Until DVDs arrived on the scene, this was one of the rarest of all Abbott & Costello movies - and with good reason: It's not very funny. True, the team are in good voice and have a couple of able assistants in Joe Besser (as a pamby manservant) and Shemp Howard (a near-sighted gunman). In fact, Besser and Howard are given more amusing material than the stars.
Lacking their usual writer, John Grant, Abbott and Costello have been fashioned into rather unusual characters. At first glance, Abbott is his normal hectoring, looking-out-solidly-for-number-one self, but then we find him volunteering to don a lion-skin so that his fraidy-cat buddy can impress the blonde vamp - something the old Abbott would never do.
Costello's character has undergone an even more startling metamorphosis: No longer a lovable dimwit, he is a lying, cowardly braggart of uncommon stupidity yet self-preserving disloyalty! It's obvious that writer Earl Baldwin gave no great thought to sympathy or consistency of characterization but simply threw every old wheeze and routine he could think of into an already overburdened script.
Unfortunately a lot of this material wasn't even meant to be funny in the first place. With the exception of such extended ennui-inducing episodes as Lou taming a lion in the process screen, the straight material is even more tedious than the unfunny funny. By and large, Baldwin lost a contract-sent opportunity to send up the whole jungle genre. Contenting himself with a few mild japes (Lou propelling his canoe with an eggbeater; the Baer Brothers trading insults), he allows Hillary Brooke (attractive though she is) to strut around in dead seriousness like the queen of a Congo serial. This mood is abetted by Frank Buck and particularly Clyde Beatty who take themselves very earnestly indeed. So eager were the producers to get their money's worth out of Beatty, they even provide him a chair, a whip and a cage of lions. A daring act certainly, but as presented in Africa Screams, boringly long-winded.
Unfortunately a lot of this material wasn't even meant to be funny in the first place. With the exception of such extended ennui-inducing episodes as Lou taming a lion in the process screen, the straight material is even more tedious than the unfunny funny. By and large, Baldwin lost a contract-sent opportunity to send up the whole jungle genre. Contenting himself with a few mild japes (Lou propelling his canoe with an eggbeater; the Baer Brothers trading insults), he allows Hillary Brooke (attractive though she is) to strut around in dead seriousness like the queen of a Congo serial. This mood is abetted by Frank Buck and particularly Clyde Beatty who take themselves very earnestly indeed. So eager were the producers to get their money's worth out of Beatty, they even provide him a chair, a whip and a cage of lions. A daring act certainly, but as presented in Africa Screams, boringly long-winded.