Costello comedies benefit from rapid-fire repartee as well as physical slapstick, so they seem almost a hybrid between the world of Laurel & Hardy and that of the Marx Brothers.  I would venture that the Martin & Lewis comedies have not aged as well, although they are still funny if you are in the right mood (of if you are 8 years old.)  Jerry Lewis’s solo films are not nearly as good, because he is so zany (some would say retarded) that he needs that straight man to anchor him.  

Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein stands in film history as a semi-official last chapter (in 1948) to the Universal Studios arc of horror films which began with Frankenstein in 1931 and continued on in the Frankenstein sequels, The Invisible Man, The Wolf-Man, Dracula, and others.  Only Mel Brooks, with his Young Frankenstein (1974), has topped the Abbott and Costello film for sheer hilarity in a horror-comedy, as he too paid homage to specific Universal films, most notably Son of Frankenstein (1939) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). In fact, the Abbott & Costello film and the Mel Brooks film are so much a part of the Universal Studios monster tradition that they do not just parody the genre, but they are an indispensable part of the Universal monster movie arc that began in 1931.