Word: slapstickers
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...reminded us of nothing so much as a slightly milder "Hellzapoppin" with a plot tagging along behind. Like the Olsen and Johnson show, it presumably will draw sophisticated snubs from the critics while packing the mobs in by droves. It has political satire, murder mystery, and slapstick in about equal portions, and there's a good chance that you'll be sitting near one of the cast if you're in the orchestra. The plot involves a couple of violent deaths which only add to the fun, and the leading character is Tom Dewey minus mustache...
Author Faulkner, a former WPA official, tells this shabby and pathetic tale with great literary tact, balancing against the slapstick ignorance and innate apathy of his unheroic characters, their deep sense of their own personal dignity, natural courtesy, terrible patience, thwarted honesty. No idealization, Men Working is the most human book that has been written about WPA workers, the saddest and the funniest...
...Buck Privates this dizzy pair of former burlesque comedians laid down a barrage of slapstick that was often agonizingly, if familiarly, funny. In The Navy their wacky, old-style fast talk gets snagged in the bony vocalizing of the Andrews Sisters, in the infantile attempts of Crooner Powell to get away from it all, in thousands of dollars worth of Universal props. Despite these expensive handicaps, sour-pussed Bud Abbott and outsized Lou Costello manage to resurrect many a guffaw for low-comedy devotees...
...irony which controls and blends extreme psychological slapstick with suggestions of the most sinister and sorrowful mysteries of life...
...even brought up the matter. Gone also, under Will Hays edict, is the spice which helped the play to an eight-year run on Broadway. What appears on the screen, shrouding fine performances by Charlie Grapewin and Gene Tierney as Jeeter and Ellie May, is a comical but altogether slapstick movie in the best Mack Sennet tradition...