Biopics of legendary entertainers rarely work, if only because it requires actors to achieve the impossible effect of duplicating the charisma and nuances of the stars they are supposed to be imitating. The classics of this genre work when the headliners give their own personalities and quirks into their roles rather than trying to create a reasonable facsimile of the stars they were hired to reenact. Thus, James Cagney did a great James Cagney in “Yankee Doodle Dandy” while Barbra Streisand was the perfect Barbra Streisand in “Funny Girl” – no one ever confused them for George M. Cohan and Fanny Brice, even though they were supposed to be recreated the performing styles of those respective talents.
However, at the other end of the spectrum are the biopics where the stars are so badly miscast that the films become unintentionally funny as the leading actors try and hopeless fail to conjure up the icons they’re being paid to recreate. Think of happy-go-lucky Donald O’Connor attempting to become the Great Stoneface in “The Buster Keaton Story,” or Rod Steiger bringing Method Acting intensity into “W.C. Fields and Me,” and Faye Dunaway…well, you know what role she’s infamous for!
Joining O’Connor, Steiger, and Dunaway in their sorry state are Harvey Korman and Buddy Hackett, who were recruited to play Abbott and Costello in the 1978 television film “Bud and Lou.” While both men were wonderful in comedy roles, neither was a dramatic actor – and considering the film mostly focused on the celebrated duo’s off-screen tumult, they were put into situations beyond their acting skills.
It also didn’t help that neither was able to recreate the distinctive style that Abbott and Costello brought to their classic routines. Korman blandly recites Abbott’s straight lines without coming close to the intensity Abbott used in trying to explain that Who is playing first base, while Hackett presents Costello as a doofus whose speech pattern is so mannered that it seems to be saying his comic lines phonetically.
Ultimately, the failure of “Bud and Lou” has less to do with the stars than with a screenplay by George Lefferts (based on the Bob Thomas biography) that takes egregious liberties with the lives of the celebrated comics and Robert C. Thompson’s slovenly direction that turns the film into an endurance test. “Bud and Lou” is not a tribute, but an insult to the legacy of Abbott and Costello.
The film also achieves the curious result of generating its one and only laugh (albeit unintended) with Costello’s death scene, when the hospitalized comic abruptly drops dead after drinking what he cheerily considers to be the best strawberry malted he ever had. That’s entertainment?