The plot revolves around Abner’s inheritance of the C&O Railroad from
his uncle, Ernest Peabody—and since he and Lum believe it to be the famed
Chesapeake & Ohio line, they convince the populace of Pine Ridge to invest
in the company, using the money to purchase right-a-ways on their neighbors’
properties so that a branch of the railroad can be established in the town.
Upon their arrival in Chicago
to see the lawyer handling the estate, they discover to their dismay that
C&O stands for “Chinnacook & Orville,” a broken-down line that ends up
costing them $47, leaving them flat broke. Abner takes a nasty spill down a
flight of stairs while leaving the office, and a trip to the doctor’s results
in a diagnosis mix-up, whereupon both men are convinced that Abner has only
“two weeks to live.” The duo then embark on a series of daredevil exploits in
an attempt to raise the money needed to reimburse their friends back in Arkansas.
L&A fans will get a kick out of this movie, but to non-fans—it’s
an example of “one’s reach exceeding one’s grasp.” The “daredevil” vignettes
are amusing, but they’re hampered by the fact that Two Weeks to Live
doesn’t possess the necessary budget to pull a lot them off. The film often
resorts to shoddy process screen work and all-too-obvious stuntmen (Lum &
Abner hazardously attempt to paint a flagpole placed precariously on top of a
tall building in one sequence; another has Abner doing some daredevil “wing
walking” on an airplane in flight). The movie also could have pruned away a few
of its subplots, perhaps shaving off some of its total running time (74
minutes) to boot. I would have preferred to seen the "inherited
railroad" plot fleshed out in an entire film instead; it would have been
funny and much more entertaining to center solely on L&A’s attempts to
start up a rail line in Pine Ridge.
The best moments in Two Weeks to Live are indeed small ones:
trapped in their hotel because they can’t pay the rent, there are some
rib-tickling sequences in which the boys capitalize on the hotel’s amenities
because the head desk clerk (Jack Rice, best-known as Edgar Kennedy’s
ne’er-do-well brother-in-law in Kennedy’s classic RKO comedy shorts) is
convinced they’re a couple of railroad big-shots. Additionally, there’s a funny
scene where two delivery men are attempting to deliver a harp to a radio
station inside the hotel and Abner mistakenly believes that it’s for him—since
he’ll be needing it when his two weeks are up. (A subsequent scene has
Abner attempting to repair a young boy’s bike and when the boy asks him—Abner’s
carrying a violin case—if he’s learning to play the violin, Abner responds that
he’s having the dickens of a time just learning to play the harp.) My laugh-out
loud moment has Lum & Abner climbing twenty-four flights of stairs to the
lawyer’s office, which prompts Abner to remark: “Doggies, no wonder Uncle
Ernest passed away so soon—one trip up here’d a-kill him…”
Two Weeks to Live
does benefit from steady direction from veteran comedy director Malcolm St.
Clair (who helmed L&A’s previous The Bashful Bachelor)
and an amusing script from Michael I. Simmons and Roswell Rogers. (Rogers had by this time
become one of L&A’s main writers on the radio show; he would also
contribute both story and screenplay to their next feature, So This is Washington.)
In addition, there’s a fine roster of classic movie character actors on
display: Irving Bacon (who plays Omar Tennyson Gimpel, a poetry-spouting window
washer), Kay Linnaker, Rosemary La Planche, Herbert Rawlinson, Ivan F. Simpson,
Charles Middleton (Ming the Merciless!), Luis Alberni, and Tim Ryan. The
big draw here, however, is filmdom’s penultimate pansy and fussbudget, Franklin
Pangborn—unfortunately, Pangborn has very little material to work with, but
does have a funny line in a telephone conversation when he asks: “Am I the
superintendent of this building, or just a flunky without portfolio?” If
you enjoy a good B-picture, you simply can’t go wrong this little Lum &
Abner gem.
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