The
forty-first installment in the long-running Bowery Boys franchise finds Slip
(Leo Gorcey) and Sach (Huntz Hall) trying to get enough money to save Mrs.
Kelly’s boarding house. When Sach
receives a huge electric shock, it gives him the inexplicable ability to
predict numbers. Slip makes him go on a
game show and thanks to his uncanny gift, the boys wind up winning a trip to
Las Vegas. They then set out to win a
fortune in the casino, and naturally become targets for unscrupulous gangsters.
Directed
by Jean Yarborough (who directed many Abbott and Costello comedies), Crashing
Las Vegas is a typical Bowery Boys entry.
It features Sach getting into fantastic misadventures while Slip rattles
off a series of quips and malapropisms. The
laughs are sparse for the most part. The
best stretch comes when Sach gets mixed up with a gangster’s moll played by
Mary Castle (who has sort of an Adele Jergens quality about her). The fantasy sequence involving the Boys in
prison stripes playing a game of “Musical Electric Chairs”, is amusing, but it
feels like it came out of another movie.
Even though it’s consistently inconsistent, it’s nowhere near the bottom
of the Bowery Boys barrel.
Unfortunately,
Crashing Las Vegas is memorable for all the wrong reasons. This was the final appearance in the series
for Gorcey. Still hurting from the
recent death of his father (who also appeared in many of their movies), he
apparently drowned his sorrows in drink.
He spent most of the filming drunk and was fired from the movie halfway
through. He’s clearly hammered in some
scenes (most notably in the casino and hotel sequences) and slurs his dialogue,
which lends a depressing pall over the film.
Look
fast for Three Stooges straight man Emil Sitka in a bit part during the game
show scene.
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