If you want to see a truly great comedy about life way up north, take in Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in "Road to Utopia" which tells basically the same story as this but through an adult point of view, not the juvenile manner in which Abbott and Costello do with this slapstick farce. I guess Hollywood assumed that Alaska was overloaded with gold because practically every film of the golden age surrounded quests for those yellow rocks. The film opens with Bud and Lou saving suicidal Tom Ewell from drowning himself and their efforts over the course of a night to keep him from repeating it. Bud cruelly arranges for each of them to take two-hour shifts to keep an eye on Ewell, then after a minute during his shift, changes the clock to make Lou think that 2 hours have gone by. This mean-spirited and selfish gag is topped by his telling Lou to go pick up Ewell's belongings so they can head up to Alaska to lay claim to his gold and reunite him with the woman he had tried to commit suicide over.
Mitzi Green, the child comic singer of the early 1930's, plays the saloon singer whom Ewell had been engaged to, dumping him over his violent jealousies. It appears that she is in cahoots with a local lawman (Bruce Cabot) to get their hands on the location of the gold mine which means marrying him then having him killed so, as his widow, she will inherit it and split it all down the middle with Cabot. Green is obviously trying to emulate Dietrich in "Destry Rides Again", and while she belts her songs with gusto, she is as close to Dietrich as Minerva Urecal (who has a funny cameo as Bud and Lou's San Francisco landlady) is. There are some funny moments, including Lou's efforts to fish with interference from a playful seal (whom Lou thinks is some kind of dog) and another where he becomes a human bridge. Overall, however, it's pretty juvenile, giving the indication that over a decade into their film teaming, Abbott and Costello and their bevy of writers were running out of ideas.
Mitzi Green, the child comic singer of the early 1930's, plays the saloon singer whom Ewell had been engaged to, dumping him over his violent jealousies. It appears that she is in cahoots with a local lawman (Bruce Cabot) to get their hands on the location of the gold mine which means marrying him then having him killed so, as his widow, she will inherit it and split it all down the middle with Cabot. Green is obviously trying to emulate Dietrich in "Destry Rides Again", and while she belts her songs with gusto, she is as close to Dietrich as Minerva Urecal (who has a funny cameo as Bud and Lou's San Francisco landlady) is. There are some funny moments, including Lou's efforts to fish with interference from a playful seal (whom Lou thinks is some kind of dog) and another where he becomes a human bridge. Overall, however, it's pretty juvenile, giving the indication that over a decade into their film teaming, Abbott and Costello and their bevy of writers were running out of ideas.