As mentioned in my last installment, the years during World War II were fertile years for seeing drag on the silver screen. Not long after D-Day RKO released a comedy staring Wally Brown and Alan Carney called "Genius at Work." Brown and Carney were RKO's answer to Abbot & Costello (kind of.) Appearing in a series of films for that studio with this being their last. In this particular film they play a couple of radio-detectives that cause havoc at radio studio. At one point, they get into drag to appear on the radio show (yes it was on radio before TV) "Queen for a Day." I have seen this film and I have seen stills from the scene which I just described. However, I can tell you that when I saw the film on TV the "drag scene" was missing. Leading to two possibilities: Either they cut it out on TV because of time restraints (which seems rather odd since the film only runs 61 min. to begin with) or this scene never appeared in the actual release of the film, having wound up on the cutting room floor.
If Brown and Carney were a poor man's Abbot and Costello, then A&C themselves were certainly not about to let the '40s pass without a couple of drag bits themselves. In 1944's "Lost in a Harem" (made on loan to MGM from Universal), Lou Costello donned a harem-girl disguise to fool the bad guys. 1949's "Abbot and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff", Costello was again forced to get in drag, disguising himself this time as a chambermaid when he is thought to be a murderer. Lou Costello's plump frame didn't allow for much in the way of a realistic, much less sexy, portrayal of a female, but what he lacked in "appearance" he more than made up for in comic-ability, bringing laughter to any role he played!
The Three Stooge-ettes "Wee Wee Monsieur"
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Another comedy team which certainly managed to get into drag on more than one occasion was The Three Stooges. Among the many shorts in which they cavorted in drag , were "Wee Wee Monsieur" (1938) (in which they played harem girls), "Rhythm and Weep" (1946) (in which they took the girls' parts in a show during WWII) and "All the World's a Stooge" (1941) (where they played refugee "children" with Larry being a girl.)
But the best short of all has to be "Self-Maid Maids" (1950), in which The Three Stooges play all the parts including "artists' models" Moella, Shepetta, and Larraine. Unlike some of their previous forays, here they seemed to do their best to try to look like (given their obvious lack of physical attributes) "attractive" women. Dressed in contemporary clothes (including nail polish and ankle-strap shoes), the Stooges gave convincing portrayals of women...well, at least as far as most comedies go!
The final comedy team we'll discuss is Laurel and Hardy. Though previously mentioned in this series, they were still making features during the mid-to-late 40s. Though along in years at the time, Stan Laurel managed one final drag outing in the film "Jitterbugs" (1943). While Ollie was good with his "Southern colonel" bit, Stan gave out with his impersonation which could only be described as an "old dame." Though it certainly was not Stan's best female impersonation, it showed he could still use "drag" to get a lot of laughs.
Next time, we'll talk about the post-War years. The 1950's when movies were trying to shed their innocence.