The
Cuckoos
(1930)
Provided
by noted film historian/author
William
M. Drew
From "The
New York Times" Film Review, "The Screen" by Mordaunt Hall. April
26, 1930.
"The Cuckoos"
is Riotous
-Buffoonery
and Tuneful Music Mark New Talkie at the Globe
"THE CUCKOOS,"
with Bert Wheeler, Robert Woolsey, June Clyde, Hugh Trevor, Dorothy Lee,
Ivan Lebedeff, Marguerita Padulla, Mitchell Lewis, Jobyna Howland; directed
by Paul Sloane; program of sound short films and news reel. At the
Globe Theatre.
A pleasantly
irrational screen comedy, with sequences in color and riotous and, at times,
ribald buffoonery is "The Cuckoos," at the Globe, which manages to live
up to its title and provides tuneful music and good dancing as well as
spirited slapstick.
The story,
if a musical comedy transplanted to the screen should have one, is something
about a nobleman who kidnaps a wealthy girl because she won't marry him.
The comedians, Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey, enter into matters as two
bankrupt fortune tellers and cavort, as they did in "Rio Rita," over the
landscape, sometimes seeking the lost heiress, on other occasions being
chased by a gypsy chief named Julius. There is a fantastic flight
in an airplane, there are singing choruses, dancing senoritas, scheming
villains in triplicate, heroes and heroines who break into a song and dance
when the spirit moves them and other mad and entertaining events.
It is
a hectic affair without much rhyme or reason. The audience at the
Globe was kept laughing throughout its showing.
This photoplay,
which is an adaptation of the musical comedy, "The Ramblers," in which
Clark and McCullough were featured, is successful because of its mobility
and facilities for exaggerating everything from a "gag" to a line of dancing
girls. Hundreds of comely girls appear.
At any
rate, Mr. Wheeler and Mr. Woolsey are almost as mad as all the Marx Brothers
together. Dorothy Lee as Anita, a young gypsy girl, performs admirably
and so does June Clyde in the role of the kidnapped heiress.