The comedy team of Wheeler and Woolsey are one of my guilty pleasures: I enjoy their films, but I'm aware that much of their material isn't very good. Part of the problem is that W&W's gag writers were working concurrently for the Marx Brothers, and the Marxes always got first pick of their best material, lumbering Wheeler & Woolsey with whatever was left.
Although Robert Woolsey was the more aggressively 'comic' of the pair, there is general agreement that Bert Wheeler not precisely a 'straight man' feed was the more talented of the duo. Wheeler and Woolsey often remind me of Morecambe and Wise, with bespectacled Woolsey as Eric and earnest little Wheeler as Ernie. In both cases, the team were largely dependent on their (highly variable) material.
'Everything's Rosie' is a very slight change of pace, as Woolsey for once carries a film without Bert Wheeler ... and this proves to be a bad idea, as the aggressive pace of Woolsey is wearying without the sympathetic contrast of the naff and gormless Wheeler for him to play against. Robert Woolsey reminds me of a lot of other comedians Groucho Marx, Bobby Clark, WC Fields, Eric Morecambe, Phil Silvers but, in every case, Woolsey is the one who comes off second-best in the comparison.
Here, Woolsey is lumbered with a plot that's a blatant rip-off of WC Field's stage play 'Poppy', which Fields had already filmed as (the silent) 'Sally of the Sawdust'. Woolsey plays a carnival huckster, a patent-medicine butcher with the very Fieldsian name J. Dockweiler Droop. His daughter Rosie (the beautiful Anita Louise) is too delicate for the harsh life of a travelling carny; she wants to marry a handsome young man and settle down. The script is careful to stipulate that Rosie is Droop's adopted foundling, not his blood child: I suppose that audiences might have been offended by the notion of this dainty girl springing from the loins of Robert Woolsey.
The funniest line in the movie occurs following the explanation that Rosie got her name because she was found beneath a rose bush, prompting Woolsey to jape 'It's lucky she wasn't found under a eucalyptus tree.' 'Everything's Rosie' disappeared so thoroughly after its release that WC Fields was able to film his own version of this story, 'Poppy' (a remake of 'Sally of the Sawdust'), five years later. Although 'Poppy' is of vital historic importance to Fields's career, as the only sound-era version of his stage play, 'Poppy' is one of Fields's worst films: he was in poor health during its production, and in many sequences he is very obviously doubled. Nonetheless, I found 'Poppy' far more enjoyable than 'Everything's Rosie'. I'll rate this rip-off version 6 out of 10, purely on Woolsey's sheer ebullience and Anita Louise's delicately beautiful looks.
