A real early one for vaudeville team Wheeler and Woolsey. and oh.
Composers Kalmar and Ruby had their biggest Broadway success yet with "The Ramblers" which ran for 300 performances in the 1926-27 season. The show starred Bobby Clark and Paul McCullough as a pair of traveling fortune tellers, whose vaudeville lunacy overcame mixed reviews.
The team of Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby are only known through their still popular catalog of songs. A movie on their life, "Three Little Words", has kept their songs alive.
In their follow-up to their hit film debut, Rio Rita (1929), with Bebe Daniels and John Boles, W&W star in another stage musical--this time with less success. The plot is stupid and some of the scenes seem to have no connection to whatever storyline is being played out.
Made during the early talkie era, this was only Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey's second movie after Rio Rita. Along with them is usual leading lady Dorothy Lee and Jobyna Howland who is hilariously mismatched with Woolsey as she towers over him!
RKO in using Wheeler&Woolsey first put them in their big budget films where they were used as comic relief. They were in Rio Rita and then in the original operetta for the screen Dixiana.
Wheeler and Woolsey had made one previous movie together, RIO RITA. RIO RITA was a musical extravaganza and in this film the standout performances were by Bebe Daniels and Wheeler and Woolsey.
I can almost guarantee that 9 out of 10 "modern" viewers will have little to no patience with "The Cuckoos". This is definitely a movie made to appeal to a different generation of moviegoers.
