Search - Africa Screams on DVD

ONE OF THE TEAM'S BEST FILMS

BILLY ANTIMISIARIS | Karpathos, Greece | 01/04/2000

(5 out of 5 stars)

"AFRICA SCREAMS (1949)

Huntington Hartford Productions

Release Date: May 4, 1949 (New York City, New York)

May 27, 1949

Runtime: 79 minutes



Director:

Charles Barton



Producer:

David S. Garber

Huntington Hartford



Writing Credits:

Earl Baldwin

Martin Ragaway

Leonard B. Stern



CAST:



Bud Abbott.....Buzz Johnson

Lou Costello.....Stanley Livington

Clyde Beatty....Himself

Frank Buck....Himself

Max Baer....Grapple McCoy

Buddy Baer....Boots Wilson

Hillary Brooke....Diana Emerson

Shemp Howard....Gunner

Joe Besser....Harry

Burt Wenland....Bobo



Music by:

Walter Schumann



Cinematography by:

Charles Van Enger



Film Editing by:

Frank Gross



Art Direction:

Lewis H. Creber



Set Decoration:

Ray Robinson



Assistant Director:

Joseph E. Kenney



Special Effects:

Carl Lee



Other Crew:

Norman Abbott....dialougue director

Albert Deano....wardrobe manager

William Nassour....executive in charge



Plot Summary:



Buzz and Stanley are booksellers in a department store. Several people start asking about a map in a book about Dark Africa. Stanley claims to know the map from memory. Buzz cons a female customer, Diana Emerson, into thinking Stanley knows a great deal about the map and insists on going to Africa knowing riches await him. After encounters with lion tamers, giant apes and a wild river, Buzz returns to America. Stanley finds diamonds and buys the store they once worked for, hiring Buzz as its elevator operator.



ROUTINES & HILARIOUS MOMENTS:

Lou fears gorilla while eating

Glasses of water for tent fire

Bud in lion skin

Lou's thought dead.



Trivia (from imdb.com): There is a scene where Bud Abbott & Lou Costello are talking in their tent and Joe Besser dashes into the tent, grabs a glass of water and dashes out again. He repeats this several times until Bud Abbott stops him and asks why he's so thirsty. Joe Besser replies that he's not thirsty, it's that his tent is on fire. That was based on an incident in Lou Costello's childhood, when he accidentally set some clothes in his bedroom on fire. His father was in the living room, which was between the kitchen and Lou Costello's bedroom. Lou Costello, not wanting to let his father know that he had set his room on fire, dashed back and forth between the kitchen and his bedroom with glasses of water until his father finally asked what he was doing, whereupon Lou Costello was forced to tell what he had done."

Not one of their best

Robert S. Gartner | Cottekill, NY | 07/09/2009

(2 out of 5 stars)

"The basic plot of the film has Hillary Brooke looking for a book about an African safari containing a map leading to a fortune in diamonds. Department store employees Bud Abbott and Lou Costello bluff their way into her confidence and then travel to Africa, along with her team of explorers, including Joe Besser, Max and Buddy Baer, Shemp Howard, Frank Buck and Clyde Beatty, eventually running into a tribe of cannibals. The film is not any where near the best work that Abbott & Costello have done; in fact, to call it one of their `lesser' efforts is an overstatement. It is a one-joke film with Abbott & Costello doing their usual, yet funny, shtick. Hillary Brooke and Shemp Howard are wasted in minor roles, as is Joe Besser, although both he and Howard are funny as always in the brief time they have on screen. The Baer brothers, Frank Buck and Clyde Beatty are there simply to show off the talents of each of them and do not add much of anything to the film, which, incidentally, feels less like a movie and more like an extended television episode for their future television show. Only for die-hard, nothing-they-do-is-bad fans."