BOOTLEG FILES 868: “Innocently Guilty” (1950 comedy short starring Bert Wheeler).
LAST SEEN: On YouTube.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: It fell through the proverbial cracks.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Unlikely, unless it is part of an anthology of miscellaneous Columbia Pictures shorts.
Bert Wheeler is remembered today as one-half of the Wheeler and Woolsey comedy team that starred in a series of comedy films beginning in 1929 with “Rio Rita” and ending with “High Flyers” in 1937. After the death of his on-screen partner Robert Woolsey in 1938, Wheeler struggled to maintain a solo career – he starred in the forgettable films “The Cowboy Quarterback” (1938) and “Las Vegas Nights” (1941) and then disappeared from the big screen to find work in nightclubs, on radio and on stage. Wheeler found a larger audience in 1950 when Jackie Gleason invited him to appear on his “Cavalcade of Stars” television show on the Dumont Television Network.
Wheeler’s return to wider visibility via television spurred Columbia Pictures to sign him to a two-picture deal where he would headline short comedies. Unfortunately, he was dumped into “Innocently Guilty,” a remake of the 1935 Andy Clyde short “It Always Happens” that turned out to be one of the least entertaining films churned out by the studio in 1950.
In this film, Wheeler plays the bumbling Hodkinson G. Pogglebrewer, the owner of a hardware store. Wheeler’s character leaves his wife to run the store while he goes on an overnight trip to Los Angeles for a business meeting with the owner of a tractor company, played by Vernon Dent. Both men are staying in the same hotel, where Dent has a suite with his beautiful French wife.
Wheeler’s trip is anything but serene – he briefly winds up in jail for kicking a police officer in the rear, gets his foot stuck in a janitor’s water bucket, and tears the dress off Dent’s wife – just as Wheeler’s wife and her belligerent sister-in-law show up. There is also a crazy car trip through the city, a surplus number of slamming doors as the characters evade and pursue each other, and assorted anvil-level slapstick including the sister-in-law getting a wet mop in her face and Dent shooting bullets into Wheeler’s derriere.
As a Columbia short, “Innocently Guilty” is packed with talent that will be easily recognized by Three Stooges fans. In addition to the burly Vernon Dent as the exasperated brunt of the slapstick situations, Christine McIntyre turns up as Wheeler’s wife, Quebec cutie Nanette Bordeaux is the French wife caught without most of her clothing, Margie Liszt is the sister-in-law, former Keystone Kop Heinie Conklin is the janitor and Joe “Fake Shemp” Palma is the cop who gets kicked in the rear by Wheeler. Jules White is the director and his brother Jack White co-wrote the screenplay.
So, what went wrong? Part of the problem was how the film positioned Wheeler. As a solo performer after the death of Robert Woolsey, he never created an easily identifiable persona that audiences would immediately recognize. As a result, Wheeler’s character was molded into a generic and unappealing ninny who gets stuck in ridiculous situations but never realizes that anything is amiss in his topsy-turvy world. Also, the actor was 55 years old when he made “Innocently Guilty” and, to be cruel, he was too old for the frenetic knockabout he was required to perform.
In watching Wheeler in “Innocently Guilty,” it is difficult not to recall an interview that Joe DeRita gave when he spoke about his brief period as the star of his own shorts series at Columbia: “My comedy in those scripts was limited to getting hit on the head with something, then going over to my screen wife to say, ‘Honey, don’t leave me!’ For this kind of comedy material, you could have gotten a busboy to do it and it would have been just as funny.”
“Innocently Guilty” made zero impression on audiences, and Wheeler’s follow-up Columbia short “The Awful Sleuth” (1951) was also a dud. The studio opted not to pursue further films with Wheeler, which ended his big screen career. The actor turned up in 1955 on the TV western “Brave Eagle” as a “half-breed” Indian and made a few isolated guest shots on the small screen before passing away in 1968.
“Innocently Guilty” disappeared from view after its release. Since Wheeler only made two unappreciated shorts for Columbia, there was no reissue value. I don’t believe this film is in the public domain, otherwise it would have been more widely available. A collector’s print of the film with a British Board of Film Censors opening title was uploaded to YouTube last month, thus saving “Innocently Guilty” from total oblivion.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: While this weekly column acknowledges the presence of rare film and television productions through the so-called collector-to-collector market, this should not be seen as encouraging or condoning the unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyright-protected material, either through DVDs or Blu-ray discs or through postings on Internet video sites.
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