Lawbolisted Powerful

UnowPriceless hyped garbage

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

classicsoncall As if the Bowery Boys didn't create enough havoc on the streets of New York, they bring their brand of merry mayhem to London when Sach (Huntz Hall) discovers that he's an heir to the fortune of the British Earl of Walsingham. With his pals and Sweet Shop owner Louie (Bernard Gorcey) in tow, the boys head on over across the pond to make Sach's claim.You know, if you think about it, the inept family members of the Earl (Walter Kingsford) could have prevented Sach from becoming principal heir if they only did their homework ahead of time and prevented the solicitor from ever making it to America. I guess then we wouldn't have had a story, or get to see them even more inept when their plans of taking out the Earl and the Boys goes down the tubes.With Slip's (Leo Gorcey) malapropisms kept to a minimum, Sach takes up the slack with his dazzling display of British history and knowledge of London's landmarks. A quick flashback instructs how one of his ancestors wound up banished to the Colonies in the first place, so at least there was that one non-sensical bit attempting to establish his English heritage.Well, with Lady Marcia (Angela Greene) failing to foil Sach's favor with the Earl, and the inept family assassins dropping like flies, the Boys might have been successfully transplanted to the English version of the Bowery, whatever that might have been. But just in the nick of time, Scotland Yard arrives on the scene to make the save, though it all turns out for naught. Seems that the wrong Horace Debussy Jones was contacted as a relative to the Earl. You mean there were two of them?

mark.waltz Everything happens to Sach, whether gaining a singing voice like Perry Como, becoming both professional boxers and college football heroes, and gaining the ability to see the future. Of course, they are all for brief periods of time, each miraculous happening for Sach forgotten by the beginning of the next film. Here, Hubtz Hall's Sach gains, not only a full knowledge of British history (disproving Slip's claim about King Henry V8) but a claim to a British estate as well. Of course, a Bowery Boy spouting historical knowledge is still a mug, not a proper English lord. Sach and the boys (and Louie of course....) find themselves out of their element in dealing with both the upper-crust, their servants and several common folk whose dialects they can't comprehend even though it is in the same language.Don't underestimate the craftiness of the British nobility with such esteemed British character actors such as Walter Kingsford as the family patriarch, John Dodsworth and Norma Varden as scheming older members of the family and pretty Angela Greene as a relative willing to do anything to discredit this interloper. The result is a sort of reverse "Pygmalion" with Sach giving a twist to Eliza Doolittle. "Downton Abbey" may have had its share of strange visitors, but these New Yorkers certainly takes the Shepard's pie.

bkoganbing Possible good fortune knocks on the door of Louie's Sweet Shop on the Bowery where four guys who every now and then have jobs are known to hang out. It seems as though a fellow with the high sounding moniker of Horace DeBussy Jones might actually rate that kind of a name. He could be the long lost descendant of a collateral branch of the Earl of Walsingham's family. And the current Earl is not doing all that well health wise.Instead of just Huntz Hall coming over the whole gang departs and the sight of them seems to perk the old Earl played by Walter Kingsford up. They've been slowly poisoning him in the hopes of at least one of them being made his heir. But Kingsford is actually charmed by the moronic clowning of The Bowery Boys and he goes off the medicines the relatives have him on and starts getting a little color back in his cheeks.The relatives are played by Norma Varden, Angela Greene, William Cottrell, John Dodsworth, and Rex Evans and they're not happy about their cousin from across the pond to say the least. It might further their interests if Kingsford got more suddenly dispatched and the Bowery Boys blamed for it.The Bowery Boys recycle a lot of material from other films and use it in their's. The characters of Walsingham family come from just about every film with an English setting you can name. Still the results here aren't too bad. Huntz Hall's battle with a stuffed fox that may still have some life in it is a classic.This Bowery Boys film did not have all that much of Leo Gorcey and his original language malapropisms. Huntz Hall has center stage here and if you are fans of his, this film is for you.

lzf0 It is with this film that the focus of the Bowery Boys movies becomes pure comedy. The change from gangster melodramas to comedy is gradual, and many of the Jan Grippo and Jerry Thomas films which precede this one point in the direction of comedy. Ben Schwab, the new producer of the series, wanted a purer sense of comedy. After doing "Jalopy", which used the regular writers and the regular director, William "One Take" Beaudine, Schwab replaced them with Ed Bernds and Elwood Ullman. These men had been working on Three Stooges shorts for years. Ullman was always a writer and Bernds had started as a sound effects man and had graduated to writer-director. The Bernds directed Columbia short comedies are usually superior to the ones produced at the same time by Jules White. Bernds and Ullman brought their short subject slapstick comedy style to the Bowery Boys and this produced the funniest movies in the series. Sure, the stories might have been better before, but the formula of someone walking in Louie's Sweet Shop and taking the boys out of their element was a great set-up for slapstick comedy. The focus of the films became Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall; Bernard Gorcey is given better material, but David Gorcey and Bennie Bartlett slip more into the background or even out of the films. Schwab also replaced longtime musical director Edward Kay, whose music consists of transformations of "Sidewalks of New York" and "B" western clichés, with the more modern and comic sound of Marlin Skiles.